This is one surefire case where the unavailability of a film (even if I did catch it, on local TV of all places, in the mid-1980s) turns it into a cult which is ultimately undeserving! Incidentally, I know first-hand about its 'banning' from the U.S. following a lawsuit by Universal for plagiarizing the first two entries in the JAWS series – having heard director Castellari boasting about the fact (even going so far as to contend that the real reason behind the film being pulled from theaters was that its profit ratio exceeded that originally made by Universal) at a press conference during the 2004 Venice Film Festival! <br /><br />If anything, Castellari's career has shown him to be a shrewd if erratic film-maker who was not only generally content to go with the flow rather than make his own thing so to speak but, on a number of occasions, he cannibalized elements which had been successful in previous films by shamelessly including them in his own (notably Woody Strode's bow-and-arrow expert from THE PROFESSIONALS [1966] being incorporated into Castellari's admittedly impressive KEOMA [1976]). Interestingly, he even saw fit to steal from himself – since JONATHAN OF THE BEARS (1993) bears {sic} more than a cursory nod to the latter; another thing he was prone to doing was reviving popular mythical figures, such as the disastrous SINBAD OF THE SEVEN SEAS (1989) and the TV mini-series THE RETURN OF SANDOKAN (1996; which I recently acquired but have yet to check out) – though, in all fairness, he did muster a fairly successful re-imagining of Homer's "The Illiad" in gangland terms with the little-known spoof HECTOR THE MIGHTY (1971).<br /><br />However, there's little to say about the crass commercial thinking that went into the making of THE LAST SHARK (by the way, Castellari had already made the even sillier THE SHARK HUNTER [1979]); the greatest insult, though, is that the film-makers couldn't hope to raise the budget (most likely, they didn't even have the inclination!) to attempt a product on the same level as JAWS 2 (1978), let alone the classic original – which is why the thing smacks of blatant rip-off, pure and simple!! Given a lean 88-minute running-time, it's no surprise the plot is so thin and obvious (virtually recreating all the highlights from the first two Universal shark flicks – however, while characterization was a strong element, in JAWS at least, the scriptwriters here lazily resort to mere stereotypes). Worse, the film repeats a good many of its incidents and effects twice or more: the idiotic 'explosion' when the shark attacks from below; the heroine – played by the director's own lovely daughter – falling into the sea, where she's not so lucky the second time around; the dives by would-be expert shark-fighter Vic Morrow – complete with heavy Irish brogue a' la Robert Shaw's Quint from the first JAWS – to destroy the creature both fail miserably, the second time getting tangled up in ropes and being dragged Ahab-like by the shark; characters get bitten in half…to say nothing of the ultra-fake blue-eyed[!] shark's head emerging open-mouthed out of the water and always hilariously tilted at the same angle. What about the sheer excess of stock footage, then (with the shark changing dimension and look from one scene to the next)?; some of these were genuinely unsettling, to be sure – but, while this practice may be forgiven when viewed in excessively dark prints (as some online reviewers have complained), it wasn't in the surprisingly clean edition that I came across only recently… <br /><br />James Franciscus has the lead role here; for the record, he had played a villain in another Italian JAWS rip-off – or, more specifically, PIRANHA (1978) – i.e. Antonio Margheriti's KILLER FISH (1979; which is one I'd also love to get a second opinion of after all these years). Another standard character is the oily aspiring Governor who, all of a sudden, decides to hunt the monster by himself in his helicopter in what emerges as the film's undeniable highlight of absurdity – he throws huge chunks of meat into the sea to entice it, but we're never sure just what he'll do once the shark turns up (needless to say, we're not allowed to find out as both the man and his vehicle tumble to the sea before long). Also on hand are a TV crew who are always trying to get the best shot of the shark…until the latter personally intervenes to this end and brings down the whole pier into the sea! Mind you, the film is hugely enjoyable while it's on (albeit unintentionally so for the most part) – right down from the very opening scene, accompanied by the cheesiest song imaginable, of a surfer trying out some impossibly intricate moves until the shark takes a bite out of his board.<br /><br />It's ironic, then, that this movie was itself ripped off by the makers of both JAWS 3-D (1983) and JAWS: THE REVENGE (1987), the vastly inferior concluding episodes in the Universal saga: as in the latter, the shark is depicted as an intelligent animal (such as when it systematically pursues the entire line-up of surfers without killing them only to then vent its anger on the man leading them in a boat and, again, when it tries to bury our two heroes inside a cave by crashing repeatedly into a rock-face and barring its exit with the falling stones!)…while the explosive ending was replicated wholesale into the official third JAWS entry (THE LAST SHARK was actually released as part of the series in Spain!). At this point, I should mention that the scenes at sea were partly filmed in Malta; normally, I ought to be proud of that fact – but I guess that only a country with no cinema industry of its own could be duped into believing that this is how a professional monster flick is made!!