Cruel Jaws

Cruel Jaws is set in Hampton Bay, a coastal resort town whose summer season is thrown into crisis when bathers are found dead in the water, their bodies badly mutilated. The attacks are blamed on a tiger shark, and the killings threaten the tourist trade that local business owners depend on. A wealthy landowner, Samuel Lewis, who wants to force aquarium owner Dag Soerensen off his property to make way for a hotel complex, organizes a hunt for the animal and offers the oceanographer a large sum for its jaws. The town's sailing regatta goes ahead despite the danger, and the people of Hampton Bay end up taking to the sea to deal with the creature themselves.

The film was directed by Bruno Mattei, working from a screenplay he wrote with Robert Feen and Linda Morrison, and produced by John Kent. It is the ninth of the eleven features listed in his directing filmography, arriving between Shocking Dark in 1989 and Fuga Orientale in 2005. David Luther plays Francis Berger, with George Barnes Jr. as Samuel Lewis, Scott Silveria and Kirsten Urso as Bob and Susy Soerensen, Richard Dew as Dag Soerensen and Sky Palma as Glenda. Twenty-six cast members and seventy-three crew are credited.

Made as an Italian-American co-production between Production Group and Europe Communications S.r.l., the film runs 94 minutes and mixes action and adventure with comedy, horror and thriller elements. Its reception has been poor: on IMDb it holds a rating of 3.5 out of 10 from around 2,100 votes, and on TMDB it sits at 4.3 out of 10 from roughly a hundred votes, scores that place it well below the average for the genre.