Jaws, No. 4 - Jaws: The Revenge (1988)

“[A shark] has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we’ve got on our hands…is a dead shark.”
– Woody Allen

It’s the same for franchises. Leave one alone long enough, and it goes into remission, until it becomes “retro” and is remade. And so, perhaps merely to keep the Jaws name alive under the mistaken impression it would again somehow become profitable, Universal released a Jaws movie four years after Jaws 3-D suggested how Sisyphean such an effort would be. Sadly, there is little further reasoning going into the existence for Jaws: The Revenge; it merely exists by fiat. As one of the legendarily worst films ever made (though long off IMDb’s list celebrating such feats), naturally whatever production whims led to Jaws: The Revenge as we know it are now lost to the depths of time.

It didn’t have to suck this bad. The director, Joseph Sargent, had one genuine thriller classic under his belt (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three), and he surely had Universal’s monetary backing. The title even attempts to indicate respectability; just as Jaws 2 was one of the first sequels to adopt a “2” title (evolved slightly from The Godfather Part II’s more respectable Roman numerals), so is this fourth Jaws one of the earlier fourth sequels to give up on numbering altogether. This is common amongst fourths, as it’s assumed the number “4” (or numeral “IV”) has a desperation about it that cannot be covered up with the term “trilogy” – even while The Revenge’s producers falsely liked calling their turd “the third film of the remarkable Jaws trilogy.” Nice try, guys.

Of course, making that The Revenge part as tiny as can be, it’s possible to trick more impressionable viewers (like me at age 6 when I first saw this) into somehow thinking this is the real Jaws. “Boy,” I thought, “if this is that world-famous classic thriller, people sure do have awful taste!”

(Whatever class The Revenge gains by dropping the “4” is itself lost with the subtitle The Revenge. This concerns the movie’s dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb premise, so let us not go into it here. Still, someone had the chutzpah to proclaim writer Michael De Guzman’s narrative idiocy in the film’s tagline: “This time, it’s personal.” Uh oh.)

Of course, both Jaws 3-D and Jaws: The Revenge are bad, but it’s different. Jaws 3-D is good-bad, stupid-bad, the sort of accidental comedy bad movie purists relish. Jaws: The Revenge is boooooring, a stately character melodrama is a series that cannot whatsoever support such a conceit – especially when it focuses on one of the minor characters, Ellen Brody. That’s right, Sid Sheinberg is getting his wish! Universal’s CEO, well, his wife is now at long last an action heroine, allowing Sid to let moviegoers know by proxy how enormous his penis is. I’d suspect this is really why Jaws: The Revenge exists – a decade-delayed bit of cock-measuring gotten out of hand and perpetrated upon a classic.


As always, the credits involve some shark’s POV Myersing it up at the seabed – this time, also taking in the lovely Amity surroundings circa Christmastime…1987? And the only, only thing helping the movie out is the score from Michael Small, which sees fit to rip off “Tubular Bells” nearly as much as it does John Williams’ original work. Oh, and oddly enough, the cinematography ain’t too shabby either – John McPherson, you pass.

At the Brody household, Loraine Gary’s Ellen Brody is engaging her grown son Sean (Mitchell Anderson) in a game of “exposit the back story.” These are the facts: Ellen exists, Martin Brody is long dead (of an expired contract and a reticent Roy Scheider), and Sean is now himself sheriff of Amity, a strange career choice for this water-phobic Colorado grad. Also oddly, this lad hasn’t aged a day since 1983, though more distressingly he’s changed so much in appearance, it’s almost like he’s a different actor.

Ellen’s granddaughter, Thea (Judish Barsi, and do not research her life history), calls on the phone, proving herself the world champion at exposition that is both over-informative and artless. Thea lets us know in no uncertain terms that her name is indeed Thea, she is Ellen’s granddaughter, she is 5-years old, her father is Mike Brody (the talentless yet bearded Lance Guest – Halloween II, The Last Starfighter), and Mike is a marine biologist in the Bahamas. That’s a hell of a career switch from Sea World’s engineer, made harder to swallow by his new wife Carla (Karen Young), and Thea’s age indicating she was born out-of-wedlock a year before Jaws 3-D, when Mike romances a totally different wench before presumably abandoning her in the wilds of Venezuela…Either that, or the producers have simply forgotten about the events of Jaws 3-D, like the rest of humanity.

It’s the holiday season, as Sargent’s oppressive directorial hand never lets us forget. And Sean must leave his overly-cheery pre-tragedy home life to see to a bit of driftwood in the harbor – ah, priorities. Creating problems where there were none, the movie insists the Coast Guard cannot do it because they’re “busy,” and Sean’s coworker is off either tipping cows or arresting people tipping cows – it ain’t too clear. No matter, Sean heads out in the police vessel for an exciting night of wood reduction when –

SHARK! (Pre-bloodied shark.)...For all of a nanosecond, as the series’ jumbled editing was exacerbated yet again – Verna Fields, where are you when we need you? Sean’s arm is off. He obliges the shark by nearing the boat’s edge, and soon he is dead. And that danged driftwood still isn’t cleared!

So…a third shark in Amity (for their thirteenth death-by-shark)?! Don’t worry, the movie has an answer for that…A stupid, stupid answer.

Loraine Gary (that is, Ellen) weeps like the Actress her CEO husband assures her she is. As her Mike-based family arrives what for the consolation, Ellen enacts an excess of wistful sea-gazing. When Mike sees to her, Ellen assures him “it [shark] came for him [Sean].” That is, premeditated shark-icide. And Martin was killed by a shark…a heart attack, actually, but Ellen assures us all this was over extreme shark terror – from a man who’d successfully eviscerated two of ‘em (with no more in sight)!


So…The Revenge? The shark’s out for revenge against the Brodys as an overall clan, for the fantabulous four shark deaths they’ve responsible for so far. Yeah. An earlier draft, and hence the film’s novelization, “justified” this as a voodoo-curse, ‘cause some houndour wanting the Brodys all deadified (for some unjustified reason) makes so much more sense than a shark alone wanting it. Oh well, at least then they’d embraced the idiocy.

At Sean’s funeral, The Revenge starts actively angering its audience, as sepia-toned footage from the original Jaws appears to highlight the quality drop.

(Repeated insistence upon that abetting driftwood suggests the proper truth – the shark placed it there in ambush for Sean. Other reviewers have pieced together the precise stupidity of this notion, so I’ll let it pass in peace…)

Mike has convinced Ellen to escape from shark-terrors to the Bahamas, justifying that they’d never go someplace so warm – whereas Amity, pre-Jaws, was equally carcharias non grata. And really, when your villain’s a waterborne menace, and you’re its one and only prey, you’ve really gotta work to make yourself available to it!

Pilot Hoagie Carmichael (Michael Caine) flies the Brodys to Nassau, where – That’s right, I said Michael Caine. Sir Michael Caine, of The Ipcress File, Get Carter, The Man Who Would be King…and, er, The Swarm, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, On Deadly Ground, and THIS. Justifies Caine: “I’ve never seen it [the rubbish that is Jaws: The Revenge], but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific!” Good enough, good Mike! And at your laziest, you’re the best part of this.


Carla’s an artist, doncha know, of randomly-welded together deadly metal – I’ve dabbled in this myself, so I cannot critique. Still, these shots of characters within the piece’s “shark mouth” are what Jaws: The Revenge employs as a tension-creating device, while Jaws was actively pitting man against animal in no uncertain terms. (I’m mostly neglecting the melodrama that makes up 88.449% of this picture, which leaves little content indeed.)

Now Ellen, persistent ocean-avoider that she is, is swimming in the ocean. And here’s the SHARK to –!

Nope, dream sequence!

So Ellen ain’t goin’ near the water, really (she acts suddenly hysterical within feet of it, which is rather much, I think), but Mike – Oh, he’s still a credible shark morsel. This is because, and only because, of his deep sea diving he does on a daily basis. What would this shark do otherwise?! So Mike tags conches, day in and day out, part of his recent research grant he’s already plowed through on booze. Aiding him in snail categorizing is Rasta mon Jake (Mario Van Peebles, star of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasss Song, and director of BAADASSSSS!) – at a career low here as a be-dreaded islander whose irritating vocal mannerisms are not helped by the constant distortion they receive in Mike’s underwater sub, mon.

