Review: The Raw Shark Texts

Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts, Canongate/The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne Vic., 2008.

Octavo; paperback; 440pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Mild wear; text block and page edges toned with some spotting. Very good.

Some years ago now, I encountered a book entitled The House of Leaves which left me simultaneously excited and infuriated, mostly the latter. The book is vapid and trite, signifying nothing other than a waste of time on the reader’s part. And yet, there was such a clamouring by the public for it, amounting to online discussions and websites tracking the various ramifications of the text. Most galling was the author’s assertions, along with statements by others firmly under his spell, that nothing like this had ever been done before and that he was breaking new ground. This is plainly not the case, as anyone with a reasonable grasp on the history of Western literature will point out and was underscored by the blatant ripping-off of Voltaire’s famous dedication (cunningly translated from the French) at the start of the piece. Why do people think that the past is ripe for plundering and appropriation when there are more than enough people out there who will call them on it?

Playing with the typographic components of the written piece is an exercise that is almost as old as books themselves. Breaking the narrative into artificial constraints in order to explore metatextual elements of the prose, ditto. As Santayana declared, those who are willing to forget the past are those who will be ostentatiously delighted by its repetition and will suffer the acute derision of those not so willing to ditch precedent. People who first encounter these kinds of texts are often surprised and excited by the opening of new vistas of reading discovery – that’s fine. Those who prey on such readers, on the other hand, deserve to be called out.

Let’s take a trip through history, shall we?

In medieval times, books were written by hand, by monks in scriptoria, who also decorated the borders and other textual elements of the works that they were transcribing. Hidden within marginal illustrations were pictorial commentaries on the characters of those who were paying for these books for their libraries, or other notable figures of the day. Sometimes these illustrations were pithy barbs; others were more a reflection of the illustrator’s state of mind (hungry; bored) or their own views on the text’s issues. The high tone of a religious tract could be devastatingly undercut by the appearance within an illuminated capital of a symbolic creature at variance with the work’s theme: a Fox for example could underscore a scheming intent; a Wolf, an intemperate greediness; a Hedgehog could signify a sodomite…

The texts themselves could be broken up into a symbolic framework that would not only sell the narrative but would highlight the characters and themes within each section. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer has such a structure, as does The Decameron by Boccaccio, and A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xuequin, to use a non-Western example. Creating such a structure allows the reader to anticipate the text’s arc and engages the reader more fully with the plot. Even de Sade did this with 120 days of Sodom, as did J.G. Ballard in his Atrocity Exhibition.

Using typography to sell content is not just the preserve of medieval scribes either. The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, written from 1759 to 1767, makes use of marbled paper and other visual, non-textual elements to get its point across. At one point feeling less than buoyant, our titular hero reveals his thoughts with nothing more than a blacked-out page; Stephenie Meyers used a similar device in the first Twilight novel by allowing a blank page to speak to the state of her heroine’s depression. This kind of typographical and textual playfulness – and many other examples like it – have been around for ages. Lewis Carroll anyone?

The thing that made House of Leaves so exasperating, having emulated all of these tropes and notions, was its author’s and audience’s wild claims to have done something new and extraordinary – along with copying T.S. Eliot’s footnoting fetish and the nested epistolary format common to most Victorian writing, including Dracula, Frankenstein and The Beetle – when it’s clear that it was the farthest thing from the truth. The whole exercise was an example of the creators trying to look smug and clever, rather than having anything vital and of interest to say. Unlike say, Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost, or Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Dumas Club or Italo Calvino’s Castle of Crossed Destinies. Above all, it’s simply not fun – not even remotely entertaining – to read.

You’ll understand then, when I say that I was extremely cautious about picking up The Raw Shark Texts.

This book was so far off my radar that I only encountered it while shelving stock at work. I grinned at the cover – riffing off the “Jaws” marketing material – then I dropped it, and, when picking it back up, I noticed that there seemed to be some pictorial material within the text. Then I discovered the whole ‘flip-book-shark-attack’ sequence in the back and decided that I needed to take this volume home for further inspection. I’m glad that I did.

