Killer Codfish! Looking Back at Brazil 1970s JAWS Spoof, Bacalhau
By now I’ve written extensively about my passion for JAWS over the years and - perhaps almost as equally - my enthusiasm for the many copycats, rip-offs, and spoofs that the 1975 summer blockbuster has inspired over the last 50 years. As a young fan and collector I would seek these films out, from the well known “cult classics” like GRIZZLY, ORCA, and PIRANHA, to the lesser known oddities like SHARK KILL, UP FROM THE DEPTHS, DEVIL FISH, and so on. The litany of eco-horror films that JAWS spawned was not contained to the USA. This was a global phenomenon that motivated filmmakers from Italy, Mexico, and many other countries. India had its Bollywood-themed take with the 1996 film, AATANK, and Turkey attempted to inject some JAWS flavor into their otherwise-not JAWS-y 1983 crime/thriller, Çöl, nowadays affectionately referred to as “Turkish JAWS.” But for all of these rip-offs and copycats that we fans love, hate, and love to hate, the slightly more esoteric subgenre of JAWS spoofs is something that has generated less attention through the decades.
Spoofs of JAWS are interesting to me because they represent an opportunity for filmmakers to let it all fly. It’s no holds barred filmmaking. As satire, filmmakers enjoy a freedom that a straight horror picture looking to cash in on the JAWS formula might otherwise not. And over the years as my collecting of and research into these types of films has expanded, I’ve discovered some silly and downright enjoyable examples of Spielberg spoofery. In 1989, beloved schlocksters, Troma, envisioned JAWS’ Bruce the shark as a man-eating lawnmower terrorizing country club golfers in, BLADES. See this author’s 2016 retrospective article about BLADES here.
A decade later indie filmmaker, Michael Pleckaitis, gave the world not one but two killer tree films - aptly titled TREES and TREES 2: THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL - where JAWS is parodied almost scene for scene. There were also quirky regional efforts boasting micro (or no) budgets, as in the case of LOBSTEROIDS, the 1989 Maine comedy about steroids, rock & roll music and - you guessed it - giant man-eating lobsters that are terrorizing local Mainers. In fact, one of the earliest JAWS spoofs came just in 1976 with the fairly well produced porno called, GUMS. No doubt that the filmmakers behind these and other satirical jabs at JAWS had both imagination and a rich sense of humor.
Over the years I’ve often wondered: what is it about JAWS that lends itself to be so easily spoofed? Is it the memorable lines, like, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat”? Or maybe the beautifully written characters like Quint, the salty fisherman, and the hydrophobic Chief Brody? Or could it be the simple yet deeply human and relatable story of dissimilar people facing extraordinary odds and coming together to defeat a formidable obstacle? I guess maybe it’s all three of these things - the core elements of JAWS that have made it so timeless. For my money, these many spoofs serve as a celebration of JAWS, an opportunity for filmmakers to express to the world that maybe the film left an important impression on them and now it’s time to give something back. If we’re being honest with ourselves, these spoofs also likely represent an opportunity for filmmakers and production companies to make a quick buck on the coattails of a globally beloved film. Regardless of the real motivation behind these spoofs of JAWS, they represent to me a strange and sometimes forgotten underbelly of film that’s worth taking a peek at especially as we creep towards the golden jubilee of JAWS in June 2025.
But of all the spoofs out there, there’s one in particular that has piqued my interest over the years. It also happens to be another of the earliest examples to hit the big screen: Brazil’s 1976 feature film, BACALHAU. Directed by Adriano Stuart with original score by Beto Strada, Bacalhau (or “Codfish” in English) tells the all-too-familiar story of an aquatic leviathan wreaking havoc on small town, coastal life.This time, a giant codfish from Guinea has suddenly appeared and has begun threatening to spoil the fishing season for the residents of São Paulo. As one might expect, local authorities attempt to address the problem by calling in the police chief, a Portuguese oceanographer (à la Matt Hooper) and a grizzled fisherman with the hope that they might catch and kill the beast. The film itself is rather silly and sometimes difficult for me to completely follow. Admittedly, I think this is for mainly two reasons: 1) the only copies I’ve found are in Portuguese with no English dubbing or subtitling, and 2) some of the gestural comedy and slapstick bits appeared to be hyper regionalized to Brazilian humor; if you know, you know.
