Jaws The Revenge
Overall impressions of the film:
There’s debate over which of the Jaws sequels is the worst, and while “Jaws: The Revenge” is awful, I think it’s technically a better-made film than “Jaws 3,” which was originally presented in cinemas as “Jaws 3-D.” That film, which starred Dennis Quaid as Chief Brody’s oldest, now grown up son, Michael, was removed from the Jaws canon, so I think that due to this fact, it sits as the worst.
But “worst” doesn’t mean “least entertaining,” and if we’re scoring by that criteria, then yes, “Jaws: The Revenge” is the worst of the four-film series. Whereas “Jaws 3” pretty much gives up pretense of being anything other than a cash-grab, “Jaws: The Revenge” actually tries to wrap up the story of the Brody family as they grapple once again with a killer great white. Only this time “it’s personal,” as the memorably awful tagline proclaims. And it is ACTUALLY personal!
While it doesn’t set out to explain how and why a shark is ONCE AGAIN terrorizing the Brodys, this movie eludes to 1) the fact that shark families somehow hold a grudge against people who have wronged them and 2. there’s a kind of psychic connection between the nasty fish and Brody matriarch, Ellen. No, I’m not kidding. The revenge-plot eluded to in the name of this film is two-sided! On one hand, you’ve got a shark apparently so Hell-bent on seeking retribution for the murder of its kin that it shows up in good ol’ Amity around Christmas time and then, incredibly, follows Ellen Brody and family when they relocate to The Bahamas. On the other hand, you’ve got Ellen seeking revenge for the shark-perpetuated horrors that have been visited upon her family. So… plenty of revenge to go around!
The shark, of course, strikes first blood, and man, is it ever a misguided and ugly scene!
Let me set the stage: as I mentioned, it’s Christmas on Amity Island and everyone’s feeling the holiday buzz. Sean Brody, youngest son of Martin and Ellen from the first two movies, is all grown up and has – like his now recently-deceased father – become a lawman on the island. When a call comes in for him to clear-out some debris that’s washed into the harbor, Sean tells his mom and fiancee to head off to a get-together without him. Now, this is the kid – as this movie will agonizingly, ponderously remind us – who sat beside Chief Brody at the dinner table in that lovely moment from the first Jaws when Brody’s actions – sighs, face in hands, etc. – are mirrored by his son. This is THAT kid. It’s also technically the kid who was positively TRAUMATIZED in “Jaws 2” when a good friend of his became fish-food right beside him. So, we’ve got history. We’ve got some skin in this game and the movie doesn’t care ONE SINGLE BIT. No, Jaws: The Revenge plops Sean into the harbor on the patrol boat and then CHOMP, a shark lunges out of the water and tears his arm clear off!
Horrified, Sean calls for help but a Christmas Chorale on the island drowns out his cries. The shark headbutts the boat, knocking Sean into the water and then he’s dragged under the water, dead and gone.
This is Chief Brody’s kid. The kid in the estuary when the shark kills the creeper kayaker in the first movie. The kid that Brody saves by fucking electrocuting the Freddy Krueger shark in the second movie. This is how they end his story? I felt personally affronted to have this character so quickly dispatched in what felt like a poorly-staged cold open.
Real quick: My sister hates the movie “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” because about 40 minutes in, Isla Nubar’s volcano lays waste to all the dinosaurs that remain on the island while the protagonists sail away. And they lay on the tragedy pretty thick, with this lingering shot of a brachiosaurus that’s stuck on the pier, staring longingly for escape and it is slowly enveloped by the ash and smoke cloud.
Sean is my brachiosaurus and Jaws: The Revenge got me right pissed-off from the get-go because of it.
Anyhow, Lorraine Gary is back as Ellen Brody and after Sean’s funeral, she gives in to her oldest son’s request that she join he, his wife and Ellen’s grand-daughter down in the Bahamas where Michael now works as… a freaking MARINE BIOLOGIST! What’s the deal with the Brody kids and STILL GOING INTO THE WATER? Chief Brody freaking hated the water and, TWO TIMES, thwarted bloodthirsty sharks that damn near killed his children. WHY THE HELL WOULD THEY EVER LIVE ANYWHERE NEAR WATER?! Never mind ACTUALLY WORK IN THE OCEAN. Bonkers.
So Ellen goes to The Bahamas where we spend time watching The Last Starfighter, Lance Guest, as grown-up Michael while he dives with his co-researcher Jake, played by Solo’s Mario Van Peebles. No, not Han Solo’s “Solo,” but the 1996 action opus “Solo,” which should probably be on a short-list for this show. Peebles, incidentally, plays a native islander with one of the worst quasi-Jamaican accents I’ve ever heard. And when we’re not subjected to that, we get to watch Ellen swoon for Michael Caine’s charming airplane pilot named, Hoagie, who says things like “I knew a one-armed piano player once. Took him two minutes to play the Minute Waltz.”
