At Least The House Was Terrific

Year: 1987

Director: Joseph Sargent

Cast: Lorraine Gary, Lance Guest, Mario Van Peebles 

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A scant four years after the previous entry, Jaws: The Revenge sank the floundering killer fish franchise for good. There’s been scarcely a blip on the radar since, even during the horror remake tsunami of the mid-2000’s. How could that be? How could one of the most iconic franchises in history, the franchise that more or less defined blockbuster cinema as we know it, be dead in the water just 12 years after it first dipped its toe in? Maybe the fourth and final film holds the key.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

So, who are we even dealing with here? Franchise stalwarts Sean and Michael Brody reappear, though none of the six actors who have played those roles over the years saw fit to return (Mitchell Anderson fills the role of the former, Halloween II’s Lance Guest the latter). Roy Scheider says “the Devil himself” couldn’t have convinced him to return as Chief Brody, so he cameos as a portrait hanging up in the police station (businesses in the movie universe love to overly honor old employees who shouldn’t really be that important to them). That leaves us with… Lorraine Gary?

That’s right, Jaws: The Revenge more or less centers upon Gary’s Mrs. Brody, hammily suffering a bout of grief after her son Sean is tragically felled by Amity Island’s third Great White shark attack since 1975. Rent must be really affordable there or something. She takes refuge on an island in the Bahamas while her son Michael – looking the sexiest he’s ever looked, and yes that matters a lot – works as a marine biologist. While Mrs. Brody attempts to cope by caring for her daughter-in-law Carla (Karen Young) and granddaughter Thea (Judith Barsi) and tentatively falling in love with the intrepid airplane pilot Hoagie (Michael Caine, who famously took the role so he could buy a house and has never seen the movie), she fears that her family may still be in danger.

Meanwhile, Michael and his sassy coworker Jake (Mario Van Peebles) discover that a Great White is lurking in the tropical waters, seemingly with an eye toward devouring the Brodys out of some sort of vaguely defined “revenge.” Jake wants to study the shark, and Michael agrees - while hiding the fact from his family - because he is a supernaturally stupid human being.

At least you’re pretty, Mike.

Jaws: The Revenge is the film out of the four that most resembles a stupid horror movie, and that’s actually a plus in my book. If the whole movie focused on Lorraine Gary sobbing behind a pair of elegant sunglasses and locking lips with a supremely disinterested Michael Caine, I would want to dump a bucket of chum over my head and hurl myself into the nearest ocean. But no, we gets lots of “sitting bolt upright in bed after a nightmare” sequences, jump scares involving eels, no fewer than two presumed dead characters miraculously appearing unharmed (at least, depending on which cut you’re watching), and a shark battling a plane. Jaws: The Revenge is totally cuckoo, and that’s its saving grace.

Because boy oh boy does it just not work as a movie. Michael Brody being a drooling idiot I can accept, because audiences have been watching that happen since 1978. But the rest of the plot relies on characters actively pushing against their survival instincts for absolutely no reason. Jake’s shark-studying mania rivals Mayor Vaughn’s for sheer gluttonous hubris, and Ellen Brody’s constant staring-off-into-space sessions are excellent for padding the film with flashbacks to earlier entries (all scenes where she patently was not present, mind you), but in no way reflect the actions of an actual human being.

And the effects! Every consecutive Jaws movie has had worse special effects than the previous entry, and they started off with a film whose effects were so dodgy that the behind-the-scenes struggles are household knowledge. It shouldn’t be that hard to top Jaws’ malfunctioning shark, but this entry’s Bruce the Fourth (which we see in exact, inch-by-inch detail far too often) looks like nothing more than a piece of carved foam which has clearly been dented by overuse floating listlessly through the water. 

Though I guess I shouldn’t expect much from a film that can’t even pull off a “missing arm” gag. When Sean Brody’s appendage is devoured, his left side turns into an art installation of layered rain slicker material that more resembles a papier-mâché flower than actual gore. Also the sky in this one scene is literally a wall that’s painted grey.

Star Wars this ain’t.