Despite some of the disconnect I felt as an American, non-Portuguese speaking viewer, it was still clear from the onset that this Brazilian retelling of JAWS was meant to tantalize and even surprise viewers. There are plenty of risque and sexual undercurrents sprinkled throughout the story along with plenty of slapstick gags. As the Fort Worth Telegram stated in a June 1976 article about BACALHAU, “The Latin American ‘monster’ has a marked preference for female victims - especially those wearing revealing ‘tanga’ string bathing suits.” (The one sheet poster supports this claim). And despite the fiberglass codfish looking as hokey as anything out of Ed Wood’s PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, Bacalhau still boatsed a surprising budget of $100,000 - sizable for a Brazilian production from this era. In that same Fort Worth Telegram article, Director, Adriano Stuart, addressed one of the difficulties in bringing his codfish beast to the big screen, namely, finding a person to operate it underwater. “No one would take the job,” Stuart said, “because there wasn’t any air in there.” Of all the well-documented problems that the JAWS production experienced on Martha’s Vineyard in 1974, I don’t think finding a brave soul to crawl inside Bruce the shark was one of them.
BACALHAU has become that oddball film that has remained wedged deep in the recesses of my cult filmic brain. We have an original poster from Spain framed and hanging in our home and, with the invaluable help of a collector friend, Chad Michael Viera, I’ve tracked down an authentic Brazilian VHS release of the film. I was even fortunate enough to win a weeks-long back and forth haggling struggle with a Spanish music collector to score an original vinyl release of the OST - a recording that I would soon learn not even Beto Strada has a copy of. As I began uncovering these rare and unusual gems of killer Codfish cinematic lore, I thought the time was right to do some digging to see what I can learn about the film and those who brought it to life. Recently, in the spring of 2024, I spoke with Beto Strada and asked him - thanks to the help of translator and Brazilian film director & writer, Dante Vescio - some questions about the film and his life in the music industry in Brazil. Perhaps not surprisingly, the conversation was both interesting and funny, and it’s my pleasure to bring a condensed version of it to THE DAILY JAWS readership.
John Campopiano: Hello Beto! Thank you for agreeing to do this interview. First, can you talk about your start in music and composing for film?
Beto Strada: I studied the violin for 12 years and was always deeply interested in film music. When I was young, the number one song in the charts was Girl From Ipanema, by my idol and friend, who I was fortunate enough to meet, Tom Jobim. I was always a passionate fan of film music. I studied under maestro Guerra-Peixe, widely considered one of Brazil’s greatest musical geniuses. I also studied under maestro Alexandre Gnatalli, brother of Radamés Gnatalli, whose work is deeply ingrained in Brazilian music history and some of the greatest guys in contemporary Brazilian music.
I eventually got into film scoring and scored 42 feature length films in total. In 1976, I was given a Best Film Score award by a very prestigious art critics association called Paulista Association of Art Critics for the score I did for the film, EXCITATION aka Excitação. It’s a very interesting film. It’s an interesting suspense thriller directed by a Portuguese-Angolan director, Jean Garrett. This particular work is possibly one of my very best. You can watch it on YouTube. I was also one of José Mojica Marins’ favorite film composers. I scored one of his films and, in fact, his entire body of work was recently restored and released by the London-based company, Arrow.
JC: How did you initially become involved with BACALHAU?
