Tag Archives: Jaws
Vids I Dig 427: The Critical Drinker: The Drinker Recommends… ‘Jaws’
From The Critical Drinker’s YouTube description: For this episode of Drinker Recommends, we’re going back 45 years to the small island of Amity, to explore the movie that made everyone afraid to go in the water…
Vids I Dig 213: Yesterworld: The ‘Jaws’ Ride You Never Got To Experience
From Yesterworld’s YouTube description: Exploring the the original and lesser known Jaws attraction at Universal Studios Orlando.
Vids I Dig 129: Defunctland: The History of ‘Jaws’: The Ride
From Defunctland’s YouTube description: In this addition to Defunctland, we take a look at the history of Universal Studios Florida’s extinct attraction, Jaws: The Ride.
Vids I Dig 058: Generation Gap Gaming: ‘Jaws’ NES Secrets and History
From Generation Gap Gaming’s YouTube description: Jaws NES Secrets and History | Generation Gap Gaming – In 1987, just when you thought it was safe to go back in the game room, Nintendo released Jaws on the NES which was published by the company that strikes fear in the heart of every retro gamer more than any great white shark LJN.
Film Review: Jaws: The Revenge (1987)
Release Date: July 17th, 1987
Directed by: Joseph Sargent
Written by: Michael de Guzman
Based on: characters by Peter Benchley
Music by: Michael Small
Cast: Lorraine Gary, Lance Guest, Mario Van Peebles, Karen Young, Michael Caine, Melvin Van Peebles
Universal Pictures, 90 Minutes
Review:
“Roar!” – Shark
Jaws: The Revenge isn’t just considered the worst Jaws film by fans, it is also considered one of the worst films ever made. Well, I guess I stray from the pack because I think that Jaws 3-D is much worse. Not to say that this isn’t also a hefty pillowcase full of donkey dung.
The premise for this film is absolutely ridiculous. In fact, I don’t know how the script was written with a straight face.
In this chapter, the final one for the series, the killer shark apparently has psychic powers and the ability to teleport. Apparently, Ellen Brody also shares a psychic link with the shark. I’m being totally serious.
Even though it isn’t explicitly stated, the shark is on a revenge quest where it can travel literally anywhere in an effort to specifically hunt down and kill members of the Brody family. How does it know who they are and where they are? Why does it want revenge? Is it just assumed that it is the offspring of one of the three sharks killed in the previous movies? How does it travel from New England to the Bahamas in a day? How does Ellen Brody have memories of events she never personally witnessed and how does she sense when the shark is around? Why is she so sure it is picking off the family on a personal revenge quest? Apparently, before this movie, Sheriff Brody died of a heart attack due to fear of the shark. Yet he stood up to two sharks like a total bad ass in previous movies. Was he psychically killed by the shark?
Jaws: The Revenge is a weird friggin’ movie when you start to analyze the crap out of it. That alone makes it infinitely more interesting than Jaws 3-D. Also, this is a Christmas movie, at least the first act, so it gets an edge there.
You also have the Last Starfighter himself, Lance Guest. Unfortunately, Mario Van Peebles gives a horrible performance as a Jamaican with a bad Jamaican accent. But props to him, as he did this two decades before Kofi Kingston showed up in the WWE. Anyway, the badness that is Van Peebles is at least offset by the awesomeness that is Michael Caine’s Hoagie, a pilot named after a fantastic sandwich.
One big positive, is that this film became the premise of the Jaws video game on Nintendo. In retrospect, it isn’t a fantastic game but when I was about ten years-old, I played the shit out of it. Who didn’t want to jump in a tiny yellow submarine and try to kill the giant shark while collecting crabs dropped from Hoagie’s plane? Frankly, I don’t know why Hoagie just didn’t give me the crabs before I went out to sea. I also don’t remember why collecting crabs was important. Anyway, back to this awful movie and not the awesome game.
Jaws: The Revenge is just about as bad as everyone says it is but at least it isn’t littered with horribly dated 3D effects like Jaws 3-D. Also, some of the action bits are better than those from the previous movies. I thought that the scene in the sunken ship was well done and certainly better than anything in the third movie.
The finale is also much better than the third film, even if thirty years later, I don’t understand the whole point about the strobe light causing the shark pain. Maybe it was a psychic strobe light or imbued with the power of a Bahamian warlock. I’m not really sure.
