Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

True confessions of a movie junkie: back when I was a teenager, I had an internship at a neighborhood newspaper. I was given a pass to go review Jaws: The Revenge and I was so excited about the prospect, I gave the movie a good review. Looking back, I am likely the only person in the world to have done so. Consider this post me righting a grievous wrong.

Most people who review Jaws The Revenge on their blogs nowadays seem to do so to prove they are intellectually superior to it. The problem is that proving you're intellectually superior to a movie this dumb is like proving you were born with a torso. Even someone with a zero IQ is intellectually superior to Jaws: The Revenge.

The movie starts with yet another Great White Shark invading the waters of Amity Island. It's Christmas time, so there's no swimmers which makes me wonder why the shark would even bother. Oh, that's right: because the Brody family still lives on Amity Island and youngest son Sean is a deputy. Deputy Sean is sent out on the water to move some driftwood and Mr. Whitey pops out of the water to say "Hello, my name is Sharkey Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!" He then eats Sean, an ignoble end to a character who was always kinda treated shoddily in this series and yet who somehow went from being 5 years old in 1975 to 30 just 12 years later.

Oldest son Michael (Lance Guest) convinces mom Ellen (Lorraine Gary, reprising her role from the first two films) to come and stay in Bermuda with him, his wife and his daughter. The weather's better and there's no sharks. She agrees, so Mr. Whitey decides to follow her to Bermuda because he has more Brody family members to kill, you see. Yes, the shark is actually exacting revenge on the family for the death of the first shark in the original movie. I promise you I did not make that up and I am quite sober. In the novelization, the shark is an instrument of vengeance for a voodoo witch doctor who is pissed at Michael. That almost makes sense, unlike what we actually get.

Ellen meets roguish pilot Hoagie--Michael Caine proving he was willing to do anything for money--and is having a good time unaware that Mr. Whitey has arrived. Michael and his partner Jake (Mario Van Peebles) are aware of Mr. Whitey since he's already tried taking a bite out of Michael. Rather than worry Mom, they decide to try to track the shark. Eventually Mr. Whitey tries taking a bite out of Mike's precocious daughter (Judith Barsi), so Ellen steals Michael's boat and goes out on the ocean to do something, but I'm not sure exactly what. I don't think the writers knew what she was supposed to do either. Certainly she didn't know what she was supposed to do. Michael, Hoagie, and Jake go to the rescue. Hoagie swims but stays dry, Jake falls into the shark's mouth and survives, and the shark eventually roars before exploding once it's impaled. How a shark roars then explodes upon being impaled, I don't know.

If I've made the movie sound more entertaining than it actually is, I apologize. It's a bad habit of mine and I really should break it.

The problems with this movie would likely fill a book. For one, it decides to ignore Jaws 3-D (1983). As bad as Jaws 3-D is--and I fully recognize it's a terrible movie even though I love it--Jaws 3-D almost makes some sort of sense. This film is pure nonsense. On top of that, the acting is bad, the dialogue worse, and the shark looks ridiculous. There isn't even a good kill count in the film as only three people get attacked and one of them survives for reasons that make no sense. There's also an awful lot of time spent on the romance between Ellen and Hoagie. That's not necessarily a bad thing since it's actually a portrayal of an older couple falling in love, something surprising for a movie of this genre. However, there's also a lot of time spent on Michael being jealous and suspicious of Hoagie that drags the thing down.  In short, the main plot is stupid and the subplots are boring. Sure, there's some unintentional laughs in the thing but there's an equally large number of cringe-inducing scenes.

Exactly why I liked this film at 16 is something I'll never know. Especially when I had the common sense to hate equally bad movies. Maybe just because it was a Jaws movie and the original is one of my all time favorite movies. At any rate, if you read my review in 1987, I apologize. And for those of you thinking this thing can't possibly be as bad as I'm now saying...it is.

3-D Thursday: Jaws 3-D (1983)

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.

The Genuis of Steven Spielberg

I was flipping through channels the other night and stumbled on Schindler's List. It was the scene where Schindler and Stern are actually typing the list. I sat there and watched it for a good few minutest before flipping again--only because I have it on DVD and I'm one of those weird people who'd really rather watch a movie from the beginning. At any rate, the topic of today's blog was decided in those five minutes.

As mentioned before, Spielberg is one of my two favorite directors. He has, in fact, directed my two favorite movies of all time, and directed quite a few others that would make it into my top 50. He is also the guy whose movies ultimately made me want to make movies.

