Jaws wasn’t even a year old when NBC debuted Shark Kill on May 20, 1976, making the telefilm likely the first contestant in the still-ongoing sharksploitation sweepstakes. And that’s about all William A. Graham’s (Beyond the Bermuda Triangle) cash-in has going for it.
At an oil rig under repair in the Pacific Ocean, young marine biologist Rick Dayner (Phillip Clark, 1982’s Alone in the Dark) spots (stock footage of) a Great White shark, but blue-collar boss Banducci (Midnight Run’s Richard Foronjy, the Luis Guzmán of his day) won’t have any of it, claiming the kid just “sees sardines,” and orders his men to keep working. Dayner is adamant: “Mister, I know what I saw!”
Eventually, they listen to him … but only after the (stock footage of the) shark eats one worker and amputates the leg of another. The latter fellow’s brother, Cabo Mendoza (Richard Yniguez, The Deadly Tower), joins Dayner on a $20,000 bounty hunt for the shark. When Dayner answers Mendoza’s question about the size of their target (about 15 feet), we know this is a BFD because the music score wakes up just long enough to punctuate Mendoza’s face pause with a “dun-dun-dunnnnn!”
Scheider and Dreyfuss, they ain’t. Hell, Lorraine Gary and Mario Van Peebles, they ain’t. I’m sure I would have loved it at age 5. —Rod Lott