The shark attack sequences are also terrible, presenting muddled flashes of close-ups that completely lack any sort of style of coherent geography. Literally the only thing this film adds to the Jaws canon is these little splashes of water during the shark POV shots that bob up and down through the surf. Nevermind that the shark doesn’t swim with its eyes above the water, at least there’s a scrap of a sense that there’s a human being behind the camera.

So.. that’s that, I guess. Jaws: The Revenge is horribly conceived and executed in every possible way. Its thorough stupidity does lend it a kind of dopey charm that makes it completely bearable to sit through, but Lorraine Gary treats this like it’s Ellen Brody Gets Her Groove Back, and she couldn’t carry this pile of narrative rubble if she tried. Frankly, there’s no reason I can think of to watch any more after the original Jaws, and I’m not even especially keen on that one.

But then again… Jaws: The Revenge is technically a Christmas movie, so that’s fun (the opening shark attack takes place just before Christmas, and the Caribbean scenes take us through the local Boxing Day celebration of Junkanoo and the New Year. Also a side character’s birthday. Pretty much every holiday in the book gets name-checked at one point or another.). You can add that to your holiday season counterprogramming playlist right next to Die Hard and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. And I honestly wouldn’t mind watching this again. It’s horrendously insipid, but I’d sooner rewatch it than Jaws 2 or Jaws 3-D. Which is something, I guess.

TL;DR: Jaws: The Revenge is a goofy patch on the already faded Jaws franchise, but it's at least admirably dumb.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1080

Reviews In This Series
Jaws (Spielberg, 1975)
Jaws 2 (Szwarc, 1978)
Jaws 3-D (Alves, 1983)
Jaws: The Revenge (Sargent, 1987)

People 0

Year: 1983

Director: Joe Alves

Cast: Dennis Quaid, Bess Armstrong, Simon MacCorkindale

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

One of the most common jokes you’ll hear people make when they’re coming up with silly-sounding fake sequel titles is “[Insert Name Here] 2: Electric Boogaloo.” But the second most common joke is “Part 3: In 3-D!,” and that is at least forty percent the fault of Jaws 3-D, which arrived on the scene smack dab in between the releases of Friday the 13th Part 3D and Amityville 3-D. Two titles is a coincidence, but three is a trend, and thus the world will never forget it. That is the one and only way Jaws 3-D has contributed to world cinema.

You’re welcome.

The Brody family must have some issues with object permanence, because Jaws 3-D begins with an average day in the life of Michael Brody (Dennis Quaid), who has moved from Amity Island to the equally oceanbound Florida coast to serve as an engineer at SeaWorld (a real life theme park/aquatic gulag providing some of the most ill-advised product placement in human history).

Although his visiting brother Sean (John Putch, director of American Pie Presents: The Book of Love) still retains a healthy fear of the ocean after surviving two devastating Great White attacks, Michael seems to have forgotten that sharks ever existed, to the point that he shouts “What the hell is that?!” when he spots his newest fishy nemesis for the first time. Also, in the five years since Jaws 2, the Brody bros appear to have aged a decade and a half, so I guess this film takes place in the mid-90’s. Wazaaaap!

Anyway, to nobody’s surprise except Michael’s, a brand new Great White shark descends upon SeaWorld during the grand opening of its new underwater exhibit. It’s up to Michael, his marine biologist girlfriend Dr. Kay (Bess Armstrong), the park’s owner Calvin Bouchard (Louis Gossett Jr.) and random British photographer Phillip Fitzroyce (Simon MacCorkindale, and I don’t know which name is more hilarious), and SeaWorld dolphins Cindy and Sandy to stop it. The movie completely forgets Sean exists after a while. 

Just like his father.

So, a Jaws movie in 3-D. Sounds like an opportunity to really explore that vast undersea environment with newfound depth, right? …You know where I’m going with this. There isn’t an effect in the entire picture that’s not hot garbage, but the 3-D effects especially are hot garbage on a hot tin roof. Really, all it takes to be an amusing 3-D movie is to shove long stuff in the camera until your arms get tired. Friday the 13th did this just fine, commandeering laundry poles, eyeballs, yo-yo’s, and even a harpoon gun (in a gag that’s lifted verbatim by Jaws 3-D) to general delight.