BS: The film’s director, Adriano Stuart, was a special friend of mine and a great, award-winning Brazilian actor and an excellent screenwriter. He helped me a lot throughout my career and placed a lot of trust in me as a composer. I scored 15 feature films along with him and BACALHAU was one of them. I was 25 back then. Adriano was very cultured, and spoke many languages. He wrote lots of comedies and he used to base his writing on other big hits. For instance, he was a big Mel Brooks fan and Brooks dealt greatly in parodies. Adriano came from a circus background and his father was a comedian circus artist, as was his grandfather. He worked as a Director at Rede Globo, the largest TV and news company in Brazil. In fact, it still is the country’s biggest news conglomerate and is now known as TV Globo. Adriano really was an extremely funny person, and also very ironic. That irony of his got him into a lot of trouble.
JC: Can you elaborate? What do you mean by “trouble”?
BS: Adriano was a very learned individual, but he was a handful, a very hard person to deal and live with. He made a lot of enemies, got into a lot of trouble. He didn’t have a political sensibility. He never wanted to hear about politics, one could never discuss it with him. And in this business, you have to walk a tightrope as to not get into trouble. It’s a very narrow, compact industry. Adriano wanted nothing to do with it. He didn’t care either way. He died a very sad death, alone in his apartment. But I owe so much to him, for all the things he did for me and my film music career. I’m deeply indebted to him.
JC: Tell us about BACALHAU. What was the plot / story of the film?
BS: BACALHAU tells essentially the same story as JAWS. The same characters featured in Jaws also appear in Bacalhau: the police chief, the mayor, and the fisherman. The fisherman was played by one of the greatest actors in Brazilian cinema and theatre, Maurício do Valle.
JC: From what you know, what were Adriano’s motivations for making BACALHAU?
BS: As for the motivations behind making BACALHAU, they’re pretty straightforward: to make money off of the straight faced approach of Spielberg’s JAWS. BACALHAU is still remembered by a lot of people today in Brazil. There’s an unforgettable scene in BACALHAU: The codfish was made out of fiberglass, so it was something crude, but it served its purpose. In this scene, the theatre venues always erupted with laughter. It was an underwater shot, in a famous beach town in the state of São Paulo called Ilhabela. The underwater camera operator was at the bottom of the sea and a diver pushed the cod past the camera, which was aimed upwards. So when the cod went past the camera, everyone could see that, in its caudal fin, there was a writing that said “Made In Ribeirão Preto.” Ribeirão Preto is a progressive town in the state of São Paulo and that’s where the fiberglass codfish was built. It was all a big joke, really. But it was inevitable; every time this particular scene played, the theaters always burst into laughter. BACALHAU’s original screenplay draft was insanely funny, filled with references to JAWS, but all of them written in a very tongue-in-cheek way. Analogies were made, like “this is a Brazilian film, this is not a Spielberg movie, this has another mood and another style, but in the end it’s all the same, so let’s just enjoy ourselves.”
JC: Had you already seen JAWS by the time you began working on BACALHAU?
BS: I did watch Jaws, of course! I was probably one of the very first to see it in theatres when it opened in Brazil. And I fell in love with John Williams’ creation, which is essentially a score built off of two notes: E and F. So we have an ostinato. And from this ostinato grows an enormous musical construction, filled with highly creative counterpoints. There are even moments in JAWS’ score that Williams takes a playful approach. When I teach film music in my workshops and seminars, John Williams is the one I talk about the most. I can’t think of anyone else that’s as wonderful, creative and genius as he is. So, I took this on (BACALHAU) knowing I needed to come up with something similar. Of course, John Williams had much better conditions to create his JAWS score than I did. I had 7 musicians in total working with me on this score. I spent countless nights composing it and coming up with the individual themes for the individual characters.
JC: What do you remember about the cast and crew of the film? Were these well known Brazilian filmmakers or new to the film scene?
BS: At the time, there used to be a big rendezvous spot in São Paulo for “Paulistano” filmmakers, called “Boca do Lixo”. (Paulistano is what we call someone who’s born in the city of São Paulo, like you’d call someone born in NY City a New Yorker.) Boca do Lixo is located in the downtown area of São Paulo, in a street called “Rua do Triunfo” or “Triumph Street.” This was a place where 150 feature films were being produced yearly. There you’d find actors and actresses, directors, costume designers, gaffers, script supervisors, camera assistants, everybody was there. So, directors and screenwriters would drop by, approach us and say “look, there’s this film that’s about to shoot, go talk to the producer if you’re interested, he’s right around the corner.” BACALHAU happened just like that. There was a producer around that was very interested in films, called Edgard Castro, and he had a production company Omega Filmes. I went and met with Edgard and he hired me on the spot.