Ellen is well aware of the danger Mike is in per his job, but Mike assures her, facial expression never changing even one iota, that “there is nothing to worry about.”


Cue Not Bruce swimmin’ along swimmingly, reassuring us that, melodramatic Hallmark reenactments to the contrary, Jaws: The Revenge is indeed a killer shark flick…mon.

As a killer shark flick, it’s time to get on to the central matter at hand – An extended romantic subplot between Ellen and Hoagie (you got an actor like Michael Caine, you don’t simply have him appear as the pilot in one scene). By inference, we’re supposed to think that Sid Sheinberg looks exactly like Michael Caine. Sure, Sid!


They fly, Sandwich – er, Hoagie teaching Ellen how to fly. You’d be mistaken to think this is a skill she’ll use against the shark, or ever. It’s just tossed off. Then Hoagie, he of the anecdotes, tells tale of one time, in Burma, when he was up against a local warlord who was stealing diamonds, then just tossing them away, because “some men just want to see the world burn.”…Wait, that’s The Dark Knight. No, sorry, Hoagie’s story is about cannibals in…oh, let’s say Burma, mon.

While Hoagie is showing Ellen the local Junkanoo (read: something I learned about from Thunderball), she starts getting all seizurey. Look, I know Loraine Gary was a little old, but couldn’t you do a second take? – Oh wait, it’s because she has a psychic link with Not Bruce. Tell me again why voodoo was deemed too stupid for this flick?


As Ellen is having her little psychic fit, Not Bruce is well at work, attacking Mike. ‘Bout freaking time! We’re only nearly half over. And what a half-shark-assed attack it is, as Not Bruce simply snacks on the research platform a little bit, then vanishes for another 10 minutes of screen time or so, mon.

And what’s the shark doing in the Bahamas anyhow?! I mean, how’d it get there?! Let’s calculate, shall we…It’s been a week, from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Eve (I’m being as generous as possible here). It’s 1,233 miles from Martha’s Vineyard to Nassau. Charcarodon carcharias can go 25 mph – that’s a top speed. So, plugging that into the ol’ calculatorizor…Holy crap, a gung-ho shark could get there in two days?! It’s unlikely as hell, but amongst The Revenge’s faults, this isn’t its greatest. I mean, voodoo, man!...Er, voodoo, mon!

Time-wasting character scene during New Year’s Eve. Mike and Jake, the asses, intend to investigate the Not Bruce, screw conches, through a strangely-argued bit where they wildly misconstrue how a research grant works. This is their big secret and...that’s our drama! Mike will not tell Ellen he saw a shark (ooh!), while she gets her Big Vague Oscar Speeches (with Hoagie) where she constantly refers to her problem as “it” – making it more “accessible” to the common man. Even when sharks are the driving focus of these “character” issues, the word “shark” is never said. This is one lackluster Jaws movie, I tell you what, mon.

Mike and Jake get their own context-free scene of “drama,” a leeeeeeeeeeengthy scene, about making some sort of nebulously defined transmitter doodad to track the shark.

Mike gets a different “drama” scene with wife Carla about taking out the garbage. She actually threatens to do Mike in with her soldering torch and – oh wait, I forgot, this one ain’t in 3-D…Where’s the damned shark, mon?!

Oh! In a sudden and unmotivated scene transition, there it is, again harassing Jake and Mike upon their dinky platform. Jake pokes it, placing on a tracer – meant to be this entry’s equivalent to Quint’s yellow barrels, for how much the “shark sonar” thing is grossly underutilized. Mike, our hero, is all the while just standing around watching. Which, frankly, is also what he did in Jaws 3-D.

Ellen and Grinder – er, Hoagie – have a, yeah, a character scene, this time in a cabana – Ah, changes of pace. “I’ve grown tired of one-way conversations,” Hoagie says. Translation: “I’m sick of masturbating.” And the seduction of Ellen Brody has begun, mon!

(Going back to Sean’s death – the one death we have to console ourselves with the hour-to-date of this “horror” flick. Originally, it was meant to be Martin Brody, ‘cause that’s what folk wanna see five minutes into their Jaws sequel – Well, the makers of Halloween Resurrection think something similar. Anyway, had that been the case, this seduction-by-Michael Caine would be even queasier than it already is.)


SHARK! AAH! MON!

Actually, it’s just Mike’s dream, mon. Damn it, that’s twice you’ve gone to that dream well! And for different people!

The Brody family enjoys a domestic dinner scene – Honestly, they had the temerity to call this thing a thriller?! Anyway, Mike runs through a scene with daughter Thea that perfectly mirrors one involving Martin Brody with Sean in Jaws (the one we saw as Ellen’s “flashback” already). This is the saddest sort of sequel, the one that traffics solely in indirectly referring to the first film. It doesn’t even have its own action sequences!

A though occurs: Following a quick, useless scene in a casino, I’ve discovered Jaws: The Revenge’s Oscar-worthy symbolism. Hoagie is the shark! Bear with me…He’s a card shark, sure, with predatory intents upon Ellen Brody, which disturbs Mike to a rather disgusting degree. So the extended scenes of Ellen and Mike with Hoagie are the metaphorical substitutions for good and wholesome Sharkly Action and – Look, I’m grasping at straws here, mon!

Mike is back out at sea in his sub, as though nothing had happened up ‘til now (it hasn’t), when Not Bruce does when it should’ve done at the 20 minute mark: Finally and without equivocation attack Mike Brody! This is an extended chase, with long, loving close-ups depicting the sadly stagnant art of animatronic shark construction. Mike swims into a sunken house (Haiti?), then runs through a sequence of narrow escapes that was far more competently parroted in Finding Nemo. He escapes to the surface with a blast from his oxygen tank, somehow avoiding both the bends (by fiat) and the research vessel (by one foot).


While Mike is intentionally involved in such stupidly self-destructive “research,” his wife Carla is at the beach presenting her grand work of art – which they’ve been leading up to all this time. So Mike ain’t there. This isn’t the healthiest marriage ever, is it? It’s just as well Mike managed to sire Thea, staving off the inevitable divorce by about 18 years (just like many of my friends have done, mon).


That divorce is briefly more viable, as Thea is out upon a banana boat when Not Bruce attacks. They’ve got things reversed; the Alex Kintner mirror still occurs in the 20th minute, sure, but here it’s the 20th minute to the end, not from the beginning. Oy! And Thea ain’t et – You thought they’d be so brave?! Naw, the poor, nameless wench beside her is. Mmm, Brody-adjacent.

That’s all Ellen can stands, she can’t stands no more! Feeling the need to get this damn thing over with, she hijacks Mike’s boat (which is now at dock, in spite of the previous scenes to the contrary), and pilots herself out to sea, with the least-developed notion in history about how she’s gonna track and kill a great white. Honestly, she has no plan, mon!

…I do love it when a screen shot can sum up the emotional experience of a movie in one visual. Here’s that moment for Jaws: The Revenge:


Boring!

Mike and Jake race out to join the climax, enlisting Hoagie and his biplane. After what feels like minutes of flat ocean footage, they discover Ellen’s boat, Not Bruce closing straight in…


Hoagie then lands his seaplane (poorly), as Mike and Jake paddle over to the boat. Then Not Bruce up and eats the airplane, also enjoying himself a Hoagie sandwich. Farewell, Michael Caine. Maybe you’ll actually be able to make it to the Oscars to accept your award for Hanna and Her Sisters, mon…

No, wait, never mind, Hoagie’s alive…and not even all that wet, ‘cause who likes a soggy Hoagie? His explanation for his survival? “It wasn’t easy, believe me.” This movie has stopped caring in a way even the Monogram Charlie Chans never did!

Not Bruce circling back around to once again to a complete lack of damage to Ellen’s boat, Jake and Mike gather together to technobabble out a solution. Jake shall place a “receiver” inside the shark, a “slave unit that’ll shock the hell outa him.” Wiring up this fearsome gizmo (a flashlight), Mike opines that it shall apparently confuse the shark – it sure as flapjacks confuses me! I mean, what are they talking about?!

