A few weeks ago, you may recall, Sam Richards of The Guardian subjected himself to a handful of entries on the IMDb’s Bottom 100 list – the absolute worst of the worst-ranked movies of all time. At first I thought he was crazy. Then I realized he hadn’t gone nearly far enough. Any moron can sit through a few of these godawful pictures; it takes a special kind of idiot to watch all 100 of them. And I’m here to tell you, loyal Screengrab readers, I am that idiot.
For your entertainment and my own detriment, I am going to watch and review them all, starting with #100 and working my way to the top. Of course, the IMDb list is constantly changing based on the whims of the voting public, but I will be sticking with the Bottom 100 I downloaded on the day I decided to tackle this most awe-inspiring task. And on whatever day that was, the #100 ranked movie was Shark: Rosso nell'oceano, or as you may know it: Devil Fish.
There’s a reason you might know it: in what I fear may become a recurring problem with this project, Devil Fish is on the list because it was skewered by those pranksters at Mystery Science Theater 3000. This makes its inclusion somewhat illegitimate to my way of thinking, since nobody would have heard of it otherwise and it would have had no chance of making the Bottom 100. And I know this won’t make me any friends amongst the bad movie cognoscenti, but I’ve never really been a fan of MST3K; heck, I don’t even like the abbreviation MST3K. If I want to be trapped in a room with a bunch of dorks making lame jokes about a movie I’m trying to watch, it’s easy enough to accomplish that goal. I don’t need them actually pasted there in front of the movie I’m trying to watch, with no way of drowning out their commentary, but in this case, I had no choice. I did my best to pretend they weren’t there and come to the film with only the purest intentions, but it wasn’t easy.
Directed by Lamberto “son of Mario” Bava, Devil Fish (or Monster Shark or Red Ocean or even Devouring Waves) is a belated Jaws knockoff from 1986 set in the Florida Everglades. A bony dolphin trainer, a beer-swilling scientist and the local sheriff join forces to battle a waterlogged monster that doesn’t actually appear to be much of a shark at all, given that it has tentacles. In a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease, the solution they arrive at is to douse the Everglades with gasoline and set it ablaze with flamethrowers. I guess this qualifies as eco-horror, though perhaps not in the way Bava intended.
With its wooden performances, cheesy effects and slack approach to editing, Devil Fish is certainly ripe for mockery, but I don’t know that it’s any worse than a hundred other low-budget monster movies that could easily have taken its place on the list. Which brings me to my “Unwatchable” rating system, inspired by my loyal co-watcher, Maury the Wonder Chibeagle. On a scale of one to four Maurys – one being a movie that actually has redeeming qualities, four being an atrocity against mankind – I hereby award Devil Fish two Maurys:
