A lot of people talk down on Renny Harlin. But with his films — Prison, A Nightmare on Elm Street part 4: The Dream Master, Die Hard 2 and more — you know exactly what you’re getting. A popcorn movie with no brain ready to entertain you until you can’t take it any more.

Witness his take on shark movies. He gets what works and then makes the movie fly so it doesn’t feel like even half of its 1 hour, 45-minute length. This is lean, mean and ready to bite.

Shot in the same tanks that James Cameron used for Titanic, the idea of this movie is absolutely ridiculous. In a deep sea facility, a team of scientists is using mako sharks to reactivate dead brain cells within patients with Alzheimer’s disease. One of those sharks has already escaped and attacked a boat full of partying teens, so the company behind it all sends Russell Franklin (Samuel Jackson) to investigate.

Doctors Susan McAlester and Jim Whitlock (Saffron Burrows and Stellan Skarsgård) prove their research to Franklin by removing protein complexes from the brain of their biggest shark. Bad idea — one shark is all it takes to mess everything up. It eats up Whitlock’s arm and as he’s being evacuated, inclement weather fouls up everything. His stretcher goes into the shark pen and as one of the sharks grabs it, it pulls the helicopter into the tower, killing anyone who could get the word out that things have gone wrong.

Susan, Russell, shark wrangler Carter Blake (Thomas Jane), marine biologist Janice Higgins and engineer Tom Scoggins (Michael Rapaport) then watch a shark use that very same stretcher to smash its way into the lab, flooding the entire base. Susan then confesses that she and Jim had genetically engineered the brain size of the sharks, which let them harvest more protein. It also made them smarter and deadlier. This is why this movie is wonderful; dumb lapses in science and logic that are glossed over so that more people can be devoured by sharks.

Meanwhile, cook Sherman “Preacher” Dudley (LL Cool J) may have lost his parrot to a shark and almost got cooked in an oven, but he knows the shark’s natural movie predator: explosions. He blows one shark up real good and goes to find the rest of the crew.

When we find the crew, they’re arguing and Russell gives a speech about how everyone has to work together. In any other movie, this is where people would pull it through. Here, a shark emerges and decimates the executive. It’s a moment that will make you stand up on your couch and scream your head off in glee.

What I love about this one is that no one is safe. The people you expect to survive — and the ones you don’t — get killed horribly. If you love watching sharks eat people, good news. This one has it all.

There are a lot of cues to Jaws here: the license plate they find in a shark’s mouth is the same as that movie. And the ways the three sharks are killed — blown up, electrocuted and incinerated — exactly play back the way the shark is killed in Jaws, Jaws 2 and Jaws 3D.

You should totally check this one out. I was actually surprised by how much I loved it. That’s after more than twenty shark movies in a few weeks, so that’s really saying something.

PS: The song LL Cool J does in this film, “Deepest Blue (Shark Fin)” is absolutely insipid. I love it. Do yourself a favor and look up the lyrics.

When I was a kid in the 1970’s, I was sitting in a B. Dalton’s reading — parents routinely dropped kids off places to read without any fear of kidnapping back then — and discovered a copy of Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex on a shelf. I had no idea what it was at the time, but the drawings (by Chris Foss, who would go on to work on Alien, Flash Gordon and Jodorowsky’s Dune) were upsetting to me. Hairy soft focused seventies post-hippies getting it on didn’t jibe well with my single digit mind.

I forgot what that feeling was like. And then I watched Tintorera…Tiger Shark.

This movie is based on the novel of the same name by oceanographer Ramón Bravo, an undersea explorer who studied the 19-foot-long species of shark known as “tintorera” and also discovered the sleeping sharks of Isla Mujeres. You may know him better for his role as the underwater zombie in Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2.

Here’s the thing — this is a shark movie, but it’s also pretty much a softcore adult movie about the three-way relationship between the heroes. As such, this is the only shark movie I’ve watched all week with full frontal male nudity, which is something of an accomplishment.

Hugo Stiglitz from Nightmare City plays Steven, born in the US but a Mexican businessman here in Cancun for vacation. He falls for Patricia (Fiona Lewis, Dr. Phibes Rises Again) but breaks up with her when he can’t decide whether or not he’s in love with her. Ah, the 1970’s.