Then Jake goes out on the mast to feed Not Bruce the thingy, only instead Not Bruce eats him. I mean, he was black, mon. (Cue long, slow-mo “Noooooooooooooos.” Leave no cliché unturned!)

Boat now somehow sinking, Mike preps his whatever machine and zaps the vocal chords outa the shark. It think it ate a lion (or Godzilla) at some point.


Seeing flashbacks to a minutes-worth of the Jaws climax, Ellen stabs the haunched beast with the mast. Hey, if it was good enough for Cthulhu (or Ursula)!


Then the shark explodes! The head, the tail, the whole damn shark.


This was a reshot ending, done to appease test audiences (who somehow found nothing else wrong with Jaws: The Revenge). Originally, the shark simply ceased living, sorta like the franchise. Oh well, at least they gave us a memorably stupid ending to cap the tedious melodrama.

Oh, and Jake has survived…Again, test audiences apparently demanded it – dumb-dumbs! And that’s Jaws: The Revenge. Body count: 2

*************************************************************

Back to the Future Part II depicts the year 2015 as playing host to Jaws 19 (“This time, it’s REALLY personal.”). Well, we’ve still got five years for the 15 extra Jaws movies to show. Of course, shark’ll still look fake…

Actually, the Jaws franchise never really got out of the water, as it were. Some movies just aren’t made to have sequels, no matter how hard a studio insists, and frankly, that’s Jaws. But here’s the way the new blockbuster and sequel environment Jaws created differs from that of the ‘40s: Most sequels then were B-movies; little expectation or weight was attached to them. Post-Jaws, studio sequels were A-efforts, like Jaws itself. Thus three Jaws sequels are somehow more impressive than 47 Charlie Chan movies, and their steady deterioration of quality is also all the more striking. And that’s why the modern era celebrates and laments sequels to an extent never imagined in the ‘30s and ‘40s Golden Age of Sequels. They mean something now, and with sequels and Jaws progeny (by which I mean all blockbusters) dominating Hollywood’s output, we don’t have the stuffy prestige pics to fall back on like before.

And there’ve been sightings in the water…sightings of something terrifying and long-dreaded. Sightings…of a Jaws remake! (With Tracy Morgan. In 3-D.)


Related posts:
• No. 1 Jaws (1975)
• No. 2 Jaws 2 (1978)
• No. 3 Jaws 3-D (1983)

Jaws, No. 3 - Jaws 3-D (1983)

We’re gonna need bigger bloat.

Jaws 2 didn’t exactly jeopardize beach-going like its fore-shark-bear did, but it was the highest-grossing sequel of all time…Until Rocky II one year later. (Wait, it did better than Bond films like Thunderball?! Damn inflation.)

Movie franchises weren’t so damn well deathless in 1983 as they are today (despite some inroads made by the horror genre). Hence, the prospect of a third Jaws movie must’ve seemed pretty patently ridiculous. So it seemed to Universal’s David Brown and David Zanuck, who pitched their next entry as Jaws 3, People 0, an Airplane!-style spoof done by National Lampoon’s Animal House scribes (and John Hughes!) and directed by Joe Dante – mastermind behind the later gonzo-humored, Gizmo-starring Gremlins. Yes, Joe “Best Jaws Rip-Off Ever Piranha” Dante, making fun of Jaws in a Jaws-titled sequel! The mind boggles and the bowel quivers.


It’s a Hollywood satire, about a shark terrorizing the filming of Jaws 3. The opening sees Peter Benchley devoured in his swimming pool whilst working on the script. Movie producers are the bad guys – makes sense. Behold, a script review!

‘Twasn’t to happen, not with Stephen Spielberg’s infamously nonfunctional sense of humor (see 1941). Rather, Jaws 3, People 0 was a zero, and the production rights passed on to some jerk named Alan Landsburg. Seeing blood-tinged dollar signs, he (and someone called Rupert Hitzig) set about creating an ostensibly serious third Jaws. For that, we’ll need a director. That’ll be Joe Alves, delivering his only motion picture ever. As director, that is, for the man was the production designer on the previous Jawses (Is that right?), and even second unit director for Jaws 2. He even worked for John Carpenter. Still, if you can imagine a further step down from Spielberg to TV director, then production designer ‘ll be it.

The screenplay is ascribed to scribes Richard Matheson (author of freaking “I Am Legend”) and Carl “I Wrote Jaws” Gottlieb, though the truth is many uncredited and wisely-anonymous script doctors rendered their efforts nigh unrecognizable. It’s just as well; I’d rather not equate Jaws 3-D with intelligent human beings.

Yes, Jaws 3-D. Justifying its existence in some paltry way, this entry can join the illustrious brotherhood of Amityville 3-D and Friday the 13th Part III in the eighties’ 3-D, third-part trilogy of terror. Let us all thank Comin’ at Ya!, a silly western, for the brief ‘80s 3-D revitalization, a silly little cinematic footnote all reviewers of Jaws 3-D just must mention.

Here in 2010, we’re suffering through the ‘80s again, in film content and in another 3-D revival – though this danged one looks to stick! I mean, Avatar did OK. But apart from the mighty Piranha 3D, none of our modern crop seems ready to successfully capitalize on what 3-D once meant, before depth of field and crappy post-conversions became all the rage – I’m talkin’ of gimmickery! The one and only purpose of 3-D in something like Jaws 3-D is to shove things at the lens, again and again. It’s cheesy, silly, stupid as all hell, and makes for a deadly drinking game.

(Too bad all present prints of Jaws 3-D prefer the much inferior title of Jaws III – Ugh! Roman numerals. Too bad, also, that converting cinematic cheese into televisual, er, post-cheese rather blurs up the image. It does crappy movies no favors.)


Consider the inaugural 3-D effect, a rolly-polly fish head. Eat them up, yum! We’re pretty well assured of Jaws 3-D’s class right off the bat, preceding even the title, itself a 3-D effect, even now as Universal has embarrassedly rechristened it in “tasteful” IIIs.


A mass of colorful, happy water-skiers ply their shoulder-standing trade out on the water, as the shark’s fin looms behind them – it’s the same scene that was Jaws 2’s crown jewel, getting repeated for the first of three or so times here. This being a horror movie, ostensibly, the skiers’ craft stalls, they scatter in the water, and at the last possible moment the boat starts back up and they’re all saved from an opening victim’s death.

Rather, the skiers make their way through non-Nixonian water gates into a manmade lagoon, shark in hot shark pursuit just as the gates shut – sending the damn things off track. This gate’ll require further examination later.

We’re at Sea World, our mercifully unique setting for the day, and I mean the real Sea World. This sad little Orlando enterprise, occupying the nebulous purgatory between aquarium and theme park, actually agreed that a gory body count movie would be right for their image. It’s as it Manhattan had actually been OK with Jason’s taking of it.

Reporters (foreground objects) gather around Sea World’s fictional owner, “evil capitalist” Calvin Bouchard (Louis Gossett Jr., fresh off his Oscar win for An Officer and a Gentleman). He exposits on the grand opening of their new attraction, the Undersea Kingdom – a series of pressurized viewing tunnels well underwater in this over-ambitious and nebulous lagoon. Adding that extra touch of prestige to the event, Bouchard has called in the services of Philip FitzRoyce, the Sixteenth Earl of Haddonfield (say wha’?!), whom we can only infer through a lack of filmic evidence is sort of a poncy, Limey version of Jacques Cousteau. He shall be played by Simon Corkingdale, “Manimal” himself, lookin’ for all the world like an unshaven Aaron Eckhart!

Those aren’t our heroes; they’re our villains! As men of financial ease, what else could they be? As such, naturally, they can never have an intelligent thought, not when our heroes can have it instead. And here’s our hero now – Mike Brody (Dennis Quaid, also of 1983’s The Right Stuff, as well as timeless classics The Day After Tomorrow and G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra). Yup, the son of Jaws’ hero (Roy Scheider wouldn’t touch this film with a 25-foot great white), having again ultra-aged in between entries, functioning in some indefinite facility as Sea World’s…um…engineer, or something. Whatever it is, it puts Mike in a position to respond to the sub-Poseidon Adventure disasterizin’ to come.