Jaws 3-D doesn’t even seem entirely aware that it’s in 3-D. Sure, water splashes into the camera sometimes, and bloody bits of people and fish float into the middle distance for an uncomfortably long time, but the visual gags are few and far between. Around the end of the second act, the camera just sort of lazily drifts toward any object on set that happens to protrude a little bit. It’s uninteresting to such a degree, it feels almost maliciously intentional.

Somebody on this crew wants my eyes to suffer.

Then there’s the rest of the effects, which seem to go out of their way to be terrible. A submersible vehicle putters across the lagoon in a bad composite effect that would have looked embarrassing in a Star Trek episode, let alone the sequel to a Spielberg movie. Seriously, did this film not have the budget to fill a tank with water and stick a  yellow dinghy in it? This is a goddamn Universal Pictures production, for crying out loud! And if you have to cut a few water ski pyramids to give us good underwater action sequences, you freaking do it!

I can understand the terrible compositing of the shark scenes, because who wants to deal with an actual Great White, but the erratically sped-up stock footage turns it into a Speedy Gonzales cartoon with teeth. Hell, it’s less scary than your average Looney Tunes joint. And don’t get me started on the disastrous, dysfunctional animatronic that can’t even gnash its teeth properly, or those dead eyes that look like glued-on Rolos. The fact that the shark roars like a lion I can actually forgive, because at least it’s amusing in its maniacally piecemeal little way.

But seriously, all I ask of one of these movies is some fun shark kills, and Jaws 3-D doesn’t even come close to clearing that low, low bar.

That bar is so low, it’s in the Mariana Trench.

But a Jaws movie is more than its effects (at least a tiny bit), so let’s stop griping about them. And start griping about the dizzying inscrutable geography of every chase scene. Or the fact that the most visually arresting elements of the movie are the beefcake extras playing non-speaking employees.

There is a modicum of fun to be had here, especially in the warm, sometimes quite sexy relationship between Sean and entertainment staffer Kelly (Lea Thompson), but it’s not enough to keep the entire production afloat. The campiness of 80’s sequeldom keeps trying to creep in along the edges (actual line of dialogue: “He can take a flying leap in a rolling donut on a gravel driveway!”), but it doesn’t quite burst through until the very last scene, which features the hilariously batty and instantly iconic dolphin cheer freeze-frame.

It’s perhaps more genially dumb and thus amusing than the flat-out dull Jaws 2, but watching a crowd of Jurassic Park rejects being menaced by the stiff, unmoving mandibles of death isn’t my idea of a good time. When actual SeaWorld is more horrifying than your thriller film, something has gone terribly awry.

TL;DR: Jaws 3-D is stupid even by the standards of a Jaws sequel.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1000

Reviews In This Series

Jaws (Spielberg, 1975)

Jaws 2 (Szwarc, 1978)

Jaws 3 (Alves, 1983)

Jaws: The Revenge (Sargent, 1987)

Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back In The Theater

Year: 1978

Director: Jeannot Szwarc

Cast: Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Jaws was bigger than any movie that ever came before it. It splashed onto the cinema scene like a 400-pound Great White shark, and the only surprising thing about the fact that it got a sequel was that it took them three years to make it. One good thing about this is that it allowed Italy time to crank out Orca: the Killer Whale, in which a whale devours a Great White in a show of aquatic horror supremacy (more on that in a bit). The bad thing is, they don’t seem to have spent those three years developing a shark animatronic that would actually work properly.

Bruce Jr. is carrying on the family name of being a massive disappointment.

One thing Jaws 2 has going for it is the return of a lot of the core cast and locations from the original: We pick up off the coast of Amity Island, where two scuba divers are attacked by a Great White shark, which we know more because of the John Williams score than the actual special effects. Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) isn’t alarmed at first, but a sudden spike in disappearances and accidents (including a beached Orca with a huge chunk bitten out of it – zing!) leads him to believe that Amity is once again under siege by a giant shark. Lord knows how he got re-elected, but once again the Mayor (Murray Hamilton) intercedes with his attempts to shut down the beaches on the account of some visiting investors.

This is how Brody’s son Michael (Mark Gruner), now a sexy teen, ends up on an ill-fated sailing expedition with a gaggle of his sexy teen peers and his little brother Sean (Marc Gilpin), who appears to be the exact same age as he was three years ago, eve though Mike has apparently accelerated through puberty like a regular Jack. Time is weird.

