cult film freak: DIRECTOR TONINO RICCI'S 'CAVE OF THE SHARKS' WITH JANET AGREN

Title: CAVE OF THE SHARK Year: 1978 Rating: ***1/2

Italian director Tonino Ricci's CAVE OF THE SHARKS seems like a JAWS-clone by the title, but most of the sharks here can't move, hypnotically inactive on the sea floor as Stelvio Cipriani's eerie music almost hits its haunting peak...

Only getting weirder in a scene where a group of suddenly possessed young boaters passively jump into the ocean along with a floating, blood-vomiting doll, making SHARKS more a freakish underwater hybrid of THE DEEP, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and THE EXORCIST...

Andrés García and Janet Agren in CAVE OF THE SHARK

And it's also a treasure-seeking crime thriller, occurring mostly above water where imported American veteran Arthur Kennedy viciously seeks a lucrative black box from an airplane that crashed since, after all, the original titled BERMUDE: LA FOSSA MELEDETTA (THE CURSED PIT) involves the infamously enigmatic Bermuda Triangle...

Where Spanish actor Andrés García, starring in this Mexican-shot Italian-backed production, had originally vanished and then reappeared, reunited with the director's future NIGHT OF THE SHARKS ingenue Janet Agren, busy in a rather complicated cuckolding romance — so when those killer fish wake up and finally become deadly, there's only ten minutes left in an oceanic fantasy with just about every offbeat exploitation genre covered, and then some.