Pictorial content there is between these covers, but – pleasingly – it’s all in context with the work at hand and serves a definite purpose within and without the text. To boil things down, this is a book about a fellow who is being pursued by a metatextual shark called a “Ludovician”, which patrols the liminal ‘waters’ between symbolic and literal reality, seeking prey. We’ll get back to this in a minute. Suffice it to say, that at several points in the narrative the shark breaches the barrier between reality and textuality, and these are represented by typographical pictures of a shark erupting out of the page. At one point while the protagonist is submerged in extra-liminal space, this is represented by a flipbook showing the fish emerging from the distant haze and barrelling down upon its potential victim, jaws agape. At no point do these cross-textual images seem gratuitous and they really add to the suspense and enjoyment of reading the book.

Getting back to the subject matter: yes, this is a book about a guy being stalked by a notional shark that wants to devour his memories. We start the book with Eric Sanderson waking up in his flat having just survived (although he doesn’t remember it) an almost fatal encounter with the Ludovician. By means of a series of letters and notes sent to him by his previous (pre-attack) incarnation (whom he refers to as the First Eric Sanderson) and the attentions of a self-interested psychologist who believes Eric is suffering from a rare dissociative disorder, he attempts to re-start his life, a PTSD survivor who doesn’t know what he’s recovering from.

Various breadcrumbs from his past existence – a videotape of a lightbulb in a dark room turning on and off in suggestive sequences; postcards from a holiday on Naxos; a returning cat named Ian that seems to know Eric of old – put him on a trail to discover an almost legendary etymologist named Trey Fidorous who might know the answers to Eric’s dilemma. Along the way he is reminded of a past doomed love affair with a deceased soulmate, and he encounters another metatextual survivor on the run from her own demon, a young woman named Scout.

The first part of the book – the set-up – feels a lot like Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, in its fascination for forgotten and abandoned urban environments and obsession with homeless individuals and their methods of coping with their lot. It rides the rails of the urban fantasy genre pretty firmly, but without the ghoulishness or self-absolution present in most works of that ilk: surprisingly, most homeless people don’t actually have magical places that they can retire to for food and shelter when night falls, believe it or not. At the, roughly, halfway point of the narrative the gears shift, and the story takes a different turn.

If you’ve seen the movie “Jaws” by Steven Spielberg, then you’ve experienced what happens to our heroes at the tail end of this novel. In the movie, the third act involves three characters who set out to sea, hunting the shark, on a clapped-out old trawler named “Orca”. They establish a tense hierarchy of command; they rail against each other’s abilities and experience; they suffer a few frightening moments that force them to work together; the nominal leader proves to have hopelessly miscalculated his opponent; another character vanishes during a shark encounter, appearing to have been eaten; and the last character finally wins the day by sheer luck and grit. Well – SPOILER ALERT – this is exactly how the back end of this novel pans out, too. Our heroes build a nominal shark-boat according to consensual readership expectations (i.e., what a notional audience would expect them to build, based upon a cultural awareness of both the movie and Peter Benchley's novel) and then they run out this ‘shark-movie playbook’ to win through.

Now, this might seem like a bit of a cop-out, but there’s a metatextual layer to this process that requires that these events take place, and which is supported by the narrative. That’s fine – we’ve been set up to expect it. However, on an entertainment level, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a bit ‘ho-hum’ in its execution. Being told how a thing ends beforehand doesn’t win you any friends, no matter the excuse for doing it.

I stated above that other books of this sort have failed because they are just not entertaining. That’s not the case here. What we have is a solid mystery and quest novel of the urban fantasy variety, but what makes it even more engaging is the story of Eric’s doomed relationship with the dead Clio and his burgeoning new relationship with the efficient, no-nonsense Scout. This romantic sub-plot underscores the clever-clever technicality of the present dangers and gives the reader an excuse to plough on, quite apart from all the intellectual exercises of the book’s mind-games. And did I mention that Hall is just a beautiful writer? Well, there's that.