Anyway, Brody finds himself in the position of singlehandedly saving his sons and their friends from the ministrations of a ravenous, very pissed-off shark.

Also, it got its face burned in an explosion, because it was almost the 80’s, so SOMETHING had to explode.

You know that thing that happens in the credits of movies where, after the names of the main stars appear, they’ll save time by showing a block of eight to ten names of the lesser actors? There are no fewer than two of those blocks in the opening of Jaws 2, and that speaks to what is perhaps its biggest flaw. The film has already speared as many Jaws actors as possible into returning (including the guy who played Screaming Swimmer and the lady who asked “Are you going to close the beaches”) and yet it still feels the need to cram in a baker’s dozen of horny teens, only four or five of which get any semblance of a personality or even an introduction.

There are a couple horny and loathsome nerds, the mayor’s son, two female cousins, and three or four couples in various combinations, but they live and die in a world that’s almost entirely undisclosed to us. They are but ants, interchangeably suffering at the fins and teeth of Amity’s second largest export. Coming after Jaws’ expert work at imbuing even the minor, one-scene characters with color and inner life, the endless parade of identical slasher-esque teens with floppy hair is a crushing disappointment.

Although, let’s give a warm Census Bloodbath shoutout to Donna Wilkes of 1980’s Schizoid!

There is more to Jaws 2 than the uncomfortable marriage of small town drama and teen horror, but precious little more. While Chief Brody does the old “man who cried shark” soft shoe, he finds himself at the receiving end of some mildly amusing dialogue, and the devastated townsfolk are for the most part well-acted. It’s not a slog to sit through, and if you bob along with your brain turned off, you will make it through to the end just fine.

That’s far from strong praise, but it’s the best I can do. Unlike its titular sea beast, Jaws 2 is pretty toothless. It drops any and all pretense of actually being a horror film (though it does keep the faux-grindhouse ending that cuts to credits with brutal efficiency the second the threat is vanquished), and that tonally flat presentation mauls any sense of tension.

Of course, it doesn’t help that the shark menacing this film’s shores looks downright terrible. Even with the added crutch of a scorch mark across the shark’s face, it rings incredibly false, all emotionless rubber and endlessly gnashing teeth. Unfortunately, director Jeannot Szwarc (of the similarly lauded Supergirl) is no Steven Spielberg, and he flails when he tries to walk the tightrope of suggestion: trying to imply the beast’s size and strength without actually showing it requires an actual vision.

The shark might as well be played by an oven mitt with googly eyes, but the alternative is worse. The shots of people thrashing about in the water are much too wide, exposing the fact that, unless the shark is nibbling on their toes, there’s actually no way a fish that huge is touching the person in the shot. It’s all just desperate artifice without a solid story to hold it all together.

And the villain looks more like a hot dog with teeth than a shark.

Jaws 2 certainly isn’t the worst sequel in the world. At least it’s faithful to the universe it takes place in and the characters who live there (the same could not be said for the likes of the abominable Exorcist II: The Heretic, released just one year prior). Unfortunately, it’s a charmless waste of time. I know Spielberg makes everything look easy, but you wouldn’t think it’d be such a challenge to make a big budget shark attack movie into something that’s actually fun to watch.

TL;DR: Jaws 2 is mildly entertaining but completely fails to even attempt to compete with the excitement of the original Jaws.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1024
Reviews In This Series
Jaws (Spielberg, 1975)
Jaws 2 (Szwarc, 1978)
Jaws 3-D (Alves, 1983)
Jaws: The Revenge (Sargent, 1987)

My, What Big Teeth You Have

For the Scream 101 podcast episode about this film, click here.

Year: 1975

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss

Run Time: 2 hours 4 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

It’s Independence Day! For someone who dislikes hot dogs, medically can’t view fireworks, and has no discernible patriotic spirit, there’s no better way to celebrate the occasion than by kicking off a marathon of the Jaws quadrilogy! As per usual on this here blog, there’s no specific time frame for the next couple reviews, but keep your ear to the ground!

