There’s nothin’ but bad guys in this sweaty little seaside thriller, but the real villains here are the producers. Let us count the ways of how jerked-off these people were:
1) They wrenched the film out of the hands of a great director (Sam Fuller) and took a hatchet to it in the editing room.
2) When Fuller saw what a mess had been made of the movie, he demanded to have his name removed from the credits. The producers ignored him.
3) After a stunt man died on the set, the producers actually used that fact to promote the movie (“A Realistic Film Became Too Real!”, shouts one of the posters).
What you’ve got here is a total sleaze-o-rama, if only for the story behind the scenes. Sam Fuller is a director who’s uniquely comfortable with creeps. If the producers hoped to make these characters more likable, they didn’t succeed. Even a primally handsome young Burt Reynolds has a cold void beneath his simmer. He’s a hard-luck gun smuggler who gets himself stranded in the Sudan. He hooks up with a dysfunctional couple who have their own shady business going on and, from there, these three snakes proceed to eat each other.
Its a talky trip overall, but it builds up to a great, black-hearted ending that finally shuts up some of the characters who most need it.
As for sharks, there are a few, dragged out when the plot needs them, but this is no precursor to Jaws.