Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

Tagline: “This time it’s personal.”

Running Time: 90 minutes

Film quality: 0.5/5
Gore Content: 2/5
Entertainment Value: 1/5
Originality: 2/5

Introduction

You would have thought after the pretty terrible ‘Jaws 3D’ that they’d have been done with Bruce the Shark but no…Universal were determined to make another instalment and drafted in four time Emmy Award winner and director of ‘The Taking of Pelham 123’ Joseph Sargent to produce and direct a fourth instalment. There was no script and no direction, just ‘give us another ‘Jaws’ movie and make sure it’s centred around the Brody family’. Well, they certainly did that, but nobody expected them to take the most sarcastic line from ‘Jaws 2’ (“Sharks don’t take things personally”) and turn it into the basis of an entire film!

In a nutshell…

When Sean Brody is attacked and killed by a shark (left), just off Amity Island, Ellen Brody becomes convinced that Great White Sharks have it in for her family. She goes to the Bahamas with her other son, Michael, who is now a marine biologist…but surely the shark hasn’t followed them more than 1,000 miles to carry out its vendetta?

So what’s good about it?

I can honestly say that there is only one even slightly effective scene in the entire film, and that’s a dream sequence. Ellen, already terrified of the water, is swimming and suddenly gets the jitters, chased by what she thinks is a shark, but she can’t swim fast enough. All tension though is ruined by the pay off you expect actually happening right in front of your eyes, alerting you to the fact that it’s clearly a dream before the punchline…effective scene duly ruined! Watching the rest of the film it’s easy to convince yourself that this moment was good by accident and, coming very early on, lulls you into a bit of a false sense of security.

Other than that, at least it’s short, there is some stunning scenery (the only truly original part of the film) and the acting is serviceable…oh, and Michael Caine bought himself a very nice house!!!

"You were only supposed to blow the bloody Jaws off"

And what about the bad?

Everything else!!! Let’s start with the premise…a shark that follows a plane more than a thousand miles from freezing Christmas waters to the tropics just because it has a personal beef with the Brody clan! I know they were intending to go for the mystical but really? Not only that but it seems to be communicating with Ellen through some kind of psychic link!!! I remember watching the original and thinking that there was no way a shark could jump onto a boat like that…if only something that down to Earth happened in this film!

Moving onto the special effects, they have to be amongst the worst I’ve ever seen from what was the most expensive film of the year, costing $23million. To paraphrase ‘Red Dwarf’, I’ve seen more convincing sharks given away free with packets of Wheaty Flakes! In some of the underwater scenes you can clearly see the mechanisms moving the shark across the sea bed. There isn’t a single moment where you think that it is anything other than a substandard mechanical puppet…where the hell did all that money go? Again, Michael Caine’s house must have been f@cking brilliant!

Flight, yet filling!

There’s the editing, the writing, the directing, the pacing, the sound effects…I mean come on, sharks do not roar and routinely poke their heads out of the water like a demented seal!!! Also, is it possible to electrocute a Great White Shark as though it’s some sort of therapy? How do they know it’s the same shark as in Amity when that’s the least likely of any number of ridiculous explanations and why does everyone, including someone who is meant to be a respected marine biologist firmly believe this…did they get its FIN-gerprints? I’m here all night! How can a 28 foot shark wriggle its way through an intricate shipwreck? They even manage to top the silly shark attack on a helicopter from the otherwise excellent ‘Jaws 2’ by pulling the same trick with a light aircraft (above,left). The entire film is utterly ludicrous…it’s only because of ‘Ishtar’ and ‘Leonard Part 6’ that it didn’t win more than one Razzie award (naturally for its low-bar setting ‘special’ effects).

Character actions and motivations are absurdly bad. If Ellen is traumatised by the water, why does her marine biologist son think that taking her to their coastal retreat on the Bahamas would be relaxing? The apparently newly qualified Michaal (quite a step up from Sea World!) neglects his duties to, you know, warn people that there's a massive killer shark around, putting everyone, including his daughter, in mortal danger. Why would such qualified and well-educated marine biologists flap around like a distressed fish at the first sign of a Great White...isn't that what attracts them in the first place? Maybe they've been spending too much time tagging Conch Shells!t's truly awe-inspiring that this kind of stuff made it past what must have been a committee of script consultants...perhaps they just fancied three months in the sun.

But the worst trick it pulls is in several scenes where they show sepia footage of the original…nothing highlights how terrible a sequel is than reminding you of the far superior original. Right from the beginning we’re treated to a photo of Roy Scheider as Martin Brody, we have a rehash of the touching father and son mimicking each other over dinner scene and, worst of all, the wonderful ending of the original is in Ellen’s thoughts (odd, she wasn’t even there!) as the incomprehensible and poorly edited finale burns a hole into our eyeballs and taints our world view of movies for evermore!

And one final thing (spoiler alert!!!)…why does the shark explode?

Any themes?

Nothing comprehensible, other than that the ‘Jaws’ series perfectly exemplifies the law of diminishing sequels. Also a perfect example of what happens when nobody has a single clue what’s going on…apparently Mario van Peebles wrote his own lines, poor soul.

Release history.

In the UK there were issues over censorship with much of the opening scene where Sean is killed cut by the BBFC to achieve a PG rating. In total 37 seconds were removed from that scene and the inflatable banana attack (some pretty gruesome shots of the shark eating a young woman…all above water of course!), all of which were restored to a ‘15’ rated DVD, downgraded later to a ‘12’.

There are a number of different versions doing the rounds that feature the shark being impaled on the front of a boat (right!), rammed until it dies of blood loss and, bizarrely in the version I saw, blowing up! Depending on which version you see Mario van Peebles’ character Jake either survives (how on Earth could he have survived that!!!) or dies, there are a number of different endings, none of which make any sense whatsoever.

Credit to the BBC who had a version pretty much identical to the original cinema cut but was broadcast at a faster speed so only runs 82 minutes…not quite fast forward but anything that makes the experience shorter!

Cultural impact

Killed the ‘Jaws’ series stone dead…there is no chance on earth or at sea that any film maker will think it’s safe to go back in the water ever again, regardless of whether or not it’s personal. Cult Italian director Bruno Mattei directed a TV movie called ‘Cruel Jaws’ that was shamelessly released as ‘Jaws 5’ in some territories and does feature some stock footage from the series but really has nothing to do with the official ‘Jaws’ cannon.

Final thoughts

This is such a turd of a film that if Sargent had unravelled the entire negative and taken a giant dump on it, we’d see a massive improvement. Shockingly bad on almost every level it’s rightly regarded as one of the worst films ever made, its only saving grace was that it turned a profit.

Memorable Quotes

Hoagie: “I have the urge to kiss you.”
Ellen: “Why?”

Jake: “May your sex life be as busy as your shirt.”

Hoagie: “When I get back remind me to tell you about the time I took a hundred nuns to Nairobi.”

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