Hoagie acts as a distraction for Ellen who finally admits that, yeah, everyone else is right and there’s no way a shark could follow her so far away from home and in waters as warm as these. Honestly, this part was the most believable to me because if there’s one person that would get my mind off a shark with a vendetta, it’s Michael Caine, who famously said about this film “I’ve never seen it, but I have seen the house it bought and it’s terrific.” No kidding, Caine was paid $1 million for ten minutes of screen time.
Now, back at sea, Michael and Jake are bearing witness to an undersea mass sponge migration or something when, suddenly, they’re attacked by a shark. Michael makes it out alive, but doesn’t tell his mom because he doesn’t want her to fall back into the belief they’re being hunted… which apparently they are. But she doesn’t need Michael to tell her because, yeah, when the shark is nearby or attacking, SHE CAN SENSE IT. Christ.
All of this comes to a head when Michael’s daughter is on a banana boat that gets attacked in one of the more laughable sequences of the entire franchise. I spoke about this scene before in my bottom five dangerous animals list, so I won’t go into detail beyond saying that the animatronic shark simply looks ridiculous.
Ellen, feeling personally affronted by this audacious shark’s attack, commandeers her son’s research vessel and goes to sea, presumably to somehow settle the score. It’s important to note that she does all this wearing the most 80’s black-and-white striped suitcoat perhaps ever caught on film, shoulder pads and all. Michael and Jake give chase in a slow-moving raft with a lawn-mower engine. Randomly, Hoagie – Michael Caine – is returning from… somewhere out at sea… and explains he has a faster way to catch up to Ellen. And yeah, before you know it, The Last Starfighter and Solo join Alfred the Butler in a prop-plane that is in no way a sea plane, but which they land in at sea when they see from the air that Ellen is battling the shark.
Michael and Jake jump out of the plane and then, in one of the funniest lines perhaps ever in a movie, Hoagie is surprised by the sudden appearance of the shark. [[play clip]]
With the entire fucking sea plane, and presumably Hoagie, at the bottom of the sea, the shark returns its attention to the boat where Jake has prepared an electric pulse device that should confuse and perturb the shark were it lodged inside of him somehow. Suddenly and miraculously, Hoagie comes swimming back from the depths while Jake valiantly steps out to the very front of the boat, onto the long bowsprit, and before you can say “hey this is sort of like what Quint did in the first movie,” CHOMP, the shark has lunged up, taking half the bowsprit, the electronic pulse device, and Jake with it.
From here, things get – somehow – even stupider and more confusing. While Michael triggers the electronic pulse device, which sends the shark into lunging fits during which it somehow, I shit you not, leaps out of the water and roars like a lion, Ellen steers the boat right toward the animal. Now, throughout this film, we’ve been treated to sepia-toned flashbacks to the first “Jaws,” and in those moments, it was Ellen reflecting on moments she did experience, like that dinner scene between Brody and Sean. But here, inexplicably, Ellen remembers both Sean’s death – which she didn’t see – as well as Chief Brody’s final “Smile you son of a bitch” moment from the original movie. And just like that, she impales the shark on the sharp, broken bowsprit and – at least in this cut of the film – the sharp fucking EXPLODES. Only the footage we see isn’t from the Bahamas shark, but the shark FROM THE FIRST MOVIE!
Now, I saw this movie in the theater way back in 1987, so in addition to the fact that makes me older than I care to admit, I also didn’t see this ending until the revisit I did for this show! In the version of the movie I remember, the shark is impaled and, in slow motion, bleeds out, breaking off the bow of the ship and making it sink. The was no explosion, which makes way more sense, because WHY THE FUCK WOULD A SHARK SUDDENLY EXPLODE? Presumably it was due to Jake’s magic electronic pulse device coupled with Ellen spearing it with the bowsprit, which, if you cannot tell, is a word that’s new to me and which I cannot stop saying.
As if all of this wasn’t enough, somehow – and even more inexplicably than Hoagie’e reemergence from his sunken plane – Jake survived being eaten by the shark! Michael grabs him and everyone, I guess, swims back to shore where we get a silly coda where Hoagie is flying Ellen back to Amity and he says [[ role clip ]]. “When I come back, remind to tell you about the time I took 100 nuns to Nairobi!”
Additional Notes:
This movie looks pretty gorgeous – not gonna lie. The cinematographer, John McPherson, chose to shoot the film in Super 35, which gives the picture a wider scope. The image feels big, and the shots in a snowy Amity Island, which is Martha’s Vineyard in reality, and the blue seas of The Bahamas really do impress. McPherson did a lot of TV work, but not a ton of particularly well-regarded Hollywood films.