Responding to that darned busted gate (which leads from Sea World’s priceless lagoon to the open sea), Mike sets a lone greased-up he-man to the dusk-lit repairs alone. Mike cannot do it, Lordie no, ‘cause he’s got a date – with Sea World’s head biologist, the equally youthful (for her job) Kay Morgan (Bess Morgan – lotsa TV). Also, urban cowboy Sean Brody (John Putch) is here visiting, taking a break from his sensible, shark-free Colorado college education. They enjoy a lengthy character scene in Sea World’s world-famous dive bars, where Sean “meets cute” with Sea World water-skier Kelly Bukowski (first timer Lea “Momma McFly” Thompson). They play “Stand Off,” the “I slap you” game – Sean is victorious, earning inevitable Thompson sex, the sort of which Mike and Kay are all too happy to demonstrate for us right now, clothes on.

While this surprisingly comic, well-acted character stuff spools out, that greased he-man is busy at gate repair. Not only at dusk (to take advantage of the light), but without breathing apparatuses. It ain’t too tough, seemingly, for Mike Brody’s engineering masterpiece can be corrected with a single chain and bike lock. This is a stalk sequence, for an unnamed-until-after-death character, so – He’ll die! First…a fish. Take a shot! Then…a SHARK! The jumble of editing and close-ups here make Jaws 2’s equivalent look good. And like that, the he-man is dead of terrible filmmaking, his goggles drifting aimlessly. His arm too…Ooh, nice effects! I ain’t seen blue screen like that since the ‘50s.

Our heroes leave the bar. Walking the beach all romantical-like, Mike and Kay debate their future. Mike’s been offered a one-year job in Venezuela (drug mule?), while Kay has a life-long opportunity at the Scripps Institute. It seems someone in this relationship ‘ll hafta make a compromise, and seeing where Jaws 3-D lies on the great era and genre scale, it sure ain’t gonna be the man. Kay shall agree to abandon her promising career for sweet ol’ Mikey! There, I’ve just saved ya many plot distractions later in the film.

Sean and Kelly, meanwhile, are at the lagoon, considering punching this PG film up to an R with impromptu skinny-dipping. But while the prospect of sexual chastisement must surely appeal to our shark, as a 1980s horror villain, apparently the prospect of devouring coral burglars is even more appealing. For, yeah, these two yahoos have just driven their van onto Sea World property in order to poach its fish, get scared by a reed…and become shark fodder. Maybe the shark just chose them since they go to the massive lagoon’s fog-shrouded, “moody” region, while the lovebird’s beach is entirely tone-free. The yahoos’ demise, by the way, is boring and perfunctory, for the Jaws sequels can never commit to being, you know, scary.


(Nothing is ever made of these deaths – they’re just for our sake. We’re meant to believe there’s no evidence of ‘em – the shark ate their raft and all. Still, one must wonder what the response would be to an abandoned criminals’ van on Sea World property.)

Come day, Mike is confronted by Charlene, utterer of obviously over-scripted lines like “take a flyin’ leap in a rollin’ doughnut in a gravel driveway.” She’s wife to the now-dead greased-up gate-locking mustachioed he-man, who now gets called Shelby. Mike hasta go track down her deadbeat, dead-meat husband, allowing him to break up Kay’s chemistry-free encounter with FitzRoyce. Oh, and as evidence of “Shelby’s” disappearance, here are his passport, driver’s license and credit cards, which he apparently leaves lying around on the floor at home.

Mike and Kay load up to search the lagoon, now seemingly like half a mile deep (!), in a truly astounding yellow submarine, a craft which prompts references to “Thunderbirds,” Toho and The Beatles on all the Internet’s other multitudinous Jaws 3-D reviews. It’s amazing. I have nothing new or clever to say here, so I’ll let screen caps themselves speak for the underwhelmingly hilarious special effects which populate this studio-made, big budget blockbuster feature film.


I guess I’d better address the lagoon itself, though. Naturally, the Undersea Kingdom is housed within, requiring a Mike Brody-designed series of tubes, airlocks, and a freaking “Star Trek” control room set, all rather like something out of Sphere or Deep Blue Sea, NOT a family theme park funhouse – which is what Undersea Kingdom is, doncha know. Hence certain shots depicting the lagoon as deeper than a Melville novel. But, at other times, it’s all of waist deep, or anything in between. See, the lagoon is seemingly also home to the water-skiers’ stunt show, the bumper boats, a free-for-all Sea World beach…and all the park’s valuable sea life roaming the aforementioned attractions freely. Even while they open the inconsequential gates to the ocean on a daily basis so the water-skiers can practice elsewhere. What sense does this make? Well, it justifies granting the shark access to everything once all shark hell breaks loose (one hour from now)…


And, how ‘bout that 3-D? It seems to come in chunks, just like vomit. So we get whole sequences devoted to showcasing the gimmick, which is then promptly forgotten for 20-minute blocks. (Hence the paucity of bold in this review.) Ah, but this is one of those delightful chunks. So THRILL, to rocks, a groping fake skeleton (which the tourists cannot see, natch), and – shriek! – an eel. Also Kay’s trained lesbian dolphins, here screeching like Flipper in their best and slowest Dolphinese, struggling to warn our be-subbed heroes that a giant fiberglass shark is in the water.

And here comes that shark!...That cheap, cheap shark – lamentably, all of 10-feet long. (What’s that, sequel anti-escalation?!) The Brucelet thrashes the sub (just as well – it has a habit of phasing out of our dimension, if the SFX are to be believed), and our heroes Mike and Kay are only able to escape when her lesbian dolphins give them a helpful ride to the shore. Then the Brucelet whomps its seemingly uncircumcised head against a gate wall, the prop shark mechanism retracting like a turtle’s face.


Greedy capitalist Bouchard learning of the beastie, he sees green – FitzRoyce shall kill it, on camera. Oh yeah, that’s the publicity Sea World wants to send the world, that it endorses the murder for recreation of endangered species. Kay comes to her would-be-gobbler’s defense, suggesting rather they capture the beast and add it to Sea World’s menagerie. No great white’s ever been successfully held in captivity – for a duration, at least, seeing as California’s Monterrey Bay Aquarium had a baby white for a while…I saw it, and it was awesome; all the other fish gave it a wide, wide berth. Anyway, it takes an amazingly long time to convince Bouchard, master-capitalist behind the whole Sea World empire, to understand the economic sense of having a live fish on display. Idiot!

The hunt is on! – that very night, difficulty aside, ‘cause God forbid we think through this thing. FitzRoyce, that Great White Hunter, is now literally so – He proposes sedating the animal with goddamned grenades! Again our heroes must over-enunciate the illogic of such an effort, rendering FitzRoyce’s grenades merely a Checkhov’s gun…Hmm, how do ya think the shark’s gonna die in this one?!

A-divin’ FitzRoyce and Kay go, FitzRoyce’s dogsbody filming the charade as he does all of FitzRoyce’s movements (even bowel). Mike, the engineering supervisor, is entrusted to sedate the passing shark with a harpoon gun. And after the shark inconsequentially gums on Kay for a while, Mike fires the harpoon right at in, in the exact same way as Jason in Friday the 13th Part III.


The exceedingly fake, immobile Brucelet is winched into a holding tank under Kay’s care. Those lesbian dolphins sure must be jealous! Satisfying a dumb, dumb running gag, Kay assures Mike it is a fish, not a mammal. Then Mike nears; sensing a delicious Brody nearby, the creature thrashes wildly (that is, a stagehand throttles it from off camera). Kay is thrilled, that their monster is alive and well and ready to be cheaply exploited (by Bouchard, I mean, not the filmmakers).

With like 40 minutes to go, you honestly cannot think this sad little Brucelet is our only shark! Hints are occasionally dropped, through cutaways to the control room, that one of Mike’s ingenious filtration pipes has a massive blockage in it. Whattaya think that is?