JC: Your score for the film is very fun with lots of jazz and funk flavor. What was your creative approach to composing the music for BACALHAU? Were there any specific genres or styles you were aiming for?
BS: My score is… how can I say it… it’s a reflection of my own musicality. I studied the violin for 12 years, you could say I’m a violinist, but I haven’t played it in many, many years. I’m a composer more than anything else, and also an arranger. I apply many different styles of music to my work. There are many composers that have impacted me throughout the years, like Henry Mancini, Elmer Bernstein, Bernard Herrmann. Composers that I love deeply and have studied deeply as well. I think of them frequently - and I discuss their works in my music classes a lot, too.
JC: Can you talk about some of the other musicians you worked with on the recording of BACALHAU’s soundtrack?
BS: Regarding the musicians that worked with me, they were all professional musicians. But I must say that many of them have already passed away. Off to a new universe. Some of them are still alive and working. But I never really kept in touch with them, I’ve been away from the whole scene for a while and haven’t seen these guys in a long time. But most of them were from the TV Globo Orchestra, which featured 64 musicians. I worked a lot with some of them. There was one who was called Bidinho, and he played the trumpet, the flute and the saxophone wonderfully.
JC: Some consider BACALHAU to be considered a Brazilian Pornochanchada film, or, a sex comedy which was very popular in Brazil from the 1960s through the mid-1980s. What do you remember about this genre of film?
BS: There’s nothing “pornochanchada” about it. It’s a straight-up comedy spoof on Spielberg’s work. BACALHAU was at the top of the Brazilian box office for weeks and it’s widely considered a cult classic here in Brazil.By the way, the film’s producer, Edgard Castro, made a BetaCam copy of BACALHAU and mailed it to Spielberg who apparently had heard of our film. Spielberg sent a reply to Edgard telling him that, in his whole life, he’d never laughed so much and so joyously during a movie. He loved the playful take these Brazilian filmmakers had come up with based on JAWS.
JC: You told me that this work is important to you. Can you elaborate on why BACALHAU holds so much meaning for you?
BS: Well, its major significance lies in the fact that everybody loves this score. Everyone seems to like it a lot. Here in Brazil, the LP goes for an exorbitant amount of money. Those who own it always try to sell it for a small fortune. I myself, the actual composer, do not own a single copy. I only have the score in its separate theme wave tracks. But I don’t own the actual LP.
JC: What kinds of projects are you working on today?
BS: Nowadays I’m fully dedicated to teaching children in elementary school and in high school about the universe of sound in film. I talk to them about foley, the importance of room tone, dubbing, dialogue and, of course, music. This is my major role right now, teaching children, especially now that they hold in their hands a tool that’s capable of filming, editing and so on. I think of myself more as a music professor, who’s absolutely passionate about passing the things he’s learned on to others. I just had a wonderful experience teaching a class of students about the 4 elements that make up a film score. So, it’s my job to teach them about this beautiful universe, the universe of sound in films. But obviously, writing music for film is still a big passion.
Thank you for enjoying my work. As I’ve said to you before, John, I’m at your disposal if you ever need a composer or a maestro - even a long, long distance one. I’d love to work with you. I see that you’re a very creative producer and who knows, maybe we’ll be able to work on something. It’d be an honor to have you as my new director.
You can watch BACALHAU on YouTube below or on the Internet Archive HERE.
You can listen to Beto’s OST for BACALHAU on YouTube HERE.
Words, interview and images courtesy of John Campopiano, Archives Manager FRONTLINE PBS. You can follow John’s incredible work on Facebook and Instagram.
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