Jaws 3-D (1983)

Tagline: “A new dimension in terror.”

Running Time: 99 minutes

Film quality: 2/5
Gore Content: 2/5
Entertainment Value: 3/5
Originality: 3/5

Introduction

One classic original and a solid second instalment meant that a third film was inevitable and it had to be something different. Clearly aware that the first two films, essentially, followed the same formula without appearing to be carbon copies, the makers needed something to freshen things up. Following the modest successes of the third films in the Amityville and Friday 13th series in their employment of a renewed interest in the 3D format, an underwater adventure and the potential of having things thrust at the audience proved too much of a temptation to resist. Audiences were about to get a lot closer to Bruce…and his/her younger daughter!

In a nutshell…

Following on from their traumatic encounter with the shark in ‘Jaws 2’, Michael Brody now works at a Sea World centre and invites his younger brother Sean to stay. Sean is now terrified of the water and his arrival coincides with an uninvited guest of a far more man eating kind.

So what’s good about it?

I don’t think anyone can hold their hands up and say that it’s anything other than a step down from ‘Jaws 2’ in almost every way. However, it is still just about entertaining and whilst, unlike the first two, it really doesn’t stand up to repeated viewing, I don’t recall being bored and have returned to it by choice a couple of times whilst channel hopping. The writers were wise not to set it in Amity, it does feel fresh as a result and I think the idea of catching a Great White and trying to nurse it back to health is an interesting, if not very realistic one! You can certainly see how an animal lover would choose this as an option whist the nautical equivalent of a big game hunter wants to blow it to kingdom come. This is what puts it WAY ahead of the utterly and completely awful fourth instalment, it has likeable and believable characters that you would cheer for and that’s half the battle.

Also unexpected, until about halfway through at least, was the presence of two sharks. Now, I’m not convinced that sharks are maternal/paternal and I don’t know how a 35 foot shark can be that incognito for that length of time, but I quite liked the direction the film went, for entertainment purposes rather than logic at least. Whereas the first film is cat and mouse and the second plays out like a slasher film, this one morphs into a disaster film at the midway point. There are shades of ‘The Towering Inferno’ and ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ as visitors to the Sea World are trapped. It adds an otherwise untapped dimension (one that doesn’t require a pair of red and green specs) to the film with scores of people in danger who aren’t in the water instead the five or six who are. I’m not sure they quite make the most of this, in fact you almost forget those people are trapped until the very end, but you’ve got to hand it to the writers once again for trying something new.

There’s really not much else about it that you could realistically describe as good…the music is what it is, the direction (Joe Alves was the 32nd unit director on the second instalment and production designed on the first) is unspectacularly okay, acting so-so despite terrible dialogue to utter, but we did have a lucky escape. The Zanuck-Brown production team initially wanted this to be a spoof called ‘Jaws 3, People 0’ written by the National Lampoon team. Thankfully, in a rare moment of studio interference for the good of the world, Universal were strongly against the idea, believing it would ruin the first two. Some early drafts also strongly hinted that the shark would somehow be the same one that perished at the end of ‘Jaws 2’, presumably picking up on the ‘Friday 13th’ theme of an unkillable killer!

And what about the bad?

Unfortunately, no matter how likeable Dennis Quaid’s Mike, his girlfriend and all round eco-warrior girlfriend Kay and some of the other characters are, it really doesn’t win the other half of the battle. Whilst the film may well have looked impressive up on a cinema screen, it looks nothing short of awful for the most part on the small screen. There’s a noticeable and distracting edge to most of the underwater effects, particularly the submersible and shark that almost look otherworldly and surreal. It also uses the gimmick of 3D as just that, a gimmick! There is no real artistic reason for it…watching it in the oh-so old fashioned realm of just the two dimensions you can pinpoint the moments when they wanted to show off the third dimension. Two divers wander around in the marshes just to the reeds can bend towards the audience. We have poles, fingers, killer whales, eels, fish, rope and, of course, the shark launching themselves towards us and it just comes across as annoying on a conventional TV screen. It’s not a long film so to have so much going on that’s purely there to exploit the format, an exercise that is made impotent on the small screen anyway, that’s a lot of wasted time.

As with part four the effects are, almost without exception, extremely poor. Costing $18million you would have expected better because even the animatronic effects are very bad which you can’t blame on the lack of 3D for small screen viewings. The film quality in parts is also very bad and this CAN be blamed on the 3D. Because some of the shots were done with the green and red filters, for the small screen they simply took the left eye shot which means resolution is halved and bathed in red. Not ideal in today’s HD-obsessed and colour corrected society!

Any themes?

Considering this a sea life centre and it’s been well documented about how misunderstood sharks have been since the release of the original ‘Jaws’ they missed a real trick in giving us a bit of a marine biology lesson. Instead it’s merely hinted at with an attempt to keep the shark in captivity and study it. Apparently they consulted real shark experts to make this film but even I know that sharks can’t swim backwards so this was an opportunity missed. Other than that, nothing other than the boundaries of 3D are really explored.

Release history.

Suffered minor edits for its cinema release after the BBFC removed 7 seconds. The offending scenes were the discovery of the mutated remains of the first victim, Overman, and a second shot of a small eel or worm coming out of his mouth. These cuts were made to avoid a ‘15’ rating and were restored for the VHS and DVD versions, rated ‘15’ for VHS and downgraded to ’12’ for DVD. These releases featured a slightly different opening title of ‘Jaws 3’ to account for the fact it was a two dimensional film. Subsequent blu-ray releases were remastered from the cinema version so revert back to its original ‘Jaws 3D’ title.

There is only one example of a small screen version retaining the 3D effect which was brought out in Japan in the very shortlived VHD format. A version of the playback machine was manufactured to play 3D but very few were made…this version has been bootlegged so it is possible to get a DVD copy but the picture is likely to poorer than the film itself!

Cultural impact

Attempted to take the series in a slightly different direction but for the most part failed. It turned a decent profit but nowhere near the cash supply of the first two films and followed the rules of diminishing returns from sequels. A little bit of trivia for you…apparently Roy Scheider accepted the part in ‘Blue Thunder’ so that there was no chance of him being roped into this one!

Final thoughts

This is where it all started going wring in the ‘Jaws’ franchise, a little bit silly and laboured in parts, it’s certainly not the worst film you’ll ever see…as we all know now, that was to come four years later!

You’ll like this if you enjoyed…

‘Piranha’, ‘Alligator’, ‘Anaconda’ ‘Free Willy’ (maybe!)