Similarly, director Joseph Sargent also did a lot of TV work, but that was largely after the failure of “Jaws: The Revenge” sunk the entire franchise. Prior to this film, Sargent was known for films like “MacArthur” starring Gregory Pek and the thriller, “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.”
Sargent and McPherson have spoken at length about the maddening pace required to pull off the movie, a mandate tossed down by the head of MCA Universal, Sidney Sheinberg who insisted the film be ready for a July 1987 release date when development of the project started in September of ’86. Sheinberg, incidentally, was the husband of none other than Ellen Brody herself, Lorraine Gary, who came out of acting retirement to play Ellen one more time.
It’s obvious the film was a rush-job. Whether it’s the nonsensical screenplay, the sloppiness of the final scenes or the generally unconvincing shark effects, the thing reeks of not having enough time to be what it wanted to be.
And that’s what’s most frustrating about “Jaws: The Revenge.” The movie is largely reverential to the original film and wants so badly to be an extension of the original narrative – perhaps even moreso than “Jaws 2” did. Apparently, rather than Shaun dying at the start of the picture, it was supposed to be Chief Brody himself! Also, Murray Hamilton who played Mayor Larry Vaughan, was going to reprise his role, but died before production began.
So you have a movie that HAD to be made in a very short window of time and that desperately wanted to be more than a cash-grab like it’s predecessor and you end up with this bizarre anomaly of a movie that is both too good to be “so bad it’s good” and way too bad to be considered “good.” With largely solid, earnest performances from Lance Guest as Michael and Lorraine Gary as Ellen, there’s a sense of missed opportunity here to provide the franchise with the correct kind of closure. And that’s sad because, at the end of the day, there’s not a single franchise where you start at such stratospheric heights and end at the very bottom of the barrel.
Bottom Five Fourth Installments:
5.) Alien: Resurrection (1997)
dir. Jeanne Pierre Jeunet
I’ve at least mentioned my initial distaste for the third Alien film, directed by David Fincher, but I’ve mostly stayed quiet about “Alien: Resurrection.” But when I think back on the film, it’s pretty unfavorably, to say the least. With a premise based around a clone of Ellen Ripley that’s birthed 200 years after the events of the first films, this fourth installment of the Alien series is visually imaginative and filled with fun supporting players like Ron Perlman, Dan Hedeya, Michael Wincott and Brad Dourif. But as directed by “The City of Lost Children’s” Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the film in no way feels like an Alien film. Everything from the wide-angle extreme close-ups of the actors to the over-stylized sets to the muted, warm color pallet that harkens too much back to the look of Fincher’s third film: all of it makes this thing feel like it’s taking place in a different universe. I’m all for reinterpretation happening within a franchise – Hell, I’m a huge fan of “The Last Jedi!” – but this one felt narratively sloppy and tonally off, with injections of humor, like Ripley owning some big tough guys on a basketball court, that simply feel forced. And that hybrid, mutant baby alien/human thing with the huge wide eyes? Just no… absolutely not. When you compare the film against the highs achieved by the first two films, and even the tension mustered by the third, it’s a startling drop in quality; an impotent chest-burster of a film that has failed, even with the forgiveness of time, to mature into a member of the xenomorph hive.
4.) Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
dir. Taika Waititi (Tie-ka WHY-tee-tee)
While the third movie in the series, “Thor: Ragnarok,” also directed by Love and Thunder’s Taika Waititi (Tie-ka WHY-tee-tee), injected the stand-alone franchise with much-needed doses of humor and fun, the fourth film triples-down on the absurdity in nearly every way, giving audiences a loud, bleeting – Jesus, those fucking goats – and ultimately very tonally uneven installment. I’m not sure who thought it was a great idea to bring back Natalie Portman’s “Jane Foster,” only to give her cancer and have her waste away while also, somehow, becoming the new Thor, but… here we are. Narratively, the thing is all over the place, going in far too many directions seemingly all at once, with stakes both huge – the murder of all Gods which could undo existence – and small: Thor must save the children of New Asgard from Christian Bale’s boogeyman, Gorr, The God-killer. I admire Love and Thunder’s overall aim to anchor the villain in a truly understandable madness caused by the death of his daughter and his being the last of his race – you know, instead of just dropping him in an electric eel tank – but when his possession by the Necrosword and his release from his rage give way to a renewed belief in love sprung from Thor’s love for Jane; it’s all simply too much. So many superhero flicks take a kitchen-sink mentality to their installments, and this fourth Thor flick is definitely one of them. But for me, it’s the unrealized potential of Thor – what’s left on the table by Waititi and Hemsworth after a truly phenomenal fourth movie – that has me placing it on my list.
