I've never considered myself a particularly fussy or uptight movie watcher. As such, there are certain movies that I know are utterly terrible movies but that I absolutely love to watch. For instance, Ed Wood's notorious Glen or Glenda is pure movie crack cocaine, a movie so utterly confused as to what it's actually about that you after a while you just go along for the ride. Robot Monster is another one that you just watch in utter disbelief but can't help yourself in your daffy enjoyment. Face it, you know it to be true. I mention this as my segue in discussing Jaws 3-D, a movie that I know is a stinker but I'd buy it on 3D Blu Ray in a heartbeat.
I'm not convinced Jaws 3-D is quite as bad as the two movies I mentioned above. I do know that the movie has it's detractors and yes, there is quite a lot wrong with the movie. It's science is, at best, fishy if not quite as bad as the pun I just made. It's special effects are hilariously awful. It's story is utter nonsense and I'm not sure the dialogue is intended to be half as funny as it often is. So, yes, this is a bad movie. Like Amityville 3-D, it even made Siskel and Ebert's Worst of 1983 list, which as I pointed out last week is just silly. There were far worse movies in 1983. Siskel and Ebert just didn't see them. I, of course, did. Some of them have perhaps permanently traumatized me, too.
But despite everything that is wrong with the movie, I think it's a great movie. Okay, not great in the sense of Casablanca great. But great as in the sense of being a fun time at the movies, so long as you can check your brain at the door, which I happily do. And seriously, not everything needs to be Citizen Kane.
For this outing, the shark causes full blown chaos at Sea World. Now, I know the real Sea World is landlocked, so how could a Great White Shark invade Sea World, but I didn't know this in 1983, so I went with it then and I still do. Maybe this is another Sea World that's closer to the ocean. Don't know, don't care. Like Revenge of the Creature did for Marineland in 1955, this film acts as something of an infomercial for Sea World. A weird infomercial whose message apparently is "see the wonders of Sea World and get eaten by a 35 foot Great White Shark", but an infomercial all the same.
Working at Sea World as an engineer is Chief Brody's oldest son Mike, now played by a young Dennis Quaid. Younger brother Sean (John Putch) comes to visit from college. It should be noted that Brody's kids apparently had whatever disease most kids in soap operas have where one day they're eight, the next their 32. I say this since in the first Jaws Mike was 10 and Sean was about five, in the second one released 3 years later Mike is 18 and Sean is 10 and in this one, released a mere 8 years after the first one and five years after the second, they're both in their 20s.
Mike, for his part, is dating marine biologist Dr. Kathryn Morgan (Bess Armstrong) and Sean hooks up with Sea World entertainer Kelly Ann Bukowski (Lea Thompson in her debut film). All is happiness until a shark invades the Sea World lagoon and kills a worker. Mike and Kay go looking for the worker and find a shark, a mere 10 footer.
Big game hunter Phillip FitzRoyce (Simon MacCorkindale) wants to kill the shark, but Kathryn convinces Sea World owner Calvin Bouchard (Louis Gossett, Jr., fresh from An Officer and a Gentlemen) to capture it and put it on display instead. Since Bouchard is a well meaning but somewhat greedy clod, he moves the captured shark too soon--hilariously putting it in what looks like the type of display you'd expect to see otters in, not sharks--and ends up killing it. Then the worker's body turns up and everyone finds out they have a much bigger problem at hand--namely a 35 foot long shark.
One of the biggest problems with the film is bad science. I know, a lot of horror/fantasy/sci-fi films have bad science. You can't see explosions in space, DNA breaks down after 500 years, most movie monsters would be crushed by their own weight, etc. Movies like Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and Godzilla could never happen in anyone's lifetime. I'm fine with that. But sharks don't roar or growl. They also don't swim backwards. This one does both. Mind, it's growl isn't as silly as the shark in Jaws: The Revenge, but that's another blog post altogether. They still don't do that. And it's pretty silly to see.
But what does one expect from a movie with lines like "You tell Shelby Overman for me he can take a flyin' leap in a rollin' doughnut on a gravel driveway, you hear?" or "You talking about some damn shark's mother?". Or my favorite: "Get some lights down there! And get some shit down there! And get some medical attention". Yes, the dialogue's a pip. The script is credited to Richard Matheson and Howard Gottlieb, but I find it hard to believe either one of them was responsible for dialogue like that. I mean, maybe they were. But one guy wrote for The Twilight Zone and the other wrote the original Jaws and neither one of those had such ridiculous lines.
Going hand in hand with the dialogue are the performances. Quaid, Armstrong, Putch, and Thompson are fairly sincere and actually pretty good. MacCorkindale and Gossett, however, are all over the place. Gossett actually gets two out of the three quotes in the previous paragraph and he's hysterically funny saying them. No, he doesn't get the "flyin' leap in a rollin' doughnut" line. That would have been awesome, though.
Actually, the acting is probably the best of any of the 80s 3D movies. Oh, sure, there's some bad performances--I defy you not to laugh at the wooden boat driver at the beginning of the film--but overall people seem to try. Dennis Quaid may well hate this movie now, but he's mostly decent in it. Indeed, the relationships between Quaid and Armstrong and Putch and Thompson are fairly strong and interesting enough that you kind of end up wishing the four actors got a chance to do it again in a non-shark film.
As to the shark...well, none of the Jaws films had a particularly realistic looking shark. After all, the joke in Back to the Future II is "the shark still looks fake". The first film has the best looking of the sharks. But by this time, the studio wasn't willing to invest as much in making it look good. Think of the 1970s Planet of the Apes movies where the apes go from being well done make up to Halloween masks. The shark, especially the 35 footer, looks pretty ridiculous in this. And the 10 footer's head contracts into it's body when it hits the gate in one scene. Of course, as bad as all that is, it's nothing compared to the shot in the underwater tunnel where the studio forgot to fill in the green screen. That's a shot that needs to be seen to be believed.
After all this, you may be wondering why in the world I actually like this movie. Well, it partly has to do with nostalgia. Jaws 3-D was the first 3D movie I got to see in the movies. I was 12 when this came out and, in fact, it's the only one of the 1980s 3D films I saw in the theater on first run. So I have a bit of warm spot for it. I still remember sitting there and during the film's opening scene when a severed fish head floats out of the screen, a stoned guy in the back of the theater shouted "it's coming at you, man!". That, for me, was movie magic.
I recently got to see it again in 3D on the big screen at the World 3-D Film Expo III and loved it all over again. The 3D is actually mostly decent. There's a couple of shots--one in particular of a crab underwater--where you feel like your eyeballs are being ripped out of your head. But overall, the effect is not bad. And the movie thankfully doesn't succumb to overly silly 3D effects like straws and popcorn. That's not to say there aren't effects just thrown in there for being effects. All the 80s films had that. But at least these effects had more to do with the setting. The most gratuitous is when some teenage girls take a tour of the The Undersea Kingdom and various animatronic characters reach out of the screen. Gossett, Armstrong, and Thompson were all supposed to attend the showing, but all three mysteriously got work right before the showing. Hmm...
Still, I think Jaws 3-D is the best 3D movie of the 80s. It's goofy fun, sometimes funny, and definitely worth the trip in 3D. I won't watch it in 2D, but I'm that way with most 3D movies anyhow. Universal truly needs to release this on 3D Blu Ray and they need to release it now.
Like I said, not everything needs to be Citizen Kane. Some things can be Jaws 3-D or Robot Monster. And they should be, too.
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