Despite having a great many faults, I hope one of them isn’t suffering from male pattern insecurity. Now that I’m deep in middle age, it is a bit too late to buy a sports car or start a dalliance with a much younger woman. I am doing the bare minimum to retain what remains of my much-thinned hair.
I think this is because I am embarrassed when I see such spectacles as a 73-year-old Jack Palance doing one-armed push-ups on stage when he accepted his 1992 Academy Award. Cornel Wilde does some of those, as well as some push-ups on only his fingertips, in 1975’s Sharks’ Treasure. He also is way too comfortable with his body, as it seems men who own boats tend to be. Often he is clad in nothing more than swim shorts which have less fabric to them than I believe anybody would care to see.
Similarly dressed while working on his boat are John Neilson, Yaphet Kotto and David Canary. They are searching for the rest of a treasure Neilson swears he can find, the location where he found a single ancient, gold Spanish coin which he presents to Wilde. The older man has his doubts at first, but then is convinced it was treasure from a particular expedition after he reads up about it at the library. The more you know! We hear what he is reading in his voiceover, and I so hoped somebody there would tell him to shush, that the voice in his head was too loud.
How Kotto comes to be on the expedition is odd. Wilde and Neilson just happened to be in his store and buying supplies for the expedition when the man outright begs to tag along. It is a strange to see the actor portray a character who is so pathetic. He will bring along fellow Vietnam vet Canary.
Wilde is an asshole to these two seemingly as soon as they’re offshore. His problem with Canary seems to be due to the man’s stammer. I’m not sure why that would alarm him, but Kotto is only able to alleviate his concerns by explaining the man had been broken by his time in a prisoner of war camp. As for Kotto, Wilde is always tearing into him, usually because the man is trying to sneak in a smoke, which Wilde won’t allow to be done on the deck even when he’s not on it.
Not that I disagree with his anti-smoking sentiment, but I suspect such draconian beliefs are those of the actor, as he is also the screenwriter and the director. He has similarly strongly-held convictions about drinking, though he does so in moderation. His lecture to Cliff Osmond about the time it takes the liver to process an ounce of alcohol inspires that man to chuck a half-filled bottle of booze into the ocean, prompting my wife and I to simultaneously say, “Yeah, right.”
Osmond is a super macho guy and leader of a group of escaped convicts who seize Wilde’s boat and take the crew hostage. Instead of just killing them outright, Osmond has them hunt for additional treasure, all of which he intends to keep for himself.
Well, he might be sharing some with David Gilliam, who is cast in the very memorable, yet deeply thankless, role of Osmond’s prison bitch. I was surprised homosexuality would be introduced in a picture of that type and era at all. I would say it is handled in the least tactful manner imaginable, except I don’t know who would conceive of a scene where Gilliam is humiliated into wearing a woman’s bikini in front of the collected group convicts and captives and then ordered to do a strip tease. What especially boggles my mind is why Wilde wrote this scene. I wonder if he had any issues to work out.
That is pretty weird fodder for a PG movie, but then, as one picture after another has demonstrated to me, that rating in the 70’s was a weird animal. There’s a pointless close-up of a crude illustration of a naked woman on beachside bar. Roxanna Bonilla works there, and we will later see some side-boob I wouldn’t have expected, at least enough that we see a nipple. That scene ends with Neilson’s bare ass as he runs away when he thinks her father is coming.
Oh, and there’s also a shit ton of real footage of sharks getting harpooned, which is what I found most offensive. I’m not even sure why our alleged heroes do this. I’m twice as confused by a scene where Wilde takes Neilson down in the shark cage for no apparent reason than for kicks. A shark breaks through one of the cage’s bars and comes close to getting to the tender morsels inside. Then another guy kills the shark, and I ended up feeling bad for it. I mean, these guys basically did nothing more than set a trap for it. Sharks gonna shark, after all.
To my considerable surprise, the underwater footage is largely stunning, though one becomes acclimated to it after a while and it becomes dull. That said, I don’t what two characters were doing when they seem to be water skiing underwater, as I have only previously seen that activity happen on the surface. Much of the film’s publicity was centered around the footage being entirely real, so as to contrast it with the special effects in Jaws, even though that film would not be released until three months later. It is shocking to consider what feels like a knock-off actually preceded the release of the picture it seems to imitate. There’s even one moment where a severed foot falls to the ocean floor and I was wondering if the filmmakers somehow knew that was going to be in a film not even in theaters yet.
It might seem odd to single out the score in a film such as this, but the music in some of those underwater sequences is appropriately dreamlike and abstract. Alas, most of the remainder of the soundtrack is probably needle-drops from library LP’s of “action” music; at least, it is generic enough they might as well be. Then there’s the stunningly awful “Money, Money”, which was written by Wilde under an alias. It is awful and inappropriate for the material in every regard, except the theme of greed can be applied to every character here. Still, I imagine anybody could do better lyrically than basically repeat the word “money” ad nauseum, with a different word only occasionally interspersed.
There was a different tune I thought of repeatedly while watching Sharks’ Treasure and that is the Itchy & Scratchy Theme Song from The Simpsons, which uses the word “fight” almost as much as the theme song here uses “money”. And that’s because the characters here do little more than bicker constantly, much of which is filmed in long, unbroken takes, curiously shot from a camera perched on a mast and pointing downwards at the deck. Wilde is the most contentious of the lot, and he has one line which is a combination of words I doubt have ever been formed before or after this film. Regarding the splitting of the treasure, he says, “What we split is shark shit.” I’m pretty sure the treasure they’re after isn’t shark excrement but, if it is, then this isn’t just a sad man who is angry, self-righteous and vain—he’s also deeply confused.
Dir (and script and theme songs lyrics written by) Cornel Wilde
Starring Cornel Wilde, Yaphet Kotto, John Neilson
Watched on Scorpion Releasing blu-ray