Severin Plots ‘Cruel Jaws’ Novelization — Add Some Genetically Modified Italian Sharks To Your Reading List
by David Lewis
Remember movie novelizations? I ‘memba! And Severin Films remembers.
Movie novelizations were all the rage back in the 1980s and ’90s, when pretty much any would-be blockbuster that wasn’t already based on a book would get a quick adaptation into paperback form. It was a fun way to re-visit a film while you waited months for it to make the transition from theaters to home video.
Leave it Severin — the perverse purveyors of cult classics, exploitation flicks, and other genre oddities — to revive the practice with a twist.
The studio has announced a partnership with publisher Encyclopocalypse Publications to create original novels, movie novelizations, and resurrect out-of-print horror paperbacks. The partnership’s first release will be Cruel Jaws: The Novelization by author Brad Carter.
Cruel Jaws is a 1995 Italian sharksploitation epic from director Bruno Mattei that freely borrows characters, plot and actual footage from Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws and its sequels, as well as several existing Italian shark-related films. In Carter’s novelization, a rogue shark expert and a member of local law enforcement confront a genetically modified beast before it strikes and turns a packed beach into a bloody massacre. It’ll be interesting to see just how Carter handles “borrowed” plot elements in the written form.
Cruel Jaws: The Novelization will be available in both mass market and trade editions, both priced at $16.99, at your local bookstore as well as encyclopocalypse.com. Both versions sport brand new cover art, photos from the film, and a foreword by Stephen Scarlata, director of Sharksploitation: The Documentary.
“We’re beyond thrilled to partner with Severin. Their passion for creating, rescuing and releasing cinematic treasures is evident in every frame of their work,” Encyclopocalypse president Mark Alan Miller said in a statement. “Brad Carter’s adaptation of Bruno Mattei’s sharksploitation classic is a brilliant, fully realized love letter and we’re excited to bring these books to both Severin’s die-hard fan base and genre lovers everywhere.”
“We are entering a new golden age of movie novelizations, with Encyclopocalypse Publications leading the charge,” added Severin Films co-founder/president David Gregory, “and Brad Carter, whose outstanding Severin novelizations also include Mardi Gras Massacre and Night of the Demon, as one of the genre’s very best scribes. We look forward to what this new partnership brings to the world of literature.”