So, on the one hand, this is pretty clearly Neverwhere with a segue into "Jaws", but it’s also its own beast. The devil here is in the details. Learning about the strange symbolic world that Eric gets dropped into is a gripping and fascinating experience. The mystery resolves as his memory returns and the horrors which populate his sub-liminal, supra-/super-/sub-/meta-/extratextual nightmare are palpable and weird. I enjoyed the strangeness of it all, along with Hall’s ability to make it all seem credible and possible. And, did I mention, there’s a shark-attack flipbook too?!

Since the book’s release, there have been a lot of online shenanigans surrounding the work – missing segments and “un-chapters”; discussions of coding techniques used in the novel – This stuff, for me, is not necessary. I think of it as extraneous marketing or promotional material, for completists only. I’m not going to waste my time tracking it all down, but I’m sure others will enjoy doing so. In the meantime, Hall has penned another tricksy book and I’ve listed it below, along with another bunch of similar titles – with the exception of House of Leaves which is not worthy of the association – which fall under the umbrella of typographically experimental novels.

Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors from me.

*****

Other Typographically Twisty Texts:

Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499)

Johannes Trithemius, Steganographia (1499)

"Torquemada" (Edward Powys Mathers), Cain's Jawbone (1934)

Marc Saporta, Composition No. I (1962)

Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch (1963; translated into English 1966)

Maurice Roche, Compact (1966; translated in 1988)

B.S. Johnson, The Unfortunates (1969)

Harry Matthews, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1972)

Christine Brooke-Rose, Thru (1975)

Alasdair Gray, 1982, Janine (1984)

J.J. Abrams & Doug Dorst, S (2013)

Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff, Illuminae (2015)

Rian Hughes, XX (2020)

Steven Hall, Maxwell’s Demon (2021)

Rian Hughes, The Black Locomotive (2021)

Review: The Amityville Horror

Jay Anson, The Amityville Horror, Pocket Star Books/Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster Inc., New York NY, 2005.

Octavo; paperback; 317pp., with monochrome maps and illustrations, Moderate wear; covers well rubbed and edgeworn; spine creased; text block edges toned with some spotting. Good.

Try this as an interesting experiment: for one week, note everything that happens to you at home without trying to infer any kind of causality. Wake up feeling off-colour? Note it down. Lost your car-keys only to find them in a place you would never think to look? Put it on the list. Heard an odd noise outside during the night? Noted. Discovered an odd bruise on your shin but can’t remember how you got it? Check. Then, at the end of the week, declare that “demons spent the last seven days trying to possess me”, and re-examine your list. You might start to feel a bit freaked out.

Of course, things happen in everyday life that have no essential connexion to each other – they’re just random pieces of happenstance and nothing can be read between them, apart from the fact that they all happened to you. But viewing them through a specific lens makes them look peculiar. It doesn’t make that peculiarity ‘Truth’; it just implies connexions which are suggestive, but which are not actually there. Despite everything that Jung has to say about synchronicity, sometimes random events are just that – random. What does this have to do with Jay Anson’s book? Let’s begin a slow unpack…

This is a book which is absolutely not true. It’s a mask which hides a whole bunch of baloney. In essence it is a distillation of things – occurrences, objects and happenings - which have been lumped together inside a particular frame. That frame bears the label “Demonic Haunted House”, but this is a lie: many of the things within the frame have been broken in order to fit; other things have been left out entirely. This book is the tip of an iceberg of intention and is designed to fool those who read it. It looks shiny and slick, but we’ve learned since 1977 that things which look polished and enticing are probably trying to sell us something. That’s the case here.

What’s interesting about this book is not so much the contents, the badly-written stuff on the pages between the covers, but all the things that are going on around it. Despite the subject matter, the book lies there trying to look innocent, but it’s covering a multitude of sins exposed by examining how it came to be and what happened afterwards. Essentially, butter wouldn’t melt between its pages.

