Decades before super-cheap filmmakers made a cottage industry out of mashing sharks up with everything from tornadoes to dinosaurs, director Lamberto Bava got there first with his ridiculous, lovably stupid sharktopus epic, Monster Shark, released in the U.S. in a horrifically mangled version as Devilfish. Penned by the very prolific Dardano Sacchetti (among others) and lifting elements from multiple Jaws films (yes, even Jaws 3-D), it was hardly the first Italian film to cash in on the shark craze (with the infamous Great White nearly deep sixing the trend entirely), but it just might be the most endearing one.

Off the coast of Florida, a rescue operation to retrieve a shattered boat turns out to be more grisly than anticipated when a body is pulled out of the waves -- with both its legs ripped clean off. Nearby, Seaquarium dolphin trainer and marine researcher Dr. Stella Dickens (Monnier) teams up with fellow scientist Peter (Sopkiw) to check out what seems to be a linked series of deaths in the area, while a military lab at the West Ocean Institute is doing some sneaky experiments with marine life tangled up with some sexual hanky panky involving project leader Professor West (Berger) and his unfaithful wife, Sonja (Lassander). Sabotage and murder are soon on the menu to keep the secret of what's terrorizing the waters, but that's just the beginning as it turns out that the monster responsible is a new kind of engineered creation that could pose a far more disastrous threat than anyone imagined. With the local sheriff (Garko, Sartana himself) trying to round up enough manpower to help out, Peter and Stella head out to the open seas for a battle that could claim their lives.

Monster Shark arrived at the height of Italy's love affair with shooting in Florida, which also encompassed a string of '80s Terence Hill and Bud Spencer films and other oddities like 1989's Nightmare Beach. In this case the lensing around the Florida Keys (with interiors shot in Italy, of course) gives it a somewhat different flavor, with Bava once again adapting his style to the demands of the location and genre as with the same year's shot-in-Georgia Blastfighter (also starring Sopkiw). As with that film, the pounding score is provided by none other than the great Fabio Frizzi (credited as "Antony Barrymore" for some reason) and Bava adopts for the second and final time the name "John Old Jr.," a nod to the famous pseudonym for dad Mario Bava. However, Bava the second pretty much dispenses with the stabs at visual style from his two previous horror films, Macabre and A Blade in the Dark, instead going for an anonymous, brightly lit approach that would make it difficult to pinpoint who was behind the camera. Of course, he would reverse that with a vengeance just after this with his two Demons films, inducing severe whiplash in fans of Italian horror who were trying to figure him out.

Barely released in U.S. theaters in 1986, Devilfish found most of its audience on VHS, via Vidmark and then Starmaker in America. The film was also given a drubbing on Mystery Science Theater 3000, which wasn't one of the better episodes and ended up on DVD in 2010. However, it does feature a funny gag involving an implied cameo by Sopkiw's nether regions (though the uncensored film itself reveals he's definitely sporting underwear). A very mediocre German DVD features a non-anamorphic transfer and looks pretty awful now, but in 2018, Code Red gave the film's vastly superior original cut a nice presentation with a Blu-ray featuring reversible cover options for the Devilfish and Monster Shark titles. Though this isn't the most vivid or sumptuous film around, the transfer looks great with the accurate 1.66:1 framing appearing correct and the blue ocean shots impressing quite a bit. The DTS-HD MA English track (the language in which the film was shot, though some actors were post dubbed) also sounds solid. The feature can be played with a brief video intro (1m54s) featuring Sopkiw and Code Red's Bill Olsen in his distinctive Banana Man guise chatting about some of the other actors in the film. Sopkiw and Olsen are also joined for a highly eccentric audio commentary with Damon Packard which covers the basics of Sopkiw's background, his rapport with Bava and Monnier, and the challenges of battling a rubber monster. There are some very long silent gaps and a few gaffes that probably should have been cut (especially when everyone can't remember the Mario Bava film turned into an L.A. opera -- it was Hercules in the Haunted World), but it's great to have Sopkiw's thoughts on the film preserved for posterity. A dupey trailer under the Australian title Devouring Waves is included along with bonus trailers for After the Fall of New York, Blastfighter, Seven Bloodstained Orchids, and The Violent Professionals.

In 2025, Severin revisited the film as a new special edition on Blu-ray (available separately or as part of a Freeding Frenzy: The Italian Sharksploitation Collection set with Night of the Sharks and The Shark Hunter) scanned from the negative again here and punched up a bit with some color correction to improve the white levels. This time you get both the English and dubbed Italian tracks (DTS-HD MA 2.0 mono, both fine) with optional SDH or translated English subtitles. In "Man vs. Devil Fish" (10m53s), Sopkiw looks back at the film, his own love of sailing and how it played a role in getting him arrested, his path from New York to Milan, getting signed to four films with Dania Film, and working alongside an international cast who all ended up getting dubbed later. Bava himself turns up in "They Call Him John Old Jr." (14m9s) covering his attraction to the fantastic and how he regards genre classifications, the multiple people involved in the treatment and screenplay (including a rejected one by Luigi Cozzi), the relatively easy process of shooting in America, and the reason you hardly see anything of the weird octopus-ish creature. The international trailer is also included as well as a 15-track soundtrack CD with Frizzi's entire score.

Severin Blu-ray

Code Red Blu-ray