Jealousy ensues when she starts hooking up with Miguel (Andrés García, a real-life former diving instructor who is also in Bermuda: Cave of the Sharks), the swimming instructor at the resort. After those two dance the devil’s dance and Steven gets all misty-eyed, she goes skinny dipping and ends up being eaten by a tiger shark that seems to have breathing problems, judging by the soundtrack.

The two fight over what happened to Patricia, but neither ever learn that she was devoured by a shark. That night, the two hook up with Kelly and Cynthia Madison, two American college students looking for fun, and swim to Steven’s yacht as the heavy breathing shark follows them. They swap beds all night long before heading back to the resort and the shark decides to leave them alone. Kelly is played by Jennifer Ashley, who was also in Phantom of the Paradise, Chained Heat and Guyana: Cult of the Damned, while Cynthia is Laura Lyons, which is her real name and not a stage name inspired by the Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles. She was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for February 1976 and actually led a strike amongst the club bunnies that led to better wages and rights for them. Other than an appearance on TV’s Love, American Style, this is the only other acting role in her career.

Steven and Miguel decide to partner up both in a shark hunting business and in being womanizers. They start shooting all manner of sharks, but Miguel warns Steven that if they ever meet a tiger shark that they must immediately get out of the water.

The guys meet Gabriella (Susan George, Die Screaming, Marianne) and take her shark hunting. She hates it, but falls for both men. They decide to form a triad relationship where they can’t be with any other woman or fall in love with her. Remember those The Joy of Sex drawings I mentioned earlier? Get ready to watch the play out as the three make love, make omelets and sightsee the Mayan ruins.

Sadly, the next time they go shark hunting, the tiger shark reappears — surprise! — and bites Miguel in half. Gabriella is so upset that she leaves, never to return. Steven vows revenge on the shark and beats up every shark he can find, upsetting even the most hardened fishermen. Surely, they tell him, he has killed the tiger shark by now.

Nope. It’s still out there, killing fishermen and lying in wait for Steven. At a beach party with Kelly, Cynthia and two new American girls (one of them is Priscilla Barnes from TV’s Three’s Company and The Devil’s Rejects), everyone skinny dips. As Steven and Cynthia make out nude in the water, the tiger shark comes back and tears the woman literally out of his embrace. Everyone is injured by the shark’s attack and Steven makes a promise to kill the shark himself.

You may be wondering: how will Steven go about killing this shark? If you guessed “he’s going to blow it up” then congratulations. You’ve been watching just as many shark movies as I have. Are explosives the shark’s natural predator?

Anyhow — Steven uses a devilfish to lure the shark close and then he hears its breathing, because that’s how sharks work. He succeeds in turning that shark into a million pieces, but loses his arm in the process. He wakes up in a hospital bed, minus an arm but filled with happy memories of the sexy times he shared with Miguel and Gabriella.

Keep in mind when you seek out this film that there are two versions. One is 85 minutes long and is more of a shark film. Then there’s the 126 minutes long cut that’s chock full of swinging Mexican resort sex. Also, a warning for those of you sensitive to these matters: many of the scenes of fish being caught and killed underwater are unsimulated. That should be no surprise to anyone who has seen a René Cardona Jr. directed film, as he threw live birds through windows in Beaks: The Movie and a cat over a wall in Night of a Thousand Cats. He’s also responsible for the borderline insane film Bermuda Triangle, as well as the scum-ridden cash-in Guyana: Crime of the Century.

Tintorera…Tiger Shark is one of the stranger films I’ve watched, not only in my shark obsessed week of trying to watch every single pre-Sharknado film of this genre, but really in all the films I’ve watched. I have no idea who it is truly for, yet appreciate its willingness to indulge in spectacle and scum, whether that be people hooking up or being eaten in front of your very eyes.

I watched this movie at 6 AM on a Saturday night/Sunday morning with my ears buzzing from a Sleep concert, cotton-mouthed from being at said Sleep concert and eating cereal half awake with I watched it in Spanish with no subtitles. I think that may be the best way to experience any movie.

Director Tonino Ricci must have loved the ocean, because he also made Encounters in the Deep and Night of the Sharks. Here, real-life scuba instructor turned macho actor Andrés García (seriously, the dude produced a reality show to find a woman for his son Leonardo and ended up making out with several of the contestant, which caused his son to leave the program) plays a scuba instructor who disappeared for six months and has been brought back to health by his wife Angelica (Janet Agren, who Ricci also conned into being in his film Panic).

