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Editor’s Note: The following is the last of MovieFanFare’s “Fin-tastic Friday” articles marking the 50th anniversary of the release of Jaws. Click here to see our piece on the film’s 1975 theatrical trailer, here for a look at pre-Jaws shark films, and here for a salute to the Jabberjaw and Misterjaw cartoons.
A favorite scene for movie buffs in 1989’s Back to the Future Part II comes early in the picture. As Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) walks around the streets of Hill Valley, California in the far-off future year of 2015 (!), he’s attacked in the town square by a giant digitized shark. The shark turns out to be a holographic image from a nearby theater promoting the fictitious film Jaws 19. Said film boasts the tagline “This time it’s REALLY REALLY personal” and is directed by one Max Spielberg (Steven’s real-life son).
Well, 2015 has come and gone (still no hoverboards that work!). And while there was a Russian-made film entitled Jaws 19 which came out that year, the roll call of official Jaws sequels still stands at three, a number that hasn’t changed in 38 years. To conclude our Golden Anniversary tribute to the “Summer of Jaws,” let’s take a look at each of these fishy follow-ups and set how they hold up on their own merits and compared to their predecessor.
Jaws 2 (1978) – Much of this film’s creative effort seems to have been spent crafting the oft-parodied tagline “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…” Four years after the original shark was blown up, another great white has come to claim the coastlines of Amity Island as its personal all-you-can-eat buffet.
With Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) off an a research voyage and Quint (Robert Shaw) abiding in Davy Jones’s locker, Amity Police Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) has to deal with this new marine marauder on his own. Once again he faces a skeptical Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) and a town council that fires him for inciting a panic. It’s as if no one remembers the events of four years earlier…and are you telling me that Amity’s voters re-elected Vaughn?
The now ex-lawman and his wife Ellen (Lorraine Gary) set out on a rescue mission when the shark attacks a group of boating teens that includes their two sons and even gets his chompers on a Harbor Patrol helicopter’s pontoons. Just as in the original, it all comes down to a one-on-one duel between Brody and his finny foe, a showdown that involves undersea power cables.
Mindful of the first film’s trouble-plagued production, Spielberg–busy finishing work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind–passed on helming Jaws 2. That job fell to French-born Jeannot Szwarc, who like Spielberg cut his directorial eyeteeth on such TV fare as Columbo and Night Gallery. It’s funny, because with all the rule-breaking, frantically screaming teens in the movie’s second half you’d swear it was a Spielberg product.
Szwarc does a fairly good job of maintaining the suspense level, even if the story follows a familiar path. Carrying most of the dramatic weight himself, Scheider gives another fine performance, and even Gary and Hamilton are tolerable in their roles. Composer John Williams took his Oscar-winning score and expanded on it, making the music one of the most memorable features of the film.
With a $30 million budget that made it Universal’s most expensive movie to date, Jaws 2 surfaced on June 16, 1978 and edged out the other debut, Paramount’s Grease, with a $9.8 million opening weekend. It would go on to be the year’s sixth-biggest release and was accompanied with a slew of merchandise (books, magazines, comics, trading cards, models, shark tooth necklaces, and more). Its success would help jump-start the sequel boom that haunts theaters to this day.
Jaws 3 (1983) – Notice I’m not referring to it as Jaws 3-D. That’s because, except for a special Blu-ray edition, which requires a complete home set-up, most home video versions of this film have been available in 2-D only.
Part of the early ’80s three-dimensional fad (Amityville 3-D, Friday the 13th: Part 3, et al.), the picture was originally conceived as an Airplane!-style spoof to be called Jaws 3, People 0. The comedy concept was eventually scrapped for straight drama…although audiences may have wondered in the screenwriters were informed.
Dennis Quaid stars as the Brodys’ grown son Mike, now chief engineer at Florida’s SeaWorld Orlando theme park (“There is not one frame of ‘Jaws 3’ you see me in,” the actor later confessed in an interview, “that I wasn’t coked out of my mind.”). A juvenile great white makes its way from the ocean into the park’s lagoon, killing a worker and some coral thieves, but Mike and marine biologist Kay (Bess Armstrong) capture it. When the young shark dies after the park manager (Louis Gossett, Jr.) tries putting it on display, its mother comes looking for it and takes several big bites of vengeance. That’s right; the story is a revamping of the 1961 British monster movie Gorgo.
Without the novelty of 3-D effects in most of its home video incarnations, Jaws 3 is a bit too much to swallow. The screenplay–courtesy of original Jaws co-scripter Carl Gottlieb and The Twilight Zone veteran Richard Matheson–fails to move its players past the “stock character” stage, and that also goes for the SeaWorld dolphins Cindy and Sandy, who manage to save Mike and Kay on more than one occasion. If you’re looking for an entertaining Universal thriller set in a Florida aquatic park, might I suggest 1955’s Revenge of the Creature?
Jaws: The Revenge (1987) – Bride of Frankenstein. Toy Story 3. Godzilla Minus One. Some cinematic sequels manage to outdo the first film in their respective series. Trust me, this is not one of them.
Ignoring the events of Jaws 3, Jaws: The Revenge finds Scheider’s Chief Brody died of a heart attack some time earlier. His widow Ellen (Gary) and their younger son Sean (Mitchell Anderson), now a lawman like his dad, still live on Amity Island. When yet another great white shows up and fatally attacks Sean, Ellen joins her other son Mike (Lance Guest)–now a marine biologist himself–and his family at their home in the Bahamas for Christmas. On the way down the Widow Brody meets and is attracted to roguish pilot Hoagie (Michael Caine).
Once there, however, who should turn up but the killer shark, also eager to spend the holidays in warmer climates. Ellen becomes convinced–thanks in part to a mental link (!) she seemingly shares with it–that the cartilaginous carnivore has come specifically to avenge its relatives’ deaths at the hands of the Brody family. That’s right; the story is Moby Dick in reverse by way of Orca, the Killer Whale. Hence the film’s introduction of the now-familiar tagline “This time it’s personal.”
Coincidentally, many moviegoers in 1987 took it very personally after spending their money to see Jaws: The Revenge in theaters. Its worldwide box office gross of just under $52 million, while a modest financial success, was the lowest of the series’ four entries. It also received a critical drubbing the like of which Universal hadn’t seen since…well, the previous year’s Howard the Duck. Roger Ebert wrote it was “not simply a bad movie, but also a stupid and incompetent one,” while a New York Times reviewer asked the logical question, “Why hasn’t this family moved to Nebraska?”
Among the production’s various problems were a reshot ending that forced co-star Caine to miss attending the 59th Academy Awards, where he won his first Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters. Don’t feel too bad for him, though, as he put his million-dollar salary to good use. Discussing Jaws: The Revenge on an Australian talk show, Caine admitted, “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built my mother, and it is terrific!”