Here’s a question that even the most argumentative film-nerds would barely bother to debate: What’s the greatest shark movie of all time?

The obvious answer, of course, is Jaws, Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster about a working-class cop (Roy Scheider), a rich nerd (Richard Dreyfuss), and a perma-soused lunatic (Robert Shaw) who board a dilapidated boat and head out to kill a large fish by … I dunno, poking it to death, maybe? (*Jaws *is my favorite movie, and I’ve likely seen it more times than I’ve seen the actual ocean, but I’m still not sure those three guys had a well-thought-out plan for offing that thing). For more than 40 years now, *Jaws *has stood as the standard-bearer of shark movies, an honor that remains unchallenged by neither the film’s three sequels, nor by the numerous knock-offs it inspired, like the Italian-produced non-classic The Last Shark. When Blake Lively’s shark-pursuit drama *The Shallows *opens today, pretty much every review will inevitably invoke Jaws, for better or worse.

But that's an unfair comparison—in many ways, *Jaws *isn’t really a shark movie at all. Yes, it's about a shark that is very, very good at being a shark, and it has one of the most hoot-inducing fish-bites-flesh scene of all time, when the creature drags Shaw into the sea, savoring each bite as though it were chomping on a chum-soaked stogie. But there are long stretches in Jaws in which the titular hunter disappears, and the movie transforms into a sharp examination of the petty, sometimes predatory behavior of the people on land: The way they favor their own bottom lines over the lives of their neighbors; the way they try to out-alpha-male each other; the way they allow their class differences to bubble to the surface. *Jaws *is actually one of the greatest human movies of all time, and to simply think of it as a shark-flick—even the best shark-flick ever—feels reductive. It belongs in its own category altogether.

So if you take *Jaws *out of the running for best-shark movie, what’s left? There’s 2003’s Open Water, a genuinely dread-inducing lost-at-sea flick that doesn’t have quite enough shark-shocks to qualify. Then there’s the glut of campy B-movies like the *Sharknado *films, which are full of mayhem, but are hard to take seriously for more than 10 minutes.

Which brings us to The Shallows, the story of a young, wanderlusting surfer (Lively) who's being stalked by a massive Great White. For the most part, it's a gnarly, sharply effective terror-thriller that combines gorgeous camerawork with grind-house momentum—though in order to fully enjoy it, you'll have to get past a lackluster opening section full of surfing footage and c'mon-who-cares exposition, and you'll have to make peace with director Jaume Collet-Serra's shameless boob close-ups and underwater skin-shots (this is a movie that combines the male gaze with the whale gaze). But when Lively is finally stuck on the rocks, being forced to make one ingeniously improvised escape after the next, *The Shallows *becomes satisfyingly tense and adrenalized, especially in the borderline-cuckoo third act. It's a really, really good shark movie. Almost a great one!

But as deeply satisfying as *The Shallows *might be, it's still not the greatest non-Jaws shark movie of all time. That title belongs to Deep Blue Sea, director Renny Harlin’s 1999 sci-fi/action/horror combo about an underwater research lab whose residents become hunted by a trio of genetically modified super-sharks. It’s part haunted-house tale, part undersea-slasher flick, and part big-ensemble disaster movie, full of high-velocity attacks and ceaseless, remorseless sharks. It doesn't have the pop gravitas of Jaws, but it does have some archetypal, yet nicely rounded-out, human characters; moments of knowing comedy; and some genuinely inventive action sequences, including one of the greatest surprise deaths in modern-movie history.

Upon its release,* Deep Blue Sea—*which is streaming on HBO Go, BTW—was greeted by so-so reviews and treated to a respectable box-office run; mostly, it was seen as little more than a fun summer-afternoon surprise. Now, almost twenty years later, it’s clear that Harlin’s daffy, way-better-than-it-needs-to-be tale deserves a place at the top of the shark-flick food-chain. But it’s also sadly evident that *Deep Blue Sea *was among the last of its kind: An R-rated B-movie, full of gore and chaos and smart-stupidness, but with a big-budget, big-cast sheen. It’s the sort of film that studios once pumped out regularly, but that, in recent years, has all but disappeared into the drink.