Germane to my interests, Cinzia Monreale shows up as a mysterious girl, something she did so well in Fulci’s The Beyond. She appears in a group of people who sit around and listen to a guy play guitar and sing. She takes her weird doll and throws it into the ocean, where she disappears and blood flows from the doll. Then all these sharks show up and watch these hippies drown themselves. I have no idea what this has to do with the rest of the movie.

There’s also an undersea city with an advanced race that can control the Bermuda Triangle and sharks, which all sleep inside a cave. Also, it has a total seventies downer ending, which seems pretty much right on.

Seriously, if Fulci made a Jaws clone, this would be pretty much the path he’d take. He was a million times better than Ricci (who was his assistant director on the White Fang movies), so I would have loved to have seen him make a movie where a shark slowly eats someone’s face and takes even more time savoring their eyeball.

Between this and Bermuda Triangle, made the same year, you really have to wonder about the Italian fascination with strange dolls and the dangers of the ocean.

If you want to see this seriously deranged film, allow me to point you to the fine folks at Cult Action, who are devoted to taking my paycheck for films that I can’t find anywhere else.

Call it Monster Shark. Call it Monster from the Red Ocean. Or Devouring Waves. Even Shark: Red in the Ocean. By whatever name you call Lamberto Bava’s (credited as John Old Jr.) undersea monster film, it’s still pretty ridiculous. But then again, you’re not coming to an Italian shark movie to get high art.

Based on a story by Luigi Cozzi (Starcrash, Contamination) under the name Lewis Coates and producer Sergio Martino (who is so beloved here that we devoted an entire week to his films), Devilshark was written by…you guessed it, Dardano Sacchetti, who wrote pretty much every great 1980’s Italy scumfest.

Along the Florida coast, a place where Italian beercans are still imbibed by our hero Peter (Michael Sopkiw, Blastfighter), there’s a monster loose that’s a mutant mash-up of an octopus and the prehistoric deep sea Dunkleosteus. Of course, that monster is loose because of a military experiment and has been set loose on a tourist town, but that’s how these things go.

Peter and Dr. Stella Dickens (and yes, Luigi Cozzi names every one of his heroines Stella) have to stop the monster before it grows, while the military wants to stop them and recapture the Devilfish. There’s also a sheriff on the job who is played by Sartana himself, Gianni Garko.

Cinzia De Ponti, the bicyclist we last saw get eviscerated by The New York Ripper (she’s also the aptly named babysitter Jamie Lee in Fulci’s utterly bizarre Manhattan Baby), shows up here, as does Dagmar Lassander from Hatchet for the Honeymoon and The House by the Cemetery.

For those that enjoy these things, there’s a flash of man meat. There’s also plenty of synthesizer soundtrack music, knife fights in the water, a goofy monster, flamethrowers vs. monsterfish, women screaming “PETER!” and plenty of bad dubbing.

Lamberto Bava takes every nice thing I ever said about his father and throws it in my face with every movie that he makes, but I still give him chance upon chance. Still, I kind of adore that there was a time when Italian filmmakers would come the whole way to America to make horrifyingly inane films.

Oh yeah — one time in 1977, Luigi Cozzi made his own version of Godzilla by redubbing 80 minutes of the original Godzilla, throwing in some footage from the U.S. 1956 version and then added in nearly 25 minutes of World War II newsreels and various other films like The Day the Earth Caught Fire and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

If that wasn’t enough, then Cozzi artist Armando Valcauda spent three months placing colored gels over the black and white film, colorizing the movie in a way that approaches pop art that was called Spectorama 70. Then, there was a new soundtrack by Vince Tempera (under the pseudonym Magnetic System) that was mixed in Futursound, an 8-track magnetic sound system based on Sensurround. Imagine Goblin with super loud explosions that could, would and did rock entire theaters with blasts of noise.

You can learn more about this moment of cinematic craziness here and watch the video below:

Anyways, Devilfish. You can watch it on Amazon Prime with a subscription or get it from Cult Action.

I’ve been in shark crazed waters for awhile, so sometimes it’s good when someone offers you a life preserver. Paul Andolina also likes these movies and even though I can’t usually deal with today’s overly silly shark films, he still finds the good in them. I’m so glad here’s here to tell you all about another one. If you like his stuff, check out his site Wrestling with Film. 