The other three Jaws flicks are but a drop in the bucket of the 1975 Steven Spielberg flick’s legacy, which includes Piranha, Alien, about half of Italy’s cinematic output between 1976 and 1983, and – oh yeah – the entire concept of blockbuster filmmaking as we know it. That’s a lot to hang on a little movie adapted from a Peter Benchley pulp novel about a giant fish. But, like its titular Great White, Jaws is strong enough to carry the weight.

That is, when it’s actually working.

Jaws starts off as an oceanbound slasher movie and sticks in that vein for a lot longer than people give it credit for (though in 1975, people wouldn’t exactly have had the parlance to recognize it as such, having only Psycho, Texas Chain Saw, and the Canadian import Black Christmas to look to). Off the coast of Amity Island, a skinny dipping co-ed (Susan Backlinie) becomes a midnight snack for a mysterious unseen creature heralded by John Williams’ twitchy minimalist title theme. The island’s police chief, Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) wants to close the beaches immediately, but the town’s cocksure mayor (Murray Hamilton) insists that they remain open for the Fourth of July weekend – Amity’s biggest tourist season.

Thus the aquatic beast – a gargantuan Great White shark – is allowed the opportunity to feast on a three course meal of unsuspecting Amity-ites. After enough is very thoroughly proven to be enough, Brody takes to the seas with the sardonic oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and the grizzled sea captain/cartoon character Quint (Robert Shaw) to attempt to defeat the beast once and for all.

Or at least until they box office starts skyrocketing and they ship in another one.

Jaws made me jump. During an underwater investigation scene, I – a jaded horror veteran – was freaked out by a movie that’s over 40 years old. Honestly, I should end the review right there, that’s recommendation enough. But I have standards to uphold and so we press on.

For its first hour, Jaws is a perfect thriller machine. Spielberg’s tendencies toward the maudlin actually blend rather well with the 70’s grindhouse vein the film inhabits more than it lets on. Not only is a little boy devoured by a shark, but we get a deeply perfect shot of the masses scrambling out of the water, exiting the frame until just one bereaved mother is left on the sand. His short, sharp shocks are immediately followed by languid moments of emotion that grind your nose into how grim and grubby the situation is.

This all culminates in the most grindhousey ending possible: cutting to credits almost the very second the threat is defeated; and therein lies the problem with the second half of the movie. While the first half lives and dies on the colorful residents of Amity and their even more colorful demises, Jaws’ second hour is a pared-down potboiler focusing in on our three heroes. All that energy and tension now lies on the shoulders of a cartoon character, one of blockbuster cinema’s most boring protagonists (yeah I said it, sue me), and an admittedly great comic relief character attempting to fill the gaping void between the two.

You did what you could, Hoops.

Frankly, the third act is a bit of a slog, bouncing between solid action sequences and aimless filler for an exhausting stretch of time. For what it’s worth, you really do feel like you’ve been sitting on a boat for a day and a half. And I understand that many people enjoy every last minute of the film, and I am loathe to take that away from them. For me, it just falls a teensy bit flat.

Of course no amount of complaining could possibly take away from Jaws’ titanic and earned reputation. It’s a remarkably well-crafted thriller with showstopping effects (when they worked) and chilling implications of danger when they didn’t. Other than the unwise decision to hang the back half on the characters they did, there’s not a hole in Jaws’ construction, from the dialogue right on down to the music. 

And John Williams is in rare form here, composing a relatively restrained theme that transposes his typical bombast into a tightly controlled minimalist crescendo. While nothing else in the score remotely matches the majesty of the title theme, it’s such a tremendous piece of work that it’s hard to mind.

Jaws isn’t Spielberg’s best. It’s not Williams’ best. It’s nobody’s best. But it’s a magnificent creature produced by a team of incredible talents with supreme mastery of their craft. It’s a delight to watch even all these years later, and it has heartily earned its gargantuan status.

TL;DR: Jaws is a well-constructed thriller with a weak third act that doesn't quite sink its massive heft.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 897

Reviews In This Series

Jaws (Spielberg, 1975)
Jaws 2 (Szwarc, 1978)
Jaws 3-D (Alves, 1983)
Jaws: The Revenge (Sargent, 1987)