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

Now, while shark schlock has seen a major renaissance in the last few year (a favourite being the batsh*t Ghost Shark, or the flying Nazi zombie sharks in Sky Sharks), one of the earliest and, oddly, most faithful rip-offs of Jaws doesn’t actually feature a shark at all. Not even a robot one.

Despite the fact that Jaws was still on general release, and that the elevator pitch for the movie (“Jaws but with a giant man-eating bear!”) was ridiculously simple, 1976’s Grizzly was only financed when director William Girdler brought it to the legendarily dodgy B-movie producer Edward L. Montoro.

The resulting movie is almost beat for beat, character for character a rehash of Jaws. The only slight variation aside from the monster and the setting is that the naturalist character that stands in for Richard Dreyfuss’ Hooper in the story is killed before the big finale. Oh yes, and the giant prehistoric bear is killed with a bazooka, because of course it is.

Grizzly was a decent mainstream hit, the biggest independent movie of 1976, causing Montoro to churn out even more exploitation movies - he was the one responsible for trying (and failing) to distribute L’Ultimo Squalo in the US.

That financial disaster was the final straw: Montoro stole a million dollars of his company’s money and vanished, never to be seen again. That put the first of a series of ridiculous obstacles in the way of a 1983 sequel to Grizzly, which itself almost vanished without a trace, only to be released literally only a couple of years ago to murmurs of indifference.