Let us not question for now, though, for this ain’t a Jaws film, not really. It’s an excuse to see waterskiing footage, strung throughout an entire narrative. It’s Meatballs 4 all over again! Only these aren’t mere water-skiers; they’re water-skiers – in 3-D, that is. So is Shamu itself, quickly followed by the water it sends up. And in less 3-D, but somehow even more astounding, is Sea World’s famous square-dancing cowgirl pastiche show, complete with anthropomorphized pig (?!).

A minimum wage sea nymph greets the influx of teenaged tourist trios into the Underwater Kingdom, whose entrance is dominated by half a plaster dragon’s bifurcated tongue. Ooh, exciting! Here in the hall of 3-D, the teen gals also discover an exceedingly fake eel and an exceedingly fake tentacle. This is your multi-million dollar new attraction, Bouchard?!...Actually, knowing Sea World, I’d bet it actually is.


Kay feeds her lesbian dolphins (they eat fish) when the park’s PA system listlessly announces the grand news – Come see the captured great white shark! That’s right, Bouchard, you captain of industry, you, bring in your amazing new attraction free when you’ve already got an over-packed opening day crowd! They’ll never have to come to Sea World again! And announce it in a hastily stenciled sign the size of my buttock. It’s idiotic! I mean, there’s a reason Disney’s California Adventure had no good rides upon opening – I mean, apart from DCA being crappy. They needed something to open later, to get audiences to come back. The Jaws folk wouldn’t understand that, though, not whilst constantly trying to undermine their own franchise.


And that shark pool! Oh my! I mean, look at it! They’re lucky the Brucelet didn’t just opt to bite a child’s delicious face off right then and there. And while Kay advised against traumatizing the poor monster, I guess even it cannot take such a condensed mass of contrivances. The Brucelet just up and bellies up, right there before Bouchard’s glorious crowd of 30, hilariously operated into the proper position by Kay herself, all while actress Bess Morgan struggles to convey the “drama” of the situation simultaneously. This movie has problems.

Back in the Undersea Kingdom, the never-asked question of what happened to he-man’s body is soon answered, as it drifts elegantly before the teenaged trio. This movie is funny as hell, ‘cause soon some random jerk has shoved one girl’s face right into the corpse. Kiss it!


Mike and Kay, experts that they are, see to the recovered man carcass (cops are never called), allowing Jaws 3-D a gore effect far out of proportion with how genteelly they’ve treated the be-sharkings so far.

Meanwhile Bouchard, sickened by the persistent pipe pluggage, and the lack of Sharkly Action, demands the pipe be shut down. Little does he know, this is where the Brucelet’s mamma, Brucette, has been dwelling all this time! It’s Gorgo time!

Now…Where indeed did Brucette come from? I mean, it’s clear but one shark passed through Mike’s amazing gate at the start. Either Sea World’s anti-monster security systems are even worse than depicted here, or the 35-foot Brucette gave birth once entering Sea World (just like a hillbilly tourist). Actually, had she given birth, they’d be faced with a dozen five-foot baby sharks terrorizing the tourists! Why didn’t they make THAT movie?!

Mike races off at top speeds (in a golf cart) to warn the waterskiing stunt troupe of impending Sharkly Action, ‘cause apparently they don’t have, you know, radios or anything. Meanwhile, for no reason, Bouchard’s publicist fist fights a fat Hawaiian man. I’m serious.

Brucette’s fin looms directly beneath the skiers (hence, her mouth’s pretty far ahead there). They see the beast; everyone tumbles; crowds panic in the stands, reenacting the final death throngs of the waning disaster genre. And Brucette…eats no one.

Sean and Kelly (remember them?) are off bumping boats at the bumper boats as a precursor to bumping nasty. Brucette bumps their bumper boat (heh!), as they fall into the water. Kelly thrashes, Brucette gives a little love nibble, and…eats no one. Ugh!

And that’s the end of Sean and Kelly’s useless addition to Jaws 3-D.


Now the shark closes in on the Undersea Kingdom. The tourists within (all 30 of ‘em – popular attraction) struggle to find an emergency exit, which is something Mike Brody forgot in all his brilliant, forward-thinking design. “Holy shit!” some laureate opines, as Brucette looms, smashing the flimsy glass windows that make up the majority of the attraction. The panicky idiots all retreat to the central hub, where airlock doors seal them in. What a good design, Mike!

Oh, and he has no contingency plan in case of such an emergency. But a solution is proposed: If, uh, Mike, uh, welds stuff and shit for a while, like, then they can just open those doors. Really, I think sometimes movies propose these over-complicated solutions to mask how poorly engineered their scenarios are to begin with. Oh, and of course the underwater welding can only be done at a specific time – night.

FitzRoyce the Sixteenth Earl of Haddonfield, meanwhile, is back in shark killing mode, to serve as bait as they try to lure Brucette back into her favorite pipe. He’ll die! Yeah, because professional FitzRoyce was too stupid to use a trustworthy rope, he soon tumbles down the underwater passage into Ma’s maw, Jaws’ jaws. He struggles inside the mouth for a bit, well beyond the shark’s teeth, when the waters churn with blood anyway, just because. Oh well, Manimal could’ve escaped that, I can assure you.

Realizing she has no function in this climax, Kay scubas down to Mike to use her own welding gun. (Oh yeah, I forgot, 3-D!) And as the movie reuses the same welding footage again and again, Brucette pounds her way out of the sealed pipe, simple as that (it was the villain’s plan, which is the sole reason it doesn’t work). She goes ahead and chases Mike and Kay along to the central control station – which is underwater by the way.

(The tourists have escaped, in the meantime, whatever having been accomplished.)

Mike and Kay reach the safety of the control room, and Bouchard’s watchful capitalist eye. Then they all gasp an extended, slow-motion “Nooooo!” as the film’s worst special effect slowly nears:



It doesn’t play in mere images, but the motionless shark model zooms towards us. Glass shatters most unconvincingly as the shark freezes still like a Truffaut hero. Bouchard, being both black and the bad guy, would surely get himself a sub-Samuel L. Jackson death here, except there’s a working class black man nearby, so…that guy gets eaten instead. Bringing the death count up to…5. That’s…kinda unimpressive, considering.


Mike and Kay, somehow amongst all the members of the control room, are caught in…some room…some room underwater – it’s murky and unclear and poorly edited besides. And Brucette is caught in a window struggling to taste them – this’d be deadly to a real great white. While the soundtrack, by Not John Williams (AKA Alan Parker), shamelessly rips off Igor Stravinsky, Mike notices FitzRoyce’s British corpse dangling in Brucette’s feminine lips. (I call continuity error on that, considering FitzRoyce’s complete absence in the plainly visible preceding images of the beast, except…maybe she puked him up, in disgust at her movie’s quality.) Oh, and FitzRoyce has a grenade readily handy, just as we’d anticipated, so it’s a simple matter for Mike to employ some sort of “Gong Show” grabbing hook to pull the pin. Thus we’re showered with what is actually the film’s worst special effect (that’s saying something) – Mountains of shark gore and, er, its jaws!


Mike and Kay surface in the dolphin pool (unconnected to the lagoon), just as dawn breaks – a sure sign all is well. Mike assures Kay (and us) that everyone else is okay, despite a complete lack of evidence to confirm this. Then Kay, having witnessed several human deaths, has but one question – “Are the dolphins okay?” Let us not worry about Kay’s lesbian dolphins, for here they are in – Okay, sorry, this is the film’s worst special effect!

Sequel diminishment being what it is for misconceived franchises, Jaws 3-D couldn’t even equal Jaws 2 in success (no surprise there). It was even shut out at that year’s Golden Raspberry Awards. No respect! It’s clearly “MST3K” fodder – the thing is like a campy ‘50s monster movie, even down to the use of 3-D. But it’s funny, maybe ever more than Jaws 3, People 0 would’ve been, and we can all rest assured that this is the furthest Spielberg’s brainchild will ever sink, right?...Oh wait.


Related posts:
• No. 1 Jaws (1975)
• No. 2 Jaws 2 (1978)
• No. 4 Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

Jaws, No. 2 - Jaws 2 (1978)

“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.”