To recap, in late December of 1975, the Lutz family moved into a house on Long Island in New York that was cheaper than expected but in a district that was above their pay grade. They were told that a series of murders had happened in the house a year earlier – thus accounting for the cheap price-tag - but this didn’t faze them, even when told that the furniture in the house was the property of the slain previous owners. While in the house, the family claimed to have experienced strange and sometimes violent phenomena, personality changes, visitations by invisible entities, odd events and curious noises. They attributed all of this to the proximity of an ancient Native American burial ground, the nearby grave of a Salem witch-hunter, and the restless spirits of those slain on the premises, with a touch of brimstone thrown in for good measure. Twenty-eight days after moving in, the Lutz family abandoned the place and relocated to stay with relatives, claiming that it was impossible to live there any longer.

To our jaded Twenty-first Century palates, this sounds like a trite trope-fest of tedious proportions; however, it’s wise to remember that, before this book was published, very little of this kind of tale had shown up in the popular narrative. William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist had appeared in 1971 to general acclaim (with a sequel appearing in 1983), and the Academy Award^TM winning movie adaptation was released in 1973. Stephen King’s Pet Sematary – a novel which capitalises heavily upon the ‘built-upon-a-Native-American-graveyard’ trope - was released in 1983, while Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” has been with us since 1953. Add to this the fact that horror fiction was going through a boom period, with writers like Guy N. Smith (Night of the Crabs), Graham Masterton (The Manitou) and James Herbert (The Rats) making enormous inroads into the zeitgeist, the world was primed and ready for this horror explosion. And explode, it did.

After the events had transpired, Jay Anson was contracted to write them up in book form. He was given a large quantity of recorded discussions – tapes of conversations that George and Kathy Lutz had made, guided by two lawyers who were advising them. Anson took this material, which he claimed was largely disjointed and non-chronological, and massaged the information into a coherent timeframe. Essentially, he took a bunch of random data as recounted by George and Kathy Lutz concerning their time at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville and focused them through a specific and peculiar lens. He is on record as saying that he contacted as many of the people mentioned in the narrative as he could, but there are notable shortfalls in his due diligence. Errors are present in the text – of sense and of chronology – and changes were made between editions of the book as it gained in popularity. It’s clear that the 1977 first edition was simply a later draft that was corrected at least two times in subsequent editions. That first edition was copywritten to “Jay Anson, George Lutz and Kathy Lutz” – is it cynical of me to think that a corrected later edition, with different copyright benefactors, might have been a slick way to cut the Lutzes out of any royalties owing from the property? Probably.

Anyway, it took only a switch from an “old tan Ford” to a “Chevrolet Vega” as Father Mancuso’s car of choice, to force an edition change, before reverting back to the original model in the following edition. Which, for avid readers, begs the question: what type of car was it?

We can’t, of course, ask “Father Mancuso”. This figure is a fraught element of the story. Apparently, the priest that the Lutz’s contacted to come and bless their house was actually named Father Pecoraro; the publishers insist that the Church intervened with an alias in order the protect the cleric’s identity. In the book, it’s clear that, during the recounted events, the priest and the Lutz family never encountered each other. The crucial scene where Father Mancuso arrives at the house and is told to “Get Out!” by a disembodied voice, occurs without either party actually interacting. Now, I don’t care who you are, if you come over to my house while I’m out in my backyard and blithely let yourself in for a spot of ritual purification, the person telling you to “get out” will be me, pure and simple. This scene has been carefully constructed to obscure the fact that the Lutzes never met a priest at their house while they were in residence, and that no priest ever went to the house during that time. Researchers have been able to verify that Father Pecoraro spoke by telephone to the Lutzes before they moved in; during television appearances after the fact he variously claimed that he had visited the house when it was untenanted, that his visits to the house had been uneventful and also – going full volte-face - that the events in the book were real, with the additional detail that he had been invisibly slapped as well as being verbally abused. Which events were factual then? The decision to rename the character “Father Delaney” in the 1979 movie seems like an attempt to dispense with the whole tortured issue.

