Something thats popped into my head for the past couple of days.
Jaws basically started the killer shark movie (and in fact the entire singular killer animal genre) but thinking back, from Jaws (1975) until 1999 pretty much every killer shark (or even generic killer sea animal) movie followed the exact same storyline. Small town that has to come to terms with killer shark, higher ups that try to downplay it, lots of shots of fins or the sharks shadow from below but not much of the actual shark, most people die from the simple “something grabs them from below and drags them through the water and cue red water” method, shark dies at the end from something relatively simple like being shot or rammed.
But the moment that Deep Blue Sea (1999) came onto the scene it basically turned sharks from being (relatively) realistic killers to outright “too smart for their own good” slasher movie monsters. Now each kill had to be spectacularly gory and on-screen, sharks devised bizarre and intelligent traps to kill humans, sharks were now taking out helicopters and other stuff which they had no right to destroy. The movies that followed Jaws were fairly tame and followed the Jaws format to a T (see Orca, The Last Shark, Cruel Jaws) everything that followed Deep Blue Sea went completely over-the-top much like it had. It seems like without Jaws we wouldn’t have Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus, Sharknado, and even stuff like Piranha 3D.
Basically if it wasn’t for Deep Blue Sea I feel that none of the mountains of terrible CGI Sci-Fi original shark movies wouldn’t exist and we’d still take that genre seriously.
Jaws was a cultural phenomenon. Deep Blue Sea was a moderately successful movie. So, no. Shark movies aren’t much of a movie subgenre, and no one has ever really taken it seriously to begin with.
Surely the reason we have mountains of crap CGI films after 1999 is that CGI was more accessible than in the seventies?
I have to admit, reading the OP I was curious to hear which movies had been influenced by Deep Blue sea, that you could only list some sci-fi channel/straight to video suckfests rather answers the question if you ask me.
I can’t think of very many shark movies since Deep Blue Sea, so how influential can it have been?
I saw “The Shallows” and it was pretty bad, but it took more from Jaws than Deep Blue Sea, really.
Deep Blue Sea was in a sense more like Jurassic Park than Jaws. The monsters are sharks but
The THEME of the movie is science overstepping itself and creating a scary new danger, and
The setting is of people trapped in a place and trying to escape hungry monsters, which is consistent with Jurassic Park but not Jaws.
Really, monster movies can’t be categorized by the type of monster. Godzilla is about a giant lizard that’s kind of like a dinosaur, but “Giant City Destroying Monster” movies are kind of their own thing, so Godzilla is really more like Pacific Rim than it is like Jurassic Park, which is more like Deep Blue Sea than DBS is like Jaws, and Jaws is more like Lake Placid than it is like Sharknado.
The movie that started having sharks be “too smart for their own good” was Jaws not DBS. The shark always knew to go after the protagonist. The sequels were worse. If I remember right the book laid out the motivation for the shark even clearer. It wasn’t just looking for food.
Jaws is a quotable classic movie that is still good when you see it today. Deep Blue Sea is a forgetable movie that would be completely forgotten if it wasn’t used as a punchline example of how thrillers kill off black people.
I’m going to have to say no since I never even heard of Deep Blue Sea. Of course, I had two small kids in 1999, so maybe that’s why I missed it completely, but I have to imagine I would have heard of Jaws even if I had two small kids in the house.
Is there a shark movie genre, other than the tornado kind, these days?
Hmm. I’d argue that DBS is, instead, a retelling of Shelley’s Frankenstein rather than of Jaws. It’s got the hubristic scientist who creates something she believes she can control and eventually it establishes its autonomy and kills her.
Except, you know, this time with sharks.
But I can see the DNA of Jaws in it. Jaws scared the crap out of people - I was about 7-8 and quit swim lessons essentially right away - and that captured the imagination of the public.
As I recall, in Deep Blue Sea the pretty white girl died and the black cook lived.
Deep Blue sea isn’t held up as an example of thrillers killing black people, it’s held up as the punchline example of a thriller killing off the big name star in the middle of him making a rousing speech to the survivors. That Samuel L Jackson was black was irrelevant.