No one’s askin’ why a Jaws sequel exists. It was the most successful film of all time, pre-Star Wars (pre-E.T., pre-Jurassic Park, pre-Titanic, pre-Avatar). No, the real question there is – How do E.T. and Titanic have no sequels?

Of course, in the three years since Jaws reinvented movie-going and damaged beach attendance, the cinematic landscape had changed considerably. Here I’m not talking about blockbusters, or marketing, or any of that important stuff. I’m talking about Jaws RIP-OFFS. Yeah, yeah, any sufficiently successful flick ‘ll see the copy-sharks, creating the sort of sequel hurdle the original never had to face. And amongst our illustrious Jaux (that’s faux Jaws) are masterworks Orca, Grizzly, Tentacles, Piranha, Alligator, Up from the Depths, Monster Shark, Killer Shark, Great White, Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, Sharktopus, Finding Nemo…Surely, not all of these things existed once Jaws 2 was perpetrated, but there was something in the waters, as it were, that Jaws 2 had to differentiate itself from. How do you do a proper Jaws film, with so many fakers riding in your dorsal fin wake?

Yeah, Jaws 2 needed continuity. It couldn’t simply be any old killer shark tale (they’re limited to sharks in this series), it needed a reason to tie back to Spielberg’s original masterpiece. And, well, that’ll have to be the cast, I guess…Now, Robert Shaw, he’d died in Jaws, and was in his last year of life anyway – He’s out. Richard Dreyfuss, well, he didn’t stick with this sinking Orca ship, but rather with Spielberg, off making some movie or other about UFOs, apparently. That leaves Roy Schieder’s Sheriff Brody, ‘cause it’s also too soon to go the Friday the 13th sequel route and jettison casts and continuity with equal élan.

Well, Brody’s back…Well, I’ve jumped ahead of myself. That didn’t happen immediately. First, Universal wisely asked Spielberg to return and direct. This being young Spielberg we’re talking about, he balked, as all sequels are but “cheap carnie tricks.” That’s Stephen "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" Spielberg saying that! And just as well, really, for instead we got that UFO movie, and didn’t have to watch the studio’s original dumbass sequel notion – Hooper and Quint’s sons hunting some other shark.

Neither did we have to contend with their second dumbass notion – A prequel set aboard the U.S.S. Indianapolis…Actually, I think that could’ve been a cool idea! Idiot producer Sid Sheinberg, though, didn’t like this…not enough Loraine Gary in it! Huh?!...Oh, right, the man’s wife, who, in his nepotistic mind, ought to get the majority of the Sharkly Action.

So it’s on to their third dumbass notion, it too never coming to fruition (I love how troubled these sequels can become, just like Alien3). This notion – the hiring of director John D. Hancock, Oscar winner…for short subject (Stick My Fingers…Fleet My Feet). With three whole small dramatic pictures under his belt before the 1975 start on Jaws 2 production, Hancock had – my goodness, man – he had better credentials than Spielberg did pre-Jaws.

Nonetheless, Hancock was onboard, beginning a ridiculous 18 months of preproduction on this stupidly conceived sequel. So, first up, who’s gonna write the sequel’s script? How ‘bout the new director’s untested wife? Why, sure! This script, by Dorothy Tristan, concerns Amity as an economic ghost town after the original’s events, with an emphasis on human drama. It seems Hancock, however potentially misguided Jaws 2 might fundamentally have been, intended a proper sequel, such as the ‘70s usually demanded (see The Godfather Part II).

Well, the producers didn’t like this idea – too dark. Who knows, maybe it also sucked! Still, Sheinberg didn’t like it, naturally, ‘cause Gary’s Ellen Brody wasn’t the superstar he knew she was (in bed) – Don’t worry, Sid you ass, you’ll get your wish some day. Richard D. Zanuck, meanwhile, the other producer, opposed Hancock because the sequel to one of the scariest films ever made ought not be scary – Jeebus, man, MAINSTREAM studio fare! Also, Zanuck and Sheinberg hated each other, as well they might. Too bad Hancock was their scape-shark.

So bugger off, Hancock, you’re being replaced with TV director Jeannot Szwarc, whose only other theatrical film then was Bug (even less promisingly, he later made Supergirl and Santa Claus: The Movie). I mean, I know a director as great as Spielberg was off the table, but yeesh!

Szwarc started filming immediately, without a script or even premise. And while he stalled with super-complicated scenes employing the latest malfunctioning mechanical shark-bots (replacing the original malfunctioning sharkdroid, which Universal stupidly destroyed by leaving it out in the sun – IDIOTS), a script was farted out. Now, and only now, do we see a return of original screenwriter Carl Gottlieb. Reportedly, it would’ve cost far less to just hire the obvious right man for the job from the start…and it would’ve made for a better movie anyway. No matter, with Gottlieb and Szwarc not in place, a troubled preproduction could give way to a troubled production.

Scheider was back, as noted, hating the idea of a Jaws 2 and hating director Scwarz just as much – as one of those technically-minded idiot directors thoroughly unconcerned with the dramatic quality of his film (see the whole AVP “series” for another example of this). Still, Scheider had to be in Jaws 2 – contracts and all, you know. Still, the man gave up on The Deer Hunter for THIS?! At least Scheider got a suntan, a quadrupled paycheck, and wasted much of this foolish production’s time to make Marathon Man and Sorcerer.


We’re back in Amity, a setting decision necessitated by Brody’s return and genre dictats. This opens up stupid contrivance issues, about why a second freakishly enormous great white is harassing this non-sharkly neighborhood, which the movie never even tries to solve. It’s the same problem as Die Hard 2, handled even less delicately.

Naturally, there has to be an opening killing…or two. Sequel escalation, you know, which also lifts the body count from 5 to 7. So these two…humans are scuba diving out at the wreckage of the Orca – this apparent desecration of ol’ Bruce’s death site is what must draw Other Bruce over from wherever. So Other Bruce snacks on the two delicious, rubber-wrapped morsels (but only one on screen), in an exceedingly inoffensive kill – all close-ups and bad editing, like Quantum of Solace imitating the Bourne series. Oh, and a diver drops his (or her) camera, which takes the shark’s lovely picture, the “plot” reason for this whole scene.

Over in town, lengthy and padding footage (a common feature of this shorter-than-Jaws flick) sees Martin Brody hie himself to the Amity Shores Holiday Inn – a real estate development and a holdover from Hancock’s version. Joining his wife Ellen (Loraine Gary), Brody pays unimpressed attention as Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton, if memory serves) oversees the hotel’s ribbon cutting, now the financial tool for a new capitalist straw man, Len Peterson (Joseph Mascolo). Like every other Jaws rip-off under the sun, Jaws 2 simply cannot stretch Sharkly Action enough to fill an entire B-movie; hence, you gotta have an evil capitalist (in this case – scientists or military jerks in others) as your human villain. This is a persistent and niggling fact of many post-Jaws blockbusters, even respectable ones like Jurassic Park. “Capitalism bad,” we’re told repeatedly by these merchandising tie-in movies distributed by heartless multinationals. Director Schwartz, or whatever that frog’s name is, goes all “artist” on us, summing up this entire trend in one amazing shot. It’s, like, real subtle and all!


‘Tis three years since Jaws, in real life and in-film, yet…yet the Brody’s brood, Mike and Sean, have both somehow aged six years. So Mike, formerly 12 (actor’s age), is now 18 (ditto), and played by charisma-challenged hulk of ‘70s hairdo Mark Gruner. Here’s the reason for this sudden violation of the space-time continuum: Jaws 2 is concerned with teens! Oh dear Godly Lord, yes, now in 1978 we’re starting to experience the true courting of the youth market – surely the audience for Jaws, but not its subject. Well, Jaws 2 is disgustingly correcting that oversight. The whiff of slashers in the air (genre codifier Halloween being Jaws 2’s contemporary), we must see the franchise’s brilliant maritime adventure transformed into a Dead Teenager Movie…Without even all that many dead teenagers, ridding audiences of even most reasons to watch those things.

Mike’s mass of teenaged teenager pals, all like twelve of ‘em, is apportioned to us with an artlessness usually reserved for the suspects in a Charlie Chan movie. I swear, slashers are better at this! Of course, when their entire concern is a teenage cast, they ought to give them care; Jaws 2 is ostensibly still about Brody (Martin), so we get the usual teenage stock types with less attention. And this is after Gottlieb’s rewrites beefed these ciphers up.