Other issues arise: the Prologue of the book claims that the Lutz family were in residence from the 23^rd of December 1975, while the first chapter clearly states that they moved in on the 18^th. Subsequent owners of the property were able to verify that all of the fittings and appointments within the house were original – no doors had been torn off their hinges; no windows had been damaged; no balcony railings had been smashed; and no garage doors had been bent and dislocated. Simple consultation with the weather agencies of the time concluded that there was no snowfall or torrential rain of the levels described over that period. There was no bar named “The Witch’s Brew” (or anything else) in the location indicated in the book. No police officers had answered calls from the Lutzes or made patrols in the area over the period. No neighbours had noticed anything unusual during the Lutz residency. And – most damning – the infamous “Red Room” in the basement of the house was simply a small closet, painted in keeping with the rest of the place, and not concealed in any way.

Claims that the house had been built upon a Native American cemetery, designed to dispose of the mad and the diseased, were disputed by the local Shinnecock population. A burial ground had been designated somewhere in the region but had been abandoned early on after torrential floods had caused the river to break its boundaries and erode the site – that’s all, folks. Nothing to see here. The reference to John Ketcham in chapter 11 is a confusion between several families and individuals of that name who lived in, or moved through, the Amityville area since the first white settlers landed in America – none of them are buried on the Lutz’s old property; certainly, none of the Amityville Ketchams practiced witchcraft in Salem, or attended the Trials there.

A handy template is tacitly offered in the book to slyly inform the reader as to what is taking place. In the Catholic Church, a formula exists to assess levels of demonic interference. First, there has to be an Invitation, or an opening of an individual to the possibility of demonic traffic (in this case we’re told that – somehow - George and Kathy’s fondness for Transcendental Meditation is the key). Then there’s Infestation where the environment surrounding targeted individuals is messed with – knocking, tapping, loud unexplained noises and other poltergeist activity. Following this there’s Obsession, during which the targeted individual starts to harbour dark and dissociative thoughts. Then there’s Vexation, wherein the body of the target is attacked by buffets, cuts and nicks, along with many other distressing ailments which occur and disappear spontaneously. And finally, there’s full-on Possession, during which the body of the target is taken over completely by the outside entity. This system of identification was used in Blatty's book, The Exorcist, and again in the movie of the same name; it was widely discussed after the impact made by those two vehicles and so, of course, it gets jammed in here to ramp up the spookiness.

In the aftermath of their tenancy, the Lutzes engaged a “vampirologist” named Stephen Kaplan to determine the cause of the uproar at the address. The Lutzes were clearly looking for a sympathetic read of the phenomenon, but they had an acrimonious falling-out after Kaplan declared that he was determined to discover and call-out any instance of fraud that he unearthed. It clearly looks as though the Lutzes had something that they’d rather remained hidden. Kaplan and his wife eventually published a book in 1995 that gives a jaundiced reading of the Amityville events.

Subsequently, the Lutzes were given the partisan hearing that they wanted in the form of a visit by Ed and Lorraine Warren. The self-styled “demonologist” and “clairvoyant” – inspiration for all the “Conjuring” and “Insidious” films (and their spin-offs) - roundly declared that the house was bursting with demonic energies and went on to make huge bank on their involvement, all the while boosting the book sales and box-office returns from the movie that launched in 1979. Once the movie hit the silver screen, it was all over bar the shouting. I went to see this film myself when it first came out and it terrified the pants off of me; I can confirm that it was truly a seminal moment for the horror genre. (The 2005 movie, on the other hand, is fine if you’re a big fan of Ryan Reynolds’ abdominal development, but a hot mess, else.)

