Any day we can find an excuse to talk about sharks is an awesome day, better still if low-budget movie special effects are involved. Before we explain the context for this amazing video, we’d like you to just watch it without the context. HYST described it as “the Bollywood version of Jaws” and “the most insane 1:41 minutes of footage ever.” Here is this masterpiece. Feel free to skip the rest of the post if you want it to remain a mysterious gem of unexplained internet ephemera.
The mystery of this film ending got to us. We had to know the source. We’ve tracked it down.
The clip is the ending to Bollywood’s Aatank, which was filmed in the ’80s but wasn’t released until 1996, when three of the actors had already passed away (not from shark attacks). The movie was critically panned, in part because it took several cues from the awful Jaws 3. If you’re going to copy a Jaws movie, don’t pick Jaws 3, with its shark that screams and hunts down specific humans to taunt them.
Aatank stars Dharmendra as Jesu, an orphan who starts a fishing business with his friend Peter (Vinod Mehra) in a mafia-ridden village. They discover black pearls, which prompts the local gangsters to send divers out seeking more pearls. This, somehow, attracts a cardboard shark who proceeds to eat Peter’s wife Suzy (Nafisa Ali). Later, the same shark hunts down Peter as well, eating him as Jesu watches. Then the shark eats somebody else in front of Jesu (I’m beginning to think the shark doesn’t like this dude). The guy slitting the shark open in the video above is either Jesu or I am incredibly racist.
Here are three more clips from the film, but none of them could top that first triumphant, out-of-context gem above.