Deep Blood

The Jaws rip off is the trashiest of the all the Italian 'genres', and director Joe D'Amato is second only to the great Jess Franco in the trash film production stakes. Put the two together and what do you get? A gigantic piece of trash, of course. Unfortunately it's not trash in the good sense of the word either, as Deep Blood delivers more in boredom than it does in hilarity. To the film's credit, it does actually attempt something bordering on a plot; but to take said credit away from the film - the plot is rubbish. It has something to do with a group of friends taking of an oath (of friendship) and then some Indian curse that manifests itself into a shark. Or at least I think that's what was going on. Anyway, the majority of the film is padded out with boring dialogue and 'drama', and the shark itself - which lets not forget, is the only thing we really want to see - finds itself in merely a cameo role. Or not even that since most the shark is actually stock footage! Despite being a trash genre, there are actually a lot of fun Jaws rip-offs; but with this one, Joe D'Amato makes it clear that he couldn't be bothered to even try, and the result is what must be the worst Italian shark movie of all time. Avoid this dross.

Compared to the mass of shark movies, this one is not very different from many others.

From the start of the movie to it's end, a lot of scenes are so generic that they could occur in every other shark movie. You could probably cut out some scenes and exchange them, not many would notice. The story is standard, the effects are below average, the music is boring to annoying.

What really hurts is the amount of useless scenes in this film, nobody needs. Diving down and planting dynamite over and over again feels trashy and I don't understand how somebody can watch this and say "Yes, we need to see him plant three more dynamite packs".

Another really annoying fact is how you can see the back of the pool in some of the shark scenes. Come on, everybody has to spot this.

I like to think of myself as a bad movie connoisseur. I like to think that the films most people label as the worst of all time I can easily withstand.

But...there are exceptions. I can only recall three movies I have had the misfortune to see that I have repeatedly used the fast-forward button for large chunks of the story. Those movies are The Mighty Gorga, Night of the Seagulls, and this little crap, Deep Blood.

In the world of Jaws ripoffs, this falls off the scale. Deep Blood doesn't have the realistic storyline of the original Crocodile, nor the incredible effects of The Sea Serpent, nor the commentary of Tintorera. No, instead we are treated to a handful of teens from any random failed '80s public access sitcom battling bullies and the local sheriff.

Shark attacks are realized by quick cuts of documentary footage with actors thrashing about in the water, occasionally with a bit of what appears to be orange-ish paint thrown into the water. Not a minute of original shark footage exists in this celluloid waste dump.

Normally, I, or somebody like me, would read a dismal review like this one and say "cool, I gotta find a copy of this!" That's the same thought I had when I read another viewer's review on this very site. How wrong I was.

So...from one bad movie fan to another...let this collect dust on the shelf...grab Up From the Depths or The Great Alligator instead to satisfy your need for something evil lurking in the water.

Just when you finally, absolutely, positively thought it was safe to go back into the water, up pops yet another Italian Jaws rip off—and slap me with a dorsal fin and chew my legs off if this isn't one of the most tedious of them all.

Directed by Raffaele Donato (with more than a bit of uncredited help from the king of Italian sleaze Joe D'amato), Deep Blood is a virtually joyless experience from start to finish, with a dreary plot, umpteen characters that are indistinguishable from one another, terrible acting (nearly all the performers fumble their lines at least once), and unconvincing shark attack scenes comprising of various odds and ends of stock footage badly inter-cut with the frenzied thrashing of the supposed victims.

The dreadful script offers a few unintentionally hilarious scenes, such as the sight of the film's heroes nipping to the local dynamite depot to stock up with enough high explosives to sink a battleship, or the hasty construction of a special shark attracting device that consists of a metal box with a flashing light on top, and further giggles might be had from the witnesses to the shark attacks, who run the gamut of emotions from 'mildy concerned' to 'slightly perturbed'; to be honest though, these brief moments of levity do little to compensate viewers for suffering through the rest of this bloody awful film.

Almost all the scenes in this movie were filmed in Ocean Springs Ms and Biloxi Ms, but no credit is given. It's not the Mississippi River as it states. I live there and even though Katrina demolished our coast , I can still recognize all the places they filmed.