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Review by Ian West ★★★½ Liked

Less of a JAWS ripoff and more of a gritty little 70’s gem that features shaman medallions, vigilante revenge, watery graves, sweltering dive bars, and shot without cages shark footage that’s hold-your-breath worthy at times as loner Richard Jaekel protects sharks (whom he can communicate with) from local yokel fisherman as well as slob nightclub owners by feeding the devious idiots to the sharks. 

That’s my kind of bullshit.

Out of the handful of Grefe movies I’ve seen, Mako is my favorite—the very specific regional exploitation Florida atmosphere of grimy, humid, sun soaked low budget Everglade excursions is the perfect almost trance inducing to me vibes and I dig Grefe’s style… kind of like William Girdler meets HGL where you can tell he has a singular vision and budgetary restraints didn’t mean shit to him and his crew and I ire that.

Cool movie.

Review by matt lynch ★★★ Liked

Mostly Grefé rehashing STANLEY but swapping out snakes for sharks. To that end it's decidedly pro-shark, which suits me fine, and it features a finale set during a "hurricane" that was clearly achieved with the use of a single Ritter fan. MVP the delightful Buffy Dee as a local stogie-chewing bigwig who carries his cocktail in a little thing around his neck. Guy has it pretty figured out.

2

So we decided since this is the first holiday season without my mom, we would go out of town for the holiday weeks. This week, we are in Wyoming so before we left, I ed ten movies from my Plex that I’ve been meaning to watch forever and I’m finally going to get around to them this week or because I have the attention span of a television antenna this week and next week!

I this vhs cover from the video store days and I vividly the intriguing picture on the back of a woman underwater looking like she’s about to get attacked by a shark. I it because the coloring was so bad it almost looked…

2

Hooptober #16

Cashing in on the popularity of Jaws from the year before, Mako: The Jaws of Death brings us plenty of shark related silliness. Though it's actually quite distinct from Jaws and not really a knock-off. Mako is a film where men are the real monsters, not sharks. It rarely focuses on the terror of sharks and mostly tells a story of human wrongdoing. There's also a mystical element to the movie, with characters possessing some kind of connection to sharks, derived from a flashback involving a Filipino shaman which is just crass exoticism. This is not a particularly sensitive or intelligent movie. It does have plenty of footage of real sharks though, and they are beautiful animals. While…

1

Very bizarre, but a fun twist on the shark movie.
It was very satisfying to see hunters get the reverse treatment, and I especially enjoyed the fishing boat crashing into the shore with its "trophies*.
That bar was pretty badass. I wish places like that still existed. Although I did have the pleasure of visiting the Sip n Dip in Great Falls that has a mermaid tank!

Edit: I was worried due to the time period and budget that there would be sharks getting hurt in this, but after seeing the intro and what the movie is about I assumed that wouldn't be the case. Now reading some reviews, I'm not so sure. There was definitely one scene that was questionable. 🤔

1976 Horror Ranked

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Hooptober... And Then There Were Nine

69th Kill

The more Bill Grefe films I see, the more impressed I become with the guy. Don't get me wrong, these movies are abjectly cheap-looking and incredibly rough around the edges, but Grefe had a genuine knack for getting the important stuff pretty right. He worked wonders with the meagre resources he had at his disposal, and thus far, Mako: The Jaws of Death is the most impressive achievement of his I have seen.

The shark sequences in this film - and there is a metric shit-ton of them - truly astounded me. How the hell did they do this? So many actors swimming around with tiger sharks. Maybe I'm wrong about this,…

Review by Digital Press ★★½

Aquaman: The Origin Story

Hooptober 9 (2022): "5 Films from [William Grefe]" FULL SET HERE.

Review by Lou (rhymes with wow!) ★★★½

Richard Jaeckel really loves sharks. If you're going to fuck with his sharks, he's going to fuck with you. This dude doesn't shy away from murder either, so be warned.

Not as exploitive as I thought it would be, but still a lot of fun. Tries to undo some of the bad press sharks have been getting since like, forever.

2

To the extent that this works, it works because of Richard Jaeckel, who gives a completely committed and dimensional performance as the lonely shark-lover who just wants what's best for his undersea predator friends. That, and the thick coat of coastal Florida grime that covers every available surface and person onscreen.

2

Hooptober IX, Part 22

Cards on the table: I don't get much out of regional horror. I see the mucky appeal of visceral setting specificity, the esoteric whims of whatever unchecked kooks that were able to film some wobbly combination of home movie banality and incompetent monster thrills, and how the lack of studio-financed production values can actually boost the discomfort you're already supposed to feel while watching horror. I get it, but I don't like it and I ain't gonna use it. Like how I get sushi, or Sandra Bullock, or Twitter.

My only takeaways from this post-"Jaws" shark feature that's surprisingly not a direct rip-off unlike most other shark movies made in the first couple decades after 1975…

4

"ok, shark boy. I'm gonna break your fin."

Hooptober Nighn (22/31)

Mako: The Jaws of Death, or When William Grefé Decided to Mako'l Aquaman into a Slasher-man.
& I mean, it's not as far-fetched as I figured bc...well...ppl are a-holes. If all of these characters - besides Sonny Stein (played fkn DIE HARD by Richard Jaekel) - were even half-decent human beings, they would not have reaped the wrath of Sonny & his sharks. But they're all the worst, which make their watery deaths all the more satisfying.

Unfortunately this is less fun than I figured, but still an entertaining watch. Thx for the rec, @BenGrayeyard !!!

🦈🦈🦈

I came here for:
List-filler in the form of an extra US regional & extra Grefé

Review by Gentry ★★★ Liked

“I got friends. They depend on me.”

A Boy and His Shark

After the snake horror success of Stanley, Wild Bill Grefé decided to stay in the animal milieu. It actually seemed inevitable that the low budget Florida filmmaker would end up making a sharksploitation film, and the success of a little film called Jaws allowed him to easily secure the funding he needed. He originally wanted Henry Silva for the lead, and almost had him, until Silva revealed he was “a New York boy” and didn’t know how to swim. Instead he got Academy Award nominated actor Richard Jaeckel, who gives a shell-shocked performance as friend to the sharks, Sonny Stein, who is crazy “in a good sort of…