10 Horror Movie Rip-Offs You Won’t Believe Exist

Literally 'The Last Shark’ but released outside of Italy simply as Great White (no relation to this year’s shark flick of the same name), Enzo G. Castellari's bad photocopy of Jaws essentially follows the same plot as Spielberg’s classic, just free of the restraint that the film’s original director displayed.

Castellari and his screenwriter Marc Princi clearly thought that the only thing wrong with Jaws was the slow-burning menace. Here, the film introduces its scene-stealing Quint-variant early on (played by Vic Morrow, in one of his last roles) and the shark bites the duplicitous mayor in half, shortly before dragging a helicopter underwater.

L’Ultimo Squalo was so blatant a rip-off that the film's planned North American release was halted after Universal Pictures successfully sued to have it blocked. As a result, it has never been released for home media or shown on TV in the US.

Of course, that's not going to stop people in this day and age (information wants to be free! power to the people!) and so bootlegs have been available for almost as long as the movie has been on release.

It didn’t stop Castellari’s distributors either, who took advantage of the lack of widespread information about overseas movie schedules to release their movie in Japan as an official sequel to Jaws, and in Spain as the sequel to Jaws 2.

That’s some impressive chutzpah, but it didn’t start there. In L’Ultimo Squalo, the hapless but determined protagonist isn't police chief Martin Brody, but horror writer Peter Benton. That’s a clear riff on original Jaws writer Peter Benchley: another example of this film ripping off the original and giving it the finger at the same time.