I discovered Avalanche Sharks two years ago during a summer full of madness and anxiety. Honestly, it couldn’t have come at better time. It was just what I needed.

Avalanche Sharks centers around a ski resort during spring break and a strange ghostly shark that is swimming through the snow and eating the spring breakers. It’s an utterly bonkers premise and I didn’t think it was going to work. An evil spirit named Skookum is disturbed by an avalanche which awakes him. His chosen form is a ghostly shark that eats people. That’s the basic elements of the film and although it feels like just an excuse for shark mayhem in the snow, it also has a decent plot about a soldier whose brother and his friend go missing on the slopes. He spends the movie harassing the search and rescue guy, a former Olympian who is a real jack ass, because he just won’t look for the missing folks. There’s a sheriff and his wife, a marine biologist, who had an encounter with Skookum as a child but she doesn’t remember much about the incident. A harbinger of doom is also present, a kooky old guy, who rides around the mountain on his dog driven sled. Now I have to bring up that there are actually two cuts of this film, the cut that is on DVD is an extended version with some scenes of a kid in a hospital, having hallucinations of a scantily clad nurse who he tells the tale of the sharks to, there are also scenes explaining the story of extraterrestrial sharks that character tells his friends, as well as a sequence of sharks on Mars. I feel they aren’t entirely necessary and the cut I watched on Netflix two years ago feels a bit more tight and neat. I’ve watched the DVD a few times as well and these scenes don’t bother me as much anymore but I really wish it had both cuts on it. Also the end credits feature the song Ymlaen by the Welsh band Clinigol. I think the song is about equal marriage but I’m not really certain. All I know is that it is catchy as heck. The unextended cut is available to watch for free with ads on Vudu and is honestly the way to go if you want to watch the film. I hope this gets at least one person to check out the madness that is Avalanche Sharks. 

If you read comic books in the summer of 1977, there’s no way you didn’t know about Orca. Despite everything that nature — and SeaWorld — could teach us, it was time to meet a predator even more deadly to man than the great white shark. To quote Neko Case: “You know they call them killer whales.”

Orca raises the Jaws rip-off stakes: if the name Orca can be Quint’s boat, here, it can be an entire movie. Dino De Laurentiis called writer Luciano Vincenzoni (he also wrote The Good, The Bad and the Ugly) in the middle of the night and told to find a fish tougher and more terrible than the great white to make a movie that could go up against Spielberg’s. Vincenzoni’s brother told him all about the killer whales and the rest is scumtastic movie history.

Directed by Michael Anderson (Logan’s Run, Doc Savage), Orca is the kind of movie that critics have assaulted for years. I’m here to tell you that every single one of them is wrong. It’s a completely ridiculous film, a shameless reboot of both Jaws and Moby Dick, but by no means is it not entertaining as hell. And it has an incredible Ennio Morricone score, something that so many fish films could only wish they aspired to.

Captain Nolan (Richard Harris, who nearly died doing his own stunts and also would grow enraged if anyone dared compare this movie to any other film) catches fish and marine animals so that he can pay off his boat. His crew is looking for a great white, which comes after crewmember Ken (Robert Carradine, Lewis from Revenge of the Nerds). An orca saves Ken and Nolan decides to repay its kindness by capturing it. After he harpoons the whale, he learns that he’s killed its mate, which miscarries and drops a fetus onto the deck of the ship that the callous captain hoses off into the ocean while our titular hero/villain/sea mammal screams in anguish. This is when you wonder: how did this movie get a PG rating?

Novak (Keenan Wynn, The Dark, Piranha), another crew member, cuts the female loose and its mate drags her dead body to shore. The villagers all rise up against the crew, who demand that Nolan kill the orca, who has gone wild and is ruining local fishing. When Nolan refuses to put the fish out of its misery, it retaliates by sinking all of the fishing boats and breaking all of the town’s fuel lines, because of course killer whales can hold grudges.

That’s what brings Dr. Rachel Bedford (Charlotte Rampling), a whale expert, into the movie. She believes that orcas are like humans, a fact that Nolan can understand. He sees himself as one of the whales, as his wife and unborn child were killed by a drunk driver. He promises not to fight the whale, but it kills Novak, attacks Nolan’s house and then bites off the leg of his injured worker, Annie (Bo Derek in her film debut).