Okay, who do we have here?...Amity’s beauty queen and resident desirable blonde slut, Tina (Ann Dusenberry). Vaughn’s son, Larry Jr. (David Eliot), is an ass-in-training, like Pa. Mike, we’ve met. There’s Andy (Gary Springer), the one I first noted as the nerd, then switched to the comic relief upon discovery of other actors playing an ultra-nerd and a semi-ultra-nerd. There’s various others, but I can only differentiate the ones with immediately distinguishing nerd features – and I never learnt the nerds’ names! Oh, and there’s Jackie (Donna Wilkes, the only one with a future career – in Angel, which begat a franchise I gotta watch). She’s the cousin of…some other girl. She’s also an out-of-towner, which is suddenly a good thing in Jaws 2, as it causes simultaneous ejaculations across the entire male teenage cast. At this particular androgynous nonentity, above all the others? Sure, why not? “Tits like a sparrow,” in Larry Junior’s genius assessment.

The teens pass their idle days (and way too much of Jaws 2’s underwhelming screen time) puttering about the sea upon their various pathetic crafts: catamarans, men-o-war (or is that man-o-wars?), sailboats, duct-taped garbage. Here’s the producers’ explanation, that it’s a maritime equivalent of similar car-based landlubbing teen assemblies. Oy, sheltered producer misinterpretations of teenage culture, again driving the content of our teenager movies!

We, as an audience, are desirous of this mass’s deaths en masse. Even if that were coming, it’s too early for that now. Unlike Jaws, which took pains to make its shark common public knowledge, Jaws 2’s Brody vs. developer plot cannot, er, develop unless the shark remains in the shadows until then, killing on occasion to, er, tide us over, but never killing with plot importance. (Those divers, for example, seemingly have no relatives or anyone who care about them, as if there weren’t actual human beings, even while Brody takes such care with their camera.)


Our victims for now, though, are a water-skier and her boat companion. Who’ve done nothing wrong to warrant death, at least not in horror movie terms. It’s random, but not in that good way like Alex Kintner in Jaws, and it seems more cynical for that, even while it’s less overtly affecting. And the shark’s pursuit of the water-skier is at least technically capable – it ought to be, as it was Sczwrzz’s initial concern with this film. Her death, though, is PG and unaffecting.

Not so her companion. She beats back Other Bruce with gasoline, follows by a flare. Whoops!, wrong order. So ka-boomo for her, poor lass, and extensive burning for Other Bruce. It’s not evident yet, but this is the movie’s way to make the 25-foot long killer shark scary – facial scars! Poorly done facial scars, worse than Tom Savini’s $12 efforts at the tail end of The Burning. If this ain’t a sign of how our fishy fiend has fallen into formulaic flotsam, I don’t know what is.


Brody’s investigation into the exploded boat is dismissed by Vaughn as another totally ordinary maritime disaster, ever so common off Amity’s shores, we’re led to believe – Yeesh, sharks or no, I ain’t travelin’ to that place! (In Jaws, Vaughn was a Shark Agnostic; here, he’s a Shark Atheist.)

But Brody’s investigation, turning up no shark evidence and thus leaving his plot stalled in first gear, at least reveals one thing: an electrical cable spanning the waters beyond Amity, set up in a ham-handed manner that just shrieks at you “The shark’s gonna get electrocuted in this one! Just go home now!”

A little bit of bland, unrelatable teenaged frolicking reveals a beached, munched orca prop – payback to De Laurentis for letting his orca chomp on a great white in Orca. This affords Brody the opportunity to contact a marine biologist. It’s not Hooper, naturally (he’s off in Antarcticostralia, or wherever, we’re told), but a posthumously-named female scientist with but one scene. She assures Brody she cannot ID the orca’s killer, due to its non-existent state of decay, and she even mispronounces great white’s Latinate name in the process – It’s a big deal when I pick up on that! She dismisses Brody’s shark-o-noia, and bats down a proposed premise that would return later to haunt this franchise (“Sharks don’t take things personally.”).

Also, she expounds at length, for no reason, that sharks respond to rhythmic thumping, like radar signals or pornography soundtracks. Hmm, bet that won’t come into play in the climax, right? (Just look to Jaws, and its gas canisters, for an example of competent foreshadowing. It’s an art, man.)

We’re now at the minute equivalent of the Ben Gardner scene from Jaws. For while Jaws 2 neglects many smart ideas at all turns, it is a consummate retread. So Brody discovers a bobbing bit of debris along the coast. Fake-out POV shots (and John Williams’ score) are used in a way Spielberg would never dare, and a burnt corpse leaps out at us…Er, the 3-D entry’s next time, guys. And no, there’s no way that body could’ve done that.

(Like many a mediocre sequel, Jaws 2’s main value is to showcase how Jaws really ought to have turned out. I mean, we’re lucky we got a single good shark flick in the first place.)

Brody alone is suspecting a shark, even when everyone else is (rightly) dismissing these concerns. (We’re only on Brody’s side ‘cause we’ve seen the beastie ourselves, at director Sczczczcz’s insistence on pimping out his semi-functional fiberglass star.) So Brody, with his years of shark fear (and past experience), creates the ultimate shark weapon – No, not something practical like an anti-rhino-rifle. I mean cyanide-filled bullets. Homemade! These’d never work (they’d gum up the pistol, or explode delicious cyanide in Brody’s face, or something), and they aren’t even used against the shark, so what with the insistence on these things anyway?

Beach crowds are assembled, right in line with when Spielberg assembled his beach crowds. Montagery is put aside to focus on the film’s unwieldy mass of thoroughly unrelated subplots – a sure sign of a poorly constructed sequel. The moronic teens sail around, enjoying life and irony in equal degrees. Mike, at the reasonable insistence of his father, has a job. What effrontery! Vaughn and Peterson are perpetuating their non-starting condo development story, with Ellen in tow as Peterson’s employee solely so she can have a climactic moment with him later on. And Brody is up in the town’s permanent shark tower, which Vaughn instantly opposes, even though he’s surely complicit in the thing’s existence. I mean, Brody didn’t just pull it from hyperspace like Felix the Cat, right? And you fool!, Vaughn, can’t you suggest he’s looking out for the myriad other maritime hazards you yourself acknowledge plague your deadly, deadly town?

Whatever, Brody spots a dark mass in the water (Oprah? Cthulhu?), and shrieks for all the beachgoers to promptly stampede themselves in response. Then he shoots the ocean, Xerxes-style. But it’s only bluefish, to the seagulls’ infinite delight. The townsfolk all shuffle away, even as Brody insists they return to the cyanide-poisoned waters. Even Ellen deserts her husband, just so, you know, they can resolve things later, and call it an arc. Only son Sean is there to help Papa collect his toxic bullet shells barehanded – Awww!


Around now, the plot insists Brody develop those divers’ photos – I hate when clues that’ve been present for an hour are delayed like this. It’s so artificial! Anyway, one of those photos depicts…UFOs? Nessie? Lindsey Lohan? Honestly, it ain’t too clear, and that’s when I’m looking for a shark – considering the title and all. But Brody, he sees “shark” when I see “Stan Brakhage experiment,” and so he takes this one-and-only photo to Town Hall, so Peterson and his elected minions can promptly dismiss it. Considering the mere arguments, sans character judgment, Peterson’s right; Brody’s acting insane. But even reasonable arguments aren’t to be believed, not in movies. Still, Brody’s abusive accusations are not heroic, and in a movie (unlike Jaws) where we’re supposed to find Brody traditionally heroic. Ladies and gentlemen, our hero:


He’s fired.

I’d follow that track more, but we got teens to “enjoy.” Here they are at the bar, not drinking, discussing tomorrow’s plans to drink. To the lighthouse it is, with the unspoken truth being that this is all a setup to get ‘em near Other Bruce’s hungry maw. And Mike is roundly chastised for his gainful employment, so he’s sore tempted to join his hateful, characterless, unintelligent buddies out on the water. That Jackie, the most attractive woman Amity has ever known, suggests further dalliances, and that’s all Mike needs!

