Thank you to everybody who stopped by the Sidewalk Cinema last night for my first time hosting VHS Time Machine! I had a fantastic time watching this amazing film with y’all, and I hope you enjoyed the cream of the Jaws rip-off crop. Now, as promised, here is your day-late edition of the newsletter. If you weren’t able to join us last night, don’t worry—now is the perfect time to watch Orca! Shark Week starts tomorrow, you know…
Every film page on Wikipedia is a minor goldmine. For just about everything that gets widely released, you’ll find at least a handful of facts that are enlightening or entertaining or both.
Here’s my favorite “fact” from Orca’s Wikipedia page: “Richard Harris enjoyed his experiences during filming and took offence [sic] at comparisons between Orca and Jaws.” I just think that’s great. And I, too, will fight you if you besmirch the good name of Orca.
But I also don’t think that a Jaws rip-off is such a bad thing for a film to be.
Critics in 1977 sure did, though. Orca boasts an unholy 9% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes with a not-much-better 33% audience score.* While there are admittedly flaws in the film’s craftsmanship that could be singled out if you’re not fun at parties, the gist of the complaints from critics and viewers boiled down to one thing: It ain’t Jaws. And much like Richard Harris, I don’t think that’s very fair.
Make no mistake: Orca quite literally wouldn’t exist without Jaws. If you noticed Orca’s release date, did some quick math, and determined that it was released two years and one month after Jaws, you might assume that it was rushed into production to capitalize on (or, perhaps more accurately, help create) a cinematic trend. And you’d be absolutely correct!
As the legend goes, industry titan Dino de Laurentiis called Orca co-writer/producer Luciano Vincenzoni “in the middle of the night,” told him he had just seen Jaws, and then commissioned him to “find a fish tougher and more terrible than the great white.” That, folks, is the kind of origin story I like to hear.**
But Vincenzoni would not be the first to intentionally imitate Jaws, nor would he be the last. As soon as Spielberg’s shark hit the water, it ignited a veritable Space Race of animal attack films: Grizzly in 1976, Piranha in 1978, and Alligator in 1980, all of which were competing with Jaws 2, itself a half-assed reheating of its franchise predecessor.*** And that’s just the first few years. Jaws rip-offs are still being made today, of course. Hell, we got one last year.
Here’s the thing, though: Individually, these producers may have been attempting to cash in on the success of someone else’s work by creating something very similar. But collectively, they were creating a subgenre of horror movies that film nerds like myself have come to love as reliable junk food.
If you’ll permit me to get more academic than a piece about Orca probably deserves, this particular point hearkens back to basic training for screenwriters. As Save the Cat author Blake Snyder (and many others before him) summarized, it’s all been written before, and there are really only a handful of narrative arcs to choose from. Ten, to be exact. Think of it like an Enneagram for cinema. There are hundreds of narrative features released every year, and each of them can essentially be reduced to one of these ten types.
That’s not a bad thing. It’s a good thing if you love movies. And it’s a great thing if you want to write movies. It allows us to approach a film (or a screenplay) with more nuanced expectations. Formulas aren’t prisons—they’re blueprints.
The same way Spielberg was borrowing from films like King Kong, many of his contemporaries borrowed from his blockbuster breakthrough. Lots of them—like Orca—are super entertaining, if a bit rough around the edges. And some of them are masterpieces in their own right. Or have you forgotten that Alien was allegedly pitched as “Jaws in space”?
So next time you’re tempted to look smart by saying that some film isn’t very good just because it’s just a rip-off of some other film, remember that you’ll be forced to fight me and the ghost of Richard Harris, and then you’ll be asked to leave our party.
*Shouts out to the three Orca defenders in the mix: Ruth Batchelor of the Los Angeles Free Press, Rich Cline of Shadows On The Wall, and my Twitter friend Scott Weinberg, who ends his review with “…and yet I’ve always liked it. Weird.”
**Roger Corman is often praised as the king of genre film producers, and I’m not one to dispute that crown. But Dino de Laurentiis has to be in the discussion. His whole career is remarkable, but his run in the mid-80s is unbelievable. When he called in the middle of the night, you listened. (Corman did get his own Jaws rip-off a year later with Piranha, though.)
***I wrote about Alligator last year, actually. Maybe I’ll see how many Jaws rip-offs I can write about before I write about Jaws.
Orca is now streaming on Showtime, Paramount+, and DirecTV, and it is available to rent elsewhere.