3.) Men in Black: International (2019)
dir. F. Gary Gray
Usually when the original director of a movie series leaves, it means bad things. Think Spielberg when he left Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones in his wake. (Yes, by the way, I know a lot of people hate on “The Lost World” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”, but the movies following those are FAR worse.) So when Barry Sonnenfeld let go of the reigns on the Men in Black series, and both Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones didn’t return, it was a pretty sure sign quality was going to dip. And dip it did. Interestingly, this is the second movie on my list starring Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson, but I don’t see it as an indictment on either of them as I think both are usually talented and quite charming. But here, in this quasi-reboot of the sharp-suited alien Ghostbusters movies? They’re charmless, graceless and largely unfunny. I think a lot of the blame falls at the feet of producer Walter F. Parkes and direct F. Gary Gray. Word is the original screenplay for the movie was filled with modern-day commentary on immigration and involved an alien music group based on The Beatles. This is apparently what Hemsworth and Thompson signed on for. But during production – allegedly due to budgeting issues – producer Parkes rewrote the script considerably, confusing the actors and pissing off Gray, who attempted to leave the director’s chair several times. These arguments carried on all the way through the editing process, ultimately leading to two cuts of the movie that were tested by the studio. Parkes’s version won out and we got the steaming turd that is this joyless, not-so-special-effects-heavy mess.
2.) Vegas Vacation (1997)
dir. Stephen Kessler
Once again, I am invoking the “when the head creative leaves, the quality drops” thesis. In this case, it’s John Hughes who left the vacation series after writing the first three and ugh, does it ever show. The storyline finds Chevy Chase’s Clark Griswold suddenly saddled with a gambling addiction and Beverly D’Angelo’s Ellen being seduce by Wayne Newton… Actually you know what? Let’s do this a different way. In my house, I have this thing I do with certain movie series where I simply ignore, outright, the worst installment – especially if it’s the last. It’s a short list too. I’ve heard tell of a “Poltergeist III” or a “Die Hard 5,” but surely those don’t exist. And what’s this thing, this “Vegas Vacation?” No way would anyone ever make that. And what? Without John Hughes? A fool’s errand that! Were this movie to exist, I’m sure it wouldn’t be the directorial debut of a guy who would some years later make a documentary about the most punchably-faced actor of all-time, Paul Williams. That’d be nuts! And no chance it would be the sole writing credit for a well-known editor who did some of the biggest movies of the past ten years. Stuff like, I don’t know, maybe “Godzilla,” “The Last Jedi” or that J-Lo flick that came out this year, “Atlas.” There’s simply no way a dude could fall that hard outside of his lane in his one go. And you know what? There’s definitely NO CHANCE Christie Brinkley would come back for this one as “the girl in the red ferrari!” Because something like that, it’d likely end up being nominated for a 1997 Stinkers Bad Movie Award in the category of “The Sequel Nobody was Clamoring For.” Hm. Good thing absolutely none of that ever happened, or else it might end up as number two on my bottom five 4th installments list
1.) Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)
dir. Sidney J. Furie
Remember when I said that when the original director of a series leave, the quality drops? The same can apparently true of producers as well. Alexander and Ilya Salkind were the original father-son duo who produced Christopher Reeves first three Superman movies. But after the lukewarm reception of “Superman 3” and the subsequent box-office bombs that were “Supergirl” and “Santa Claus: The Movie,” the producers sold the movie rights to the Israeli producing team powerhouse of Golan and Globus, who founded Cannon Films. Hilariously, though, they too were running out of money after a string of box office losers and projects stuck in development Hell. (Oh, one of those projects? The first known iteration of a feature-length “Barbie” film!) Things got so bad in 1987 that Golan and Globus split the the budget for Superman 4 in half, partially so they could also fund “Masters of the Universe” which they deemed in press materials as “the Star Wars of the 80’s.” Both films underperformed at the box office, but this final appearance of Christopher Reeve as Superman is a total embarrassment, filled with God-awful special effects, a nonsensical storyline and one of the dumbest damn villains ever, Nuclear Man played by a buff blonde dude named Mark Pillow who did next to nothing after. This was likely in part due to the fact that Gene Hackman dubbed over Pillow’s voice for the film, which is every bit as jarring as one would assume. [[ roll clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ezPVizHpY0 ]] But the thing I always remember most about this formidably horrible flick is the scene where Superman is ambushed by Nuclear Man on the moon and the two grapple in one of the worst fight scenes this side of classic Trek. Shot in slow-motion and with Nuclear Man grunting like he’s an ape having an excellent time in the wild, this scene plants Superman: The Quest for Peace as not only a perfect entry for a bottom five 4th Installment, but also for countless other bottom fives, including bottom five villains, bottom five fight scenes, bottom five space scenes, bottom five dubbing, bottom five slow motion scenes, bottom five hairstyles, and bottom five moon sets.
Jay calls an audible, replacing “Superman IV” with “Excorcist: Believer” because, well, fuck that movie.