God damn me, it’s been, what, half an hour since Sharkly Action?! Yup. Here’s the problem with Jaws 2. Spielberg’s film insisted on the shark’s omnipresence, even on land, the whole plot driven by its persistent threat. Here, we have plenty of time to focus on romance, and character breakdowns, and so many other plot-stalling distractions. And I suspect the further sequels shall continue this flaw.

No matter, Mike sneaks past his jobless father’s drunken form for this fate-tempting boat trip. Middle school-aged Sean tags along, because what’s a few potential teenager shark meals without an endangered child to really get those heartstrings pumping? Oh, Sean’s not gonna get et, we know that! This is why children and ball-less horror films rarely mix.


That shot up there? That sums up Jaws 2 more succinctly than anything. Imagine it, five minute intervals of sailing montages. This is not a taut movie.

But soon sailing footage is traded for scuba footage. Lengthy, lengthy scuba footage. At last, a change of pace! Just-introduced guide “Sparky” leads an anonymous gaggle of tourists past Amity’s famous plastic lobsters, John Williams doing all the work to keep this movie afloat, when –

The SHARK! At freaking last! Too bad it’s too murky for a screen cap, but the shark, uh, like, sidles up against Sparky and – Hold up, I can do that with more alliteration! A sudden scarred shark sidles shockingly alongside scared scuba shaman Sparky, sending said swimmer sailing sloopwards…There we go! So, translated, that means Sparky rises suddenly to the surface, gets himself the speechless bends for his trouble (to delay that Shark Truth longer yet), and Other Bruce completely neglects to chomp down on any of the other tasty divers. Nope, not when he can stalk after the nearby teenaged regatta. Kill ‘em all, Other Bruce!

Obliging Other Bruce’s desires, mighty slut Tina puts her dingy dinghy in neutral apart from the others, so that she and a…boy can have some luvvvvv. That’s right, Jaws 2 is actually invoking the Have Sex and Die rule! And as Tina demands a carpet, to minimize sex bruises, the shark knocks the boat, sending the…boy into the water! Eat ‘im, shark! Eat that teenager! Yeah, here it comes! Die! DIE! YEAH!...Actually, it’s a rather listless de-lifing, but a combined scarcity of Sharkly Action, and a schadenfreude-esque desire to see teens die, makes it good.

Brody, Ellen in tow, is now aware of the teens’ cumulative stupidities, and has commandeered the police boat to go rescue them from almost-certain Brucings. He also radios a chopper for help, but the plot cannot use it yet, so it’s “busy.”

More footage of blissfully ignorant teens sailing! Man, that’s what I needed!

Brody happens upon Tina, strangely uneaten, cowering in a pool of overacting. Making a bizarre decision, Brody shall continue on alone to save the other fool teens, despite his hydrophobia and inept seamanship. Thus Ellen and his dopey deputy (a real seaman) are left with Tina in her pathetic boat, surely at the mercy of Other Bruce…

– Except he’s busy ramming the countless other worthless boats, sending interchangeable semi-named teenaged ciphers into the drink! Somehow, Other Bruce never quite eats any of these folk (what with digestion and all), but it’s something. All in all, actually, this shark is eternally incapable of truly threatening the eight or so teenaged targets, despite how utterly seaworthless their vessels are. He makes one effort, on Mike, merely exposing his animatronic hydraulics for his trouble:


During a characteristic lull in Sharkly Action, the teens lash their vessels together into a grand omni-sloop, something I once did with a bunch of rafts while shooting the Colorado. There were no river sharks there, though. This patchwork, makeshift, directionless vessel, patched together from unrelated constituent parts – Hey! I’ve just described Jaws 2!

Anyway, the mega-sloop ultimately drifts its mega-way towards Cable Junction, a precursor to Waterworld’s Atolls, and the setting of all those seaborne electrical cables – See, they’s gonna shock a shark! Also, the fat teen’s hungry. It’s funny. Oh, and here’s that chopper, its function to the plot now evident. So it’s gonna rescue the idiots from their present be-Darwining, only…


Naw, Other Bruce has seen Grizzly, and knows a helicopter is the frailest craft in all genre works…somehow even more frail than the super-omni-sloop itself. So the helicopter explodes, shark survives, and flying rotor debris patently fails to slice off any teenager faces, quite unlike what a modern Jaws rip-off would do – Piranha 3D, anyone?

Okay, I have a theory for the shark’s inability to just do in these teens. Think about it: You’ve got yourself a bag full of potato chips. Unlike Lays’ slogan, you can eat just one – at least, you don’t devour all the snacks in a single ravenous gulp like Slimer. So, those chips are eternally at your mercy, yet they remain mostly uneaten…for a while.

But now, Other Bruce is hungry, having used up all those calories attacking the helicopter, and having not even gotten at the crunchy human nougat within. Thus, with seriously little effort, the beast goes right ahead and gobbles down a…girl…Er, Jackie’s cousin, whom research suddenly reveals is named…Marge (Martha Swatek).


Meanwhile, Ellen, Tina and the deputy are back on shore, having apparently been towed there off screen by some unidentified Good Samaritan. This is so Ellen can finally tell off Peterson, and put a climax to all that anti-capitalist uselessness.

Brody, boating along after the teens, comes across…well, one of their boats, separated from the others in a moment our beleaguered, Oscar-winning editor couldn’t make clear. Mike is among this bunch (also the many nerds), leaving us with…

Sean – Sean as the only character still in danger for whom we care about even remotely. And the more I think about it, the more my potato chip theory holds less water than the super-omni-ultra-mega-sloop. Other Bruce cannot sink it simply because this movie is sad and pathetic and a poor, poor excuse for the original Jaws.

Besides, the teens are now a mere 10 feet from Cable Junction (safety), shark nowhere in sight, and yet they still cannot get to it. Incompetence!, man, from both humans and shark! Man, why can’t that shark even rip through the flimsy cloth that forms these sloops’ hulls?


Okay, forget I asked that.

Brody’s here now, ready to take part in this ballet of incompetence. So as he tries to aid the extras onto his boat, instead he crashes it into an island. Oy! So the teens simply swim over to the island and – Well, that was easy! But Sean is still out on the water (Jackie too), and the shark’s screen time is growing more and more generous. Quick, Martin Brody, you’ve – got – to – do – something!

Like piece together all that foreshadowing about electricity and rhythmic jungle thumping, say. And be sure to make this moment be a pale reflection of how you offed the last shark. I know! We could employ an underwhelming “action one liner,” say “Open wide!” Sure, that’ll work!



Spark shark! And that’s it then, with roughly nine more teenagers alive than there ought to be. No word, of course, of the power that’s suddenly out all over Amity Island…

Jaws 2 cost $30 million to make (averaging a whopping $80,000 a day), the most expensive film Universal had yet made. That’s roughly three times what it cost to make Jaws, a notoriously over-budget flick. Still, the investors and money men were okay this, and really, they drive the sequel genre. See, here we see the emergence of “market risk” as a movie idea – A sequel can still make but 40% of the original (as Jaws 2 did, with its $81 million domestic), but if you can guarantee it’ll make that (by dint of name, mostly), then it’s worth even a wildly inflated sequel budget. And this, the true innovation of Jaws 2 (like its predecessor, this film is notable for its accountancy as much as its craft), determined the path of all Hollywood sequels to come. If you can strike the perfect balance of cost to profit, you can justify any sort of sequel. Such thinking lead to the Saw series.

So, as a one-off sequel, Jaws 2 did what Universal demanded of it, and was…OK. Still, franchisery wasn’t yet an obvious thought, and that danged “market risk” thing rather guaranteed Jaws 2 would destroy the possibility of Jaws as a franchise to rival, say, James Bond. There’d be more sequels, sure, two of ‘em, but they still aren’t helped out by the existence of Jaws 2.

So I guess it’s back to square one for potential shark-jumping sequel mongers…


Related posts:
• No. 1 Jaws (1975)
• No. 3 Jaws 3-D (1983)
• No. 4 Jaws: The Revenge (1987)