And even though everyone bitches about it, I don’t mind the shark having a roar. That’s way more plausible than psychic powers and teleportation.
Rating: 4.25/10
Film Review: Jaws 3-D (1983)
Also known as: Jaws 3, Jaws III
Release Date: July 22nd, 1983
Directed by: Joe Alves
Written by: Carl Gottlieb, Richard Matheson
Based on: characters by Peter Benchley
Music by: Alan Parker
Cast: Dennis Quaid, Bess Armstrong, Simon MacCorkindale, Louis Gossett Jr., Lea Thompson
Alan Landsburg Productions, MCA Theatricals, Universal Pictures, 99 Minutes
Review:
“Overman was killed inside the park. The baby was caught inside the park. Its mother is inside the park.” – Kathryn Morgan
With the success of Jaws and Jaws 2, it was probably just a matter of time before Universal decided to milk the shark once again. Unfortunately, they gave us this awful and dreadful picture that really has no redeeming qualities about it whatsoever other than finding enjoyment in just how bad the special effects are.
Noticeably gone is the amazing music of John Williams. The score to this movie is pretty atrocious. But that’s not even the worst thing about it.
Now I like Dennis Quaid, Lea Thompson and Louis Gossett Jr. but they are about the only positive things in this train wreck. Even then, this is far from their best performances and they really just dialed it in anyway.
This is also the shark’s worst performance out of four movies. The mother shark in this is twice the size of the previous versions and she moves so slow, she isn’t even threatening. It’s as if someone is behind her, pushing her at infant crawling speed. Somehow she is still quick enough to chomp the bejesus out of human meatbags that either have to be frozen in suspended animation or high on angeldust to the point where they don’t even realize that a shark the size of a city bus is slowly ambushing them.
Jaws 3-D, as the title implies, relies heavily on the 3D gimmick. That being said, the movie is littered with a ton of shots that were made specifically for that purpose. The shots look hokey and plain stupid when seen in a 2D format, which is how the vast majority of people have seen this picture, after its initial release over thirty years ago. Also, for 1983 standards, the special effects are absolutely horrible. Compare this to some of the bigger budget films of the day and this looks dated when put next to them. In fact, I’ve seen better visual effects in films that predate this by two decades. If you turned this film into a drinking game where you take a shot every time there is an awful visual effect, you’d just find yourself chugging from the bottle and might actually need a whole case of liquor just for yourself.
This movie is stupid, its horrible and it is an embarrassment to Universal Studios. It is a slap in the face of the masterpiece that Steven Spielberg created. It doesn’t even look like a sequel, it looks like one of the many Jaws ripoffs that came out in the late 70s and into the early 80s. Hell, this makes Piranha (which I love, by the way) look like a Kubrickian masterpiece.
And how in the friggin’ hell was Richard Matheson involved in this?
Does this deserve to be run through the Cinespiria Shitometer? Oh, you bet your dandy ass it does! So what we have here is a “Type 6 Stool: Fluffy pieces with ragged edges, a mushy stool.”
Rating: 2.5/10
Film Review: Jaws 2 (1978)
Release Date: June 16th, 1978
Directed by: Jeannot Szwarc
Written by: Carl Gottlieb, Howard Sackler
Based on: characters by Peter Benchley
Music by: John Williams
Cast: Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton
Universal Pictures, 116 Minutes
Review:
“But I’m telling you, and I’m telling everybody at this table that that’s a shark! And I know what a shark looks like, because I’ve seen one up close. And you’d better do something about this one, because I don’t intend to go through that hell again!” – Martin Brody
Jaws 2 has its fans and its detractors. I’m more in the fan camp, as I think it is a pretty good sequel, all things considered. Besides, it is nowhere near as bad as the two Jaws films that followed.
For a sequel that lost its original (and legendary) director, two of its lead actors and the benefit of using mystery over a full reveal of the monster, Jaws 2 does pretty good with the pieces of the puzzle it still has.
Roy Scheider is back, as is Lorraine Gary, who plays his wife. Additionally, Murray Hamilton returns as the sleazy town mayor, who apparently learned nothing from his greedy follies in the first Jaws picture.
