![]() In fact, he must be the only producer around who has consistently been making films from the 1950s to the 2010s. Roger has had a bit of a renaissance of late. Consequently Griffith had to cut away from it very quickly every time because as soon as it was put into water it would start sinking, nose-first. Roger’s Up From The Depths (1979), directed by Charles Griffith, will be mentioned here simply because if you do stumble across it the monster in question is particularly terrible, being little more than a large rubber head with chompy teeth that according to Joe Dante was apparently too heavy to float. This includes Antonio Marghereti’s Killerfish (with Lee Majors), and the recent and utterly dreadful Piranha 3DD. Without a doubt the best of these was Joe Dante’s Piranha (1978), in which lower budget fish menaced much lower budget stars in an enjoyable well-written (by John Sayles) romp that generated sequels and remakes and rip offs of its own. Although that didn’t stop him from weighing in quickly with some aquatic-themed rip offs of his own. In the rather good documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed, Roger Corman admits that when he saw Jaws he realised that Spielberg had made a Corman-type picture better than he ever could have. Making vast amounts of money does not go unnoticed in movie-land, and Jaws was responsible for launching something other than the subsequent stellar career of its director – namely the crap shark rip-off film. You know the films I mean – there’s the one where the shark eats the electric cable (Jaws 2), the one with the shark in the water park in 3D (Jaws 3D) and the one where the shark fights Michael Caine (Jaws 4: The Revenge, although even enthusiasts may have chosen to give this one a miss). Jaws was such a success that it generated a whole franchise of sequels – films familiar to all those of us who, at one time or another, have found ourselves in front of the television happy to watch any old disaster movie featuring large angry living things. ![]() It’s a film that pretty much set its director on the road to fame and fortune while at the same time making a huge amount of money for Universal. ![]() This June sees the re-release, in selected cinemas across the UK, of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975).
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