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#170 - Jaws: The Revenge
Joseph Sargent, 1987
When her youngest son is killed during a shark attack, a widowed Ellen Brody opts to join her surviving son in the Bahamas, but is soon troubled by the same shark coming to take revenge.
Even though I have considered Jaws a Top 10 favourite for years now, I have only just managed to watch one of its three sequels and, surprise, surprise, it's not only the worst of the bunch but it's also got a reputation for being one of the worst movies ever made. Of course that'd appeal to my sensibilities on the basis of its reputation alone, but upon actually watching it I can see that this isn't the kind of bad movie that you can enjoy on your own. The reason why Jaws: The Revenge is a genuinely awful movie is because it's boooooring. Even if we take into account the sheer inanity of the premise - the idea that the shark is not only related to the shark that died at the hands of Chief Brody in the original film but is sapient enough to try to chase down and kill everyone else from the Brody family, to the point of being able to magically follow the surviving members from Amity Island to the Bahamas is, to put it mildly, ridiculous - the rest of the film is about as cold and lifeless as a mechanical shark.
The plot for much of the film is driven by the fact that surviving son Michael is a marine biologist who keeps working in the water to fund his project, which naturally freaks out Ellen and she spends much of the film hysterically trying to convince Michael to stay out of the water to little success. Fortunately enough, the tension is suppressed by the inclusion of the one and only Michael Caine as a pilot who befriends the rest of the cast. He also (rather predictably) ends up serving as a somewhat romantic companion to Ellen, trying to get her to loosen up about the whole magic shark thing (which doesn't help when she psychically detects the shark about to attack someone...yeah, I don't know what's going on). The only thing worse than the increasingly absurd additions to the franchise is the ways in which it shamelessly copies scenes from the original film - even small moments such as a parent and child mimicking one another playfully (which is also referenced by a sepia-toned flashback to the original film, which just adds a lot of insult to this considerable injury).
Given their inconsistency and bad timing, the flashbacks are just one of several ways that this film insults its source (especially during the film's climax). The shark's practical effects aren't especially awful (to the naked eye it's more or less indistinguishable from the original shark) but considering how often you see the shark you don't get a lot of terror out of its appearances. At one point it literally roars out loud. I mean...yikes. You can glean some amusement from this film's generally poor quality and bizarre internal logic, but it's still a slow and boring film for the most part that completely undercuts any actual terror it might have held.
Joseph Sargent, 1987
When her youngest son is killed during a shark attack, a widowed Ellen Brody opts to join her surviving son in the Bahamas, but is soon troubled by the same shark coming to take revenge.
Even though I have considered Jaws a Top 10 favourite for years now, I have only just managed to watch one of its three sequels and, surprise, surprise, it's not only the worst of the bunch but it's also got a reputation for being one of the worst movies ever made. Of course that'd appeal to my sensibilities on the basis of its reputation alone, but upon actually watching it I can see that this isn't the kind of bad movie that you can enjoy on your own. The reason why Jaws: The Revenge is a genuinely awful movie is because it's boooooring. Even if we take into account the sheer inanity of the premise - the idea that the shark is not only related to the shark that died at the hands of Chief Brody in the original film but is sapient enough to try to chase down and kill everyone else from the Brody family, to the point of being able to magically follow the surviving members from Amity Island to the Bahamas is, to put it mildly, ridiculous - the rest of the film is about as cold and lifeless as a mechanical shark.
The plot for much of the film is driven by the fact that surviving son Michael is a marine biologist who keeps working in the water to fund his project, which naturally freaks out Ellen and she spends much of the film hysterically trying to convince Michael to stay out of the water to little success. Fortunately enough, the tension is suppressed by the inclusion of the one and only Michael Caine as a pilot who befriends the rest of the cast. He also (rather predictably) ends up serving as a somewhat romantic companion to Ellen, trying to get her to loosen up about the whole magic shark thing (which doesn't help when she psychically detects the shark about to attack someone...yeah, I don't know what's going on). The only thing worse than the increasingly absurd additions to the franchise is the ways in which it shamelessly copies scenes from the original film - even small moments such as a parent and child mimicking one another playfully (which is also referenced by a sepia-toned flashback to the original film, which just adds a lot of insult to this considerable injury).
Given their inconsistency and bad timing, the flashbacks are just one of several ways that this film insults its source (especially during the film's climax). The shark's practical effects aren't especially awful (to the naked eye it's more or less indistinguishable from the original shark) but considering how often you see the shark you don't get a lot of terror out of its appearances. At one point it literally roars out loud. I mean...yikes. You can glean some amusement from this film's generally poor quality and bizarre internal logic, but it's still a slow and boring film for the most part that completely undercuts any actual terror it might have held.