Now, I know a lot of guys say that and certainly a lot of guys want to be Spielberg. I won't cop to that, per say. In my case, Spielberg's making of Raiders of the Lost Ark and talking about how it was inspired by old time movie serials led to eventually watching old time movie serials which led me to making movie serials. But yes, there's a lot of guys who simply want to be Steven Spielberg. His movies have inspired as many imitators as Hitchcock's.

Let's take Raiders as an example. To this day, movies are imitating the adventures of Indiana Jones. Anyone seen The Mummy movies with Brendan Fraser? How about Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow? I was really interested in seeing that one when it was out a few years ago. The director, Kerry Conan, even said he was putting chapter breaks in the film and that it was pure, old fashioned serial adventure. Never mind the fact that the actors did the whole thing in front of green screens and the entire world was CGI. But I wanted to see it and gave it a shot. When it was done, I turned to my buddy and said, "it was okay, but it didn't have the wow factor of Raiders."

Come to it, there's only been one imitator of Raiders that ever really worked--Romancing The Stone. And that one is less an imitator and more of a romantic comedy adventure film than any of the others. Well, okay...the first Mummy movie worked to a decent extent, too. Never bothered with the sequels, though I may.

Jaws has been imitated to death as well. Again, even as late as this decade, there's shark attack movies. Most of them are done for TV now since people stopped being suckered into going to the movies for them. But they all make the same fatal mistakes: show the (fake looking) shark to death and just have a high body count. Spielberg's movie did neither which is why it remains a masterpiece.

But like I said earlier, Hitchock is still imitated and he's been dead for nearly 30 years. Disturbia is nothing more than a reworking of Rear Window. And while it was decent enough, Shia LaBeouf is no Jimmy Stewart. This, of course, proves what the average movie buff has known for years: Hollywood is totally out of ideas. But I digress. Back to Spielberg.

There are, of course, two sides to the Spielberg coin: Spielberg the spinner of fantasy and Spielberg the guy who likes to win Academy Awards. The earlier is the type of Spielberg I prefer. It's not that the latter doesn't make good movies--you'd be hard pressed to argue that Munich isn't a good movie--it's that the earlier has a style of movie that is infinitely rewatchable. Of his more serious works, the only one I really care to rewatch is Schindler's List, and that mostly because of the wonderful interaction between Liam Neeson and Ben Kingsley. Saving Private Ryan was extremely well done (and depressing), but I'm not exactly jumping up and down to put it in the DVD player. Ditto Munich.

The problem seems to be that older Spielberg has seem to forgotten that, as Rod Serling once pointed out, you can make as potent a point in fantasy as you can in serious drama and make it in a more entertaining manner. E.T. is perhaps the perfect example. E.T. is practically the template for later Spielberg films. It's also as powerful and well done as those later films, it's just that it's the story of a boy and his alien instead of some "realistic" drama. In fact, it's probably as powerful as film as Private Ryan--I defy anyone to not cry when E.T. dies (I still do and I've seen the film multiple times). But it works better than the later films because it creates a genuine sense of magic and wonder. It's unfortunate he felt the need to monkey with the film in 2002. The removal of the guns does nothing for the story. Thankfully the first version of the DVD had both versions on it.

1993 was a major turning point in the films of Steven Spielberg. That was the year he gave us both Jurassic Park and Schindler's List. JP is perhaps the last really big Spielberg thrill ride. It is on a par with Raiders and Jaws. Next to the 1933 King Kong, it is the best dinosaur movie ever. Like Jaws, it has an excellent cast and makes a point--the debate over cloning and evolution--amidst all it's suspense. And every frame of the movie works. The special effects are amazing. It really looks like the cast is right there with real dinosaurs. It does everything that Spielberg's best does and it does it better than even most of them. I ended up seeing JP in the theaters four times. Only a couple of 3-D movies share that.

Of course, after Schindler, Spielberg announced an intention to stick with more serious fare for the rest of his carreer. Thankfully, he has slowly started to go back to what made him great in the first place in the past couple of years. War of the Worlds proved he still had it even if it wasn't as thrilling as his earlier work. And while Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull wasn't as good as the original trilogy, it didn't completely disappoint me either. But I'd still like to see one more Jurassic Park type thrill ride out of him. I have no doubt that he can still do it.

One thing worth mentioning is that Hitch made essentially the same type of movie for nearly 50 years. And he never really complained about it and--except for a couple of late carreer missteps--never really lost his touch, either. Spielberg for a time was our generation's Hitchcock, a master of suspense and wonder. It would be nice to see him completely go back to being that again.