Nolan and his crew, including Paul (Peter Hooten, who was also in Derek’s first actual filmed movie, Fantasies, as well as the 1970’s Dr. Strange TV movie and Just a Damned Soldier with Mark Gregory), all take off after the orca, along with Native American Jacob Umilak (Will Sampson, the magical Native American in films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Poltergeist II). That’s when the orca goes buckfutter and wipes out nearly everyone by either grabbing them, biting them, crushing them and tossing icebergs at the boat.

The orca throws Nolan all the lace like a ragdoll, killing him, but leaving Bedford alive. We watch as Nolan sinks into the water in a crucified pose and the killer whale decides to swim under the ice. Now, there’s some conjecture here: is the killer whale trapped or has it decided that with its revenge complete, all it can do is die when faced with the path or revenge that it has wrought? I can see the poetry of this thought, but then I realize that I’ve just watched a film filled with no subtlety whatsoever, so perhaps the orca swam on, discovered a new mate and remains ready to wipe out all of humanity at a moment’s notice.

Orca is everything I love about movies: it’s big and dumb and bloody. It’s the kind of movie a fine actor like Richard Harris chews the scenery with just as much viciousness as a killer whale devours one of Bo Derek’s shapely gams. It also takes shark films to the next level. Every single one of the humans in this movie are amongst the dumbest people ever, doomed by the fact that they even known Captain Nolan. The moment he hoses orca’s son into the icy waters, he’s sealed his fate. This is one of the few films where you root for the beast and savor its revenge.

You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll be amazed at Bo’s bloody stump. I want more people to love this movie even a fourth as much as I do.

If you thought Joe D’Amato didn’t have a Jaws ripoff in him, then you don’t know Joe D’Amato. Or Federiko Slonisko. Or Michael Wotruba. Or David Hills. Or Kevin Mancuso. Or Joan Russell. Or Raf Donato, the name he used when he directed this.

Joe D’Amato had just as many names as he made movies. Born Aristide Massaccesi, he first became known as a cinematographer on films like What Have You Done to Solange? before directing his own films like Death Smiles on a Murderer, five Emanuelle films include the absolutely berserk Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, Antropophagus, Absurd, Endgame and literally hundreds more, as well as producing films by George Eastman, Michele Soavi, Umberto Lenzi, Lucio Fulci and Claudio Fragrasso.

This movie begins as we meet four boys, Miki, John, Jason and Alan, eating hotdogs on the beach with a Native American mystic who tells them the tale of the monstrous Wakan shark. The boys sign a blood oath that they will always be friends and help one another in times of danger.

Much like a Stephen King movie, the boys get together ten years later. However, Wakan shows up, kills John and starts randomly devouring just about everyone in his path. There’s a long extended sequence where a police chopper hovers over the guys’ boat, repeatedly saying “Go back to shore, you should be embarrassed of what you’ve done” that made me laugh so hard I fell off my couch.

If the scene of the shark blowing up at the end — sorry spoiler warning — looks familiar, it’s because D’Amato just recycled the effect from the end of The Last Shark. Yes, the Italian film industry is not above ripping itself off. Also, the effects team only built a shark head. The rest of the undersea footage comes from National Geographic.

The mystic angle adds a different take on a shark movie. And there are moments of sheer absurdity, like the sheriff being named Cody and not Brody, harpoons being shot into the cars of punkers and a fishing scene where it’s obvious that no one knows how to actually fish.

Joe D’Amato may not have delivered the Italian shark movie of my dreams, where George Eastman emerges from the inside of the shark eating its innards, but dammit if he didn’t try.

You can get this from Severin, who used our quote on the back cover.

Paul Andolina from Wrestling with Film asked me if he could review this for BASTARD PUPS OF JAWS week. I figured, sure, Anacadona is basically Jaws in the jungle with J. Lo looking good in safari clothes. Why not?

I thought that Snake Outta Compton would be appropriate for Bastard Pups of Jaws week. Boy, was I wrong. I thought this would be just another typical animal attack movie but this movie was so far off the rails from anything I’ve seen before.

A rap crew, consisting of Cam, Pinball, Neon, and Beez Neez are forced to battle a giant snake terrorizing their city. Pinball’s roommate, Vurkel, discovers a snake embryo in the streets from the detritus of a snake that fell from the sky out of an airplane.