This chapter in the franchise is much more action heavy. You see the actual shark more often, which is fine. After the big reveal in the first movie, there isn’t much reason to hide him in this one, as the building of suspense in Spielberg’s “less is more” technique wouldn’t work a second time around and in the first movie it was employed to hide the fact that the shark robot never worked properly.
While Jaws 2 is not the near perfect masterpiece of its predecessor, it is a worthy sequel in that it builds off of the first film. It gives you more time with the Brody family and gets more personal than the original movie. The fact that Capt. Brody’s children are in direct danger, makes the tension and the finale work quite well.
Also, the finale has Schneider’s most bad ass moment in his long career. The scene where he finishes off the shark by feeding it an electrical cable is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen a manly man do on film and it tops the killing of the shark from the first movie, even if me saying that pisses some people off.
Jaws 2 is not a perfect picture but it is still a fairly strong outing and a good companion piece to the original. Granted, everything in the franchise just goes off the rails after this.
Rating: 7/10
Film Review: Jaws (1975)
Release Date: June 20th, 1975
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Written by: Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb
Based on: Jaws by Peter Benchley
Music by: John Williams
Cast: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton
Zanuck/Brown Productions, Universal Pictures, 124 Minutes
Review:
“Here’s to swimmin’ with bow-legged women.” – Quint
Jaws is considered to be one of the greatest motion pictures ever made. It’s usually found in top ten lists and a lot of people I have met throughout my life call it their favorite movie. While it’s not my favorite film nor my favorite Spielberg picture, it holds a special place in my heart.
I wasn’t born when this came out so I never got the big screen experience until this past weekend. However, when I was a kid, it’s VHS box art haunted me in the aisles of every single mom and pop video shop. It wasn’t until I got a bit older that I had the balls to watch it. Well, that and the fact that I did it on a dare from my older cousin.
Surprisingly, I wasn’t scared of the film once I saw it. I know that a lot of people were but I was more interested in dangerous wildlife and developed an obsession with sharks and other deadly sea creatures. I also grew up on the Gulf of Mexico and saw sharks all the time, whether at the beach or in my uncle’s boat.
Jaws did spark my interest and love in these type of films. A love that would continue and be further cultivated throughout the 1980s, as Jaws really gave birth to a genre of knockoffs that still exist today. Hell, as I saw this in the theater, right across the hall was 47 Meters Down, another shark attack movie.
Steven Spielberg truly made a masterpiece with Jaws and it would be his first of several. This is the film that put him on the map and led to a series of fantastic and imaginative pictures that he still directs and produces today.
Jaws had a myriad of serious issues during its production but Spielberg still churned out a near perfect picture. The robot shark never really worked right but the film utilized the “less is more” technique in regards to seeing the aquatic beast. Had there been more shark, this film might not have worked as well and thus, not launched Spielberg into the heights he reached. Maybe the production problems were a blessing of sorts. In any event, a lot of unforeseen good came out of those problems.
The film is accented by stellar acting from just about everyone in the cast. Roy Scheider is perfect in just about everything but this is his most famous and iconic role for good reason. Richard Dreyfuss is spectacular and this role led to a lot of great things for the now legendary actor. It is Robert Shaw, however, that really steals the show. Being cast mostly as villainous heavies, earlier in his career, Shaw carved out his own niche later in life and the character of Quint is not only his most famous but one of the most famous in movie history. There are very few characters that could even come close to Quint’s coolness and toughness.
While the film has a few spots with strange editing or strange shot framing, I can’t nitpick about those things, because the positives about Jaws are why it is a classic motion picture that will be cherished till the end of time or until human beings evolve some higher form of consciousness.
Despite those issues, the picture is generally well shot and the cinematography is absolutely awesome. In fact, a lot of the techniques that are employed in this film were “borrowed” by directors and cinematographers for years. In fact, they’re still common techniques used today. The use of shadows, silhouettes, the underwater work, all have been “borrowed” to death. Realistically, it just goes to show how much of an impact Jaws had on the future of filmmaking.
Few movies leave a lasting impression as strong as that of Jaws. There are dozens of motion pictures that have won Picture of the Year at the Oscars that most people wouldn’t even know today. But there is hardly anyone that doesn’t know Jaws.
Rating: 10/10
Talking Pulp 
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