If you know anything about Deep Blue Sea, you probably know that scene—the one in which a shady bajillionaire, played by Samuel L. Jackson, gives an angry pep-talk next to an indoor tidal pool, in order to let everyone know he’s in charge. By 1999, Jackson was an Oscar-nominated super-star, and certainly the highest-profile member of the cast, which also included Thomas Jane as a loner shark-wrangler; L.L. Cool J as a bible-quoting chef; and Saffron Burrows as a mad scientist hoping to cure Alzheimer's by using the powers of the shark-brain (which she would do by … I dunno, poking it to death, maybe?). Jackson’s speech, which takes place about halfway through the movie, is shot, performed, and edited to feel deeply heroic—it's the moment where he'll rile up the troops and send them into battle against the sharks. Instead, at the midpoint of his yakking, this happens:

Warner Bros. Pictures

It’s a truly jolting moment, maybe the best unexpected-expiration since Drew Barrymore’s demise in Scream, or Angie Dickinson’s death in Dressed to Kill. At the *Deep Blue Sea *press screening in New York City in 1999, Jackson’s death was so utterly shocking, it prompted audience members to gasp and scream for what felt like minutes, before finally staring at each other with a confused look that said, Have you seen my shit anywhere? Because I totally just lost it. (I can only imagine Jackson, who was in the audience that night, high-fiving his Kangol cap in delight.)

But what makes *Deep Blue Sea *so much fun is what happens *after *Jackson gets grabbed by the giant mako, slammed to the floor, and dragged into the sea. First, the tiny pool bubbles up with blood; then, we see the shark pulling Jackson’s still-kicking body down to the ocean floor, only to be joined by another mako, who then proceeds to bite off Jackson’s head.

*Deep Blue Sea *is full of these cartoonish, yet controlled outbursts of gooey, giddy violence, which it inflicts upon its very likeable cast: Michael Rapaport gets rammed into a control panel before being split in half. Stellan Skarsgård gets his arm ripped off, and is later scooped up into a shark’s mouth and thrown into a giant underground window. A shark eats L.L. Cool J’s bird ("You ate my bird!" —L.L. Cool J). If *Jaws *honed in on the terror-stoking, bond-building moments that occur *between *the inevitable violence, *Sea *instead tries to replicate the economic approach of its big-finned villains: Keep moving, and keep feeding. Good shark movies need good, sharky deaths, and *Deep Blue Sea *has a bunch.

Still, if all you wanted just a few grisly on-screen deaths, you could always watch, say Jaws: The Revenge, a very fun-bad movie with one childhood-ruining attack scene. What sets *Deep Blue Sea *apart from other animal-attack movies is the way it mixes high-end production values with pulpy, lowbrow thrills. Warner Bros. spent a reported $60 million on the film, which is a decent figure back in the late '90s, but an all but unheard-of amount of money when it comes to today’s studio genre movies, which are often churned out as either micro-budgeted supernatural flicks, or $200 million-plus sci-fi spectacles, with little room for anything in between (The Shallows, for what it's worth, is rumored to have cost just under $20 million).

Which is a shame, because, for a while there in the '90s, we had a nice run of ambitious, and ever-so-slightly askew action and sci-fi films, all made with the sort of budgets that were big enough to afford spiffy production values and massive stars, but that were just small enough to allow filmmakers to away with all kinds of happy on-screen nonsense. Harlin’s *Cliffhanger *and *Die Hard 2: Die Harder *were byproducts of this era, as were slightly outrageous entries from the likes of Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall, Starship Troopers), Roland Emmerich (Stargate), and Luc Besson (The Fifth Element).

These were loud, singular, occasionally taste-free affairs—made, for the most part, without the sort of slavish devotion to fan-demands or IP constraints that so many of today's blockbusters must now satisfy. And they're each a little nutso in their own way: Think of Arnold Schwarzenegger extracting a tracking device from his nose in Total Recall, or Chris Tucker preening around*The Fifth Element. *That's the kind of low-key, let's-screw-with-the-suits weirdness that directors could get away with back then—maybe because they were insulated by having powerful stars, or maybe because no one was paying attention. But nowadays, a studio exec would hone in on those more idiosyncratic moments, picking them from the script before it even got to a second draft.

Thankfully, *Deep Blue Sea *was made just long enough ago to retain some of that satisfying strangeness. You can see it when the movie's biggest star gets unexpectedly chopped and skewered, or when L.L. Cool J rides atop one of the sharks, stabbing it in the eye with a cross. As far as shark movies go, it's everything you'd want: Swift, tense, and chummed with enjoyably empty-headed dialogue ("You ate my bird!" —L.L. Cool J). It's no Jaws, though it also never makes you think of Jaws—high praise for a movie within a micro-genre that, for decades, has been dominated by one apex predator.

But it's also the kind of killer-B that we need more of, especially in a summer like this, where every blockbuster sequel requires an explainer video and a Midtown Comics expense account, just so you can keep up with the action. And if the studios won't make pure pleasure-machine fright-flicks like *Deep Blue Sea *anymore, maybe we'll have to find a shady bajillionaire, bunker him or or her down in an underwater lab with a bunch of scientists, and try to reverse-engineer our own. What could possibly go wrong?