Vurkel then bombards the snake that hatches from it with a ray that imbues it with a slew of unstable molecules. This makes the snake grow rapidly and it escapes, eating its way through the city.

This movie plays with its hand revealed, it’s a silly film, full of references to other movies. It even spoofs the film Training Day. It follows two cops who are not only crooked but also incompetent. The veteran cop is even named Denz (Joston Theney, himself an accomplished writer and director) and the rookie, Ethan. They say that it is training day for the rookie cop more times then I could keep track of.

I expected this to be a standard cash grab riff on Snakes on a Plane with a giant monster spin but it turned out to be anything but. It lampoons rap culture as much as it glorifies it, and is generally an exaggeration of urban life as a whole. The characters are all as ridiculous as they are entertaining and there is never a dull moment in the film. There’s plenty of cool stuff to look at throughout the film and I found the CGI of the giant snake to be quite effective. I thought the CGI would be more akin to that of a B level TV movie but it was crisp and attractive.

I found the movie to be fun and entertaining, the music, excellent, and the story captivating. It turns out that if you get eaten by the snake and come into contact with its saliva, you begin to transform into a human-snake hybrid! This was a surprising turn in the movie, and Vurkel’s slow transformation into a hybrid, I’ve affectionately decided to call Slurkel, was a highlight of the film for me.

If you are a fan of outlandish premises, irreverent comedy, giant snakes, and some sweet hip hop vibes this is the film for you. The effects are great with plenty of slimy bright colored saliva and blood. The snake kills early in the film are funny and disturbing at the same time.

Snake Outta Compton is also full of super aware commentary on the human condition too, something I found to be funny. I had been anticipating this film since seeing a poster for it and it exceeded any expectations I could have had for it. If you can turn your mind off and just enjoy a film for what it gives you, something folks seem to have a difficult time doing in our highly critical comic book laden movie theater age, you should give Snake Outta Compton a shot.

Even if you can’t just watch a film with an open mind you should see it because I think it was a bunch of silly fun. Sso take a sseat, grab a ssoda and savor the hip hop flavor of sSnake Outta Compton, hiss a fun one!

Somehow, Ovidio Assonitis (Beyond the Door, Madhouse, The Visitor) must have had pictures of people in Hollywood in very compromising positions. How else could he have gotten Hollywood royalty like Henry Fonda, Shelley Winters and John Huston to appear in a movie about a giant killer octopus?

Want to know how far Assonitis went to rip off Jaws? The trailer to this movie is narrated by Percy Rodrigues, who also voiced over the trailers to every single Jaws film.

You know how it goes: Solana Beach is a tourist town that’s facing off with a giant octopus that likes to eat people the whole way down to the bone. That’s because Mr. Whitehead’s (Fonda) Trojan company has built an illegal underwater tunnel that’s using radio signals that are too loud, driving the octopus insane.

Luckily, marine expert Will Gleason (Bo Hopkins, Midnight Express) and newspaper reporter Ned Turner (Huston) are on the job, tracking down the beast and setting a pair of killer whales named Summer and Winter loose on it. By the way — for this scene, that’s a real octopus — a dead one from a fish market — getting torn up. Oh you wacky Italians and your disregard for life!

Also: there’s a long sequence where Hopkins talks to his killer whales about how people treated him as a killer and how he loves them so much more than any human being he has ever met before he asks them to understand why they have to kill the octopus. It’s totally ADR and beyond ridiculous and made me love this movie 200,000 times more than I thought were possible.

Along the way, you’ll meet the gorgeous Delia Boccardo, Italian comedian Franco Diogene and the always welcome Claude Atkins as, you guessed it, a sheriff.

Moving things quickly — no matter how plodding the film gets — is a great soundtrack by Stelvio Cipriani, who is something of a Jaws ripoff music maestro, considering he also scored The Bermuda Triangle, Encounters in the Deep, Night of the Sharks, The Great Alligator and Piranha II: The Spawning.

The best thing about this movie is that it doesn’t care at all about having a plot of a central character that you can follow. Major characters just disappear. Shelley Winters doesn’t even have to be in this movie. And Assonitis seems like he’d rather be making a drama or art film than one with a giant rubber octopus, which makes this even more awesome than it should be.

Want to see it for yourself? Shout! Factory has you covered.