cult film freak: TREAT WILLIAMS IN THE ITALIAN IMPORT 'NIGHT OF THE SHARKS'

Treat Williams and Janet Agren in NIGHT OF THE SHARKS Year: 1988 Rating: ***

Extremely low-budget imported Italian exploitation involving one of the most familiar potboiler plot-lines: a careless, flaky sibling (in this case younger brother) and their inevitable, semi-deserved death from being involved with the seedy crime world to begin with — thus dragging their family into a proverbial whirlwind...

Herein a vengeful, tropical-shark-hunting older bro Treat Williams (with sidekick Antonio Fargas, priest Christopher Connelly and love-interest Janet Agren), whose balmy turf is encroached by killers... either the dorsal-finned kind (the deadliest shark actually plays intentionally goading mind-games) or those wearing cheap hoodlum suits... providing danger from the blood-soaked ocean into a machine-gunned jungle...

Treat Williams credited for NIGHT OF THE SHARK

Throwback to the prior decade's indie programmers combined with what was then technologically modern: the blackmailing brother had damning evidence not on the usual spy-genre microfilm, but something called a CD...

Making NIGHT OF THE SHARKS a deliberately progressed old school thriller beyond what the adventurous title randomly attempts... albeit usually during daylight... and with a synthesizer score by iconic Italian composer Stelvio Cipriani under a similar MIAMI VICE-influence of director Tonino Ricci, NIGHT OF THE SHARKS aka LA NOTTE DEGIL SQUALI (whether on land or sea or foam) is decent-enough ninety-minute time-filler.