Director: Stephen Scarlate
Script: Stephen Scarlate
Producer: Kerry Deignan Roy & Josh Miller
Running time: 106 minutes
Year: 2023
Certificate: Not rated
Produced by Shudder, Sharksploitation is an American documentary film written and directed by Stephen Scarlata, who also produced the film, alongside Kerry Deignan Roy and Josh Miller. The documentary examines the sharksploitation film subgenre, which, as one might expect, centres around the central theme of sharks and their attacks against humans.
Featuring dozens of short-form, talking-head type interviews, with a variety of filmmakers and marine biologists, who all have their own tales to tell or interesting angles regarding sharks and/or the films that feature them, the documentary is full of interesting facts and anecdotes, both from the real world and from the cinematic one. Next to exploitation stalwarts like Roger Corman, Mario Van Peebles and Joe Dante, we also hear from more recent contributors to this increasingly popular subgenre, including Mark Atkins (6-headed Shark) and James Nunn (Shark Bait).
The documentary covers a lot of ground, starting with information and clips from some early shark-featuring films such as The Sea Bat (1930), an early example of a monster-in-the-sea movie, and Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931), where the shark is portrayed as a god.
The doc then changes tack and talks about sharks featured as minor villains in more mainstream movies, including three Bond films: Thunderball, Live and Let Die and License to Kill, plus comedies such as Despicable Me and Austin Powers. And later switches to sharks featured in treasure-hunting movies such as Shark!, an infamous film where a stuntman was actually killed during an attack by a shark while he was filming.
The documentary also discuss shark documentaries such as Blue Water, White Death, which, sadly, portrays all sharks as being very dangerous to humans and therefore had quite a negative effect on population numbers afterwards, since it encouraged greater numbers of sharks to be hunted. In the doc Peter Gimbal, who invented the shark cage, kills a shark on camera, marking it out as a very exploitative film.
The doc also credits Steven Speilberg’s Jaws as kicking off the boom in shark pictures, which we are still seeing today (Meg 2, for example). There are plenty of anecdotes and facts about this key film and its ongoing legacy. Plus, it’s interesting seeing Jaws novelist, Peter Benchley’s wife, Wendy, being interviewed about shark conservation, something Peter later became very interested in before he passed away in 2006.
Jaws also started the whole ‘when animals attack’ subgenre, which was particularly popular during the seventies and early 80s with titles like Grizzly, Orca, Tentacles, Pirahna and Alligator all doing the cinema rounds, collectively riffing on the themes brought to the foreground by the cultural phenomena that was Jaws. Even a film like The Car can be viewed as a more mechanical version of the story of Jaws.
The film also talks about the giant creatures subgenre which, again, has proved itself very popular with modern audiences, looking forward to their next giant shark or giant octopus fix, whether done at the studio level (e.g. Kong Island, Meg), the low budget level (e.g. Sharknado, Mega Shark Vs Octopus) or ultra-low budget level (e.g. Sharkenstein, Sharkula).
In fact, Sharknado opened the gates for a whole new subgenre of high concept, even more ridiculous, sharksploitation film, which includes the likes of Sharkman, Avalanche Sharks, Ghost Shark, Ice Sharks, Sand Sharks, Ozark Sharks and Virus Shark amongst its ranks.
However, a more recent trend has been the more realistic shark film, often based on true stories, including the likes of Black Water, Open Water, 47 Meters Down, The Shallows and The Reef and its follow-up.
The documentary is nicely put together and features lots of clips from the films that it talks about, plus it also provides an interesting perspective from various shark experts that I wasn’t really expecting, so I was pleasantly surprised by how rounded the doc was. Plus, any film that shows the clip of the shark-eating zombie from Zombie Flesheaters can’t be bad.
Sharksploitation is now available to stream on Shudder and fans of shark-related films and facts are in for a treat.