But is it all real? Well, no – no it’s not. In the follow-up after its release the book prompted many investigations by interested parties, some by television programs and other media outlets, some by amateurs bothered by the inconsistencies between the book editions. There were declarations of shenanigans and some bitter legal fights ensued. It was revealed that the two lawyers who coached the Lutzes on their original taped revelations had met with the couple over a good bottle of red wine and declared that the case was a money-spinner that would reap them great benefits. Researchers working with the Warrens after their moment in the spotlight were told to “make up” material for their reports, the scarier the better, in order to keep popular attention simmering. At the end of the day, George Lutz was forced to amend his stance on the events downgrading the mystery from “absolutely real” to “mostly true”. Which is to say, not at all.

All told, Lutz is on record as saying that he and his family reaped about US$300,000 across several decades, an amount largely eaten into by legal costs and other expenses. The lawyers, the publishers and the film production companies have benefited from the lions’ share of the booty. And certainly, Jay Anson has never had to work another day in his life. Along the way, they created the template for all of the haunted house scenarios to follow in their footsteps.

*****

Fans of the unexplained and the mysterious of course know the story of the Marie Celeste. This ship was discovered adrift at sea in the Nineteenth Century, completely empty of crew and passengers and with signs that, whatever had taken place, it had happened quickly and without warning. Over the years, many writers and researchers have tried to pin down what happened; in essence, they have tried to find a frame that encompasses all of the elements of the mystery, a lens which rationalises all of the myriad details that prompt questions of ‘Why?’. Over the years I’ve read many theories as to what happened to the ship: UFOs; Pirates; Madness Due to Spoiled Grain; Alcoholic Poisoning. None of them seemed to adequately explain each and every recorded detail. The chosen frame didn’t encompass all of the scene. As far as The Amityville Horror is concerned (and, cheekily, Anson named it that in homage to Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror”) there is a frame that accounts for all of the goings-on, hidden behind the bland sleekness of this carefully-constructed, sleight-of-hand of a book. If you squint just so through the trashy writing, you can see it too.

Three Tentacled Horrors from me.

Review: The "Jaws" Tetralogy

I recently began reading The Raw Shark Texts (Canongate, 2005) by Stephen Hall and it put me in mind of my ongoing obsession with B-grade shark flicks. Consequently, I cast around idly for something to watch and review but nothing of any real consequence presented itself. I have imposed an as-yet unspoken-about limit to my explorations in this field – any movies where the featured creature becomes embroiled in a tag-team punch-up with some other notable beastie, or where weird science conjoins two or more rampaging horrors, I gracefully defer comment. This decision is completely the result of sitting through all of the “Sharknado” films with the realisation that life is just too short for some forms of dross. So, “Sharktopus” was out, along with a slew of multiply-headed shark features and their sequels. You’ll have to do those yourselves.

In the end, I decided to tune in to Spielberg’s “Jaws” to pass time while awaiting inspiration and I realised that I have never examined this seminal franchise in full. I didn’t see the titular film when it came out (I was too young) but I did see the second film at the drive-in cinema during its initial release, which terrified the socks off me (I was too young). “Jaws 3-D” could never be an inducement as, being a spectacles wearer, the whole third-dimension craze was fraught with the issues around being able to use the necessary equipment in order to enjoy the experience. As for “Jaws: The Revenge”? I just rolled my eyes at the title and walked on by. Now, I find myself curious to explore these murky waters, to take my own remembrances and thoughts and see to where they lead…

Stephen Spielberg (Dir.), “Jaws”, Universal Pictures / Zanuck/Brown Pictures, 1975.

In which we learn that Solid Writing and Direction, Good Performances and Not Showing the Monster pay off in the form of a gold statuette.

Peter Benchley’s book of the same name is a multi-layered metaphor that sings off the page, with the caveat that it has dated a little since the 1970s. Nevertheless, it contains some truly meaty and horrifying descriptions that still get the pulse racing. On paper, the shark becomes a symbol of Chief Brody’s sexual and social dysfunction, objectifying the issues he has in his marriage and the castration of capability he suffers from the mayor and town council of the small island community to which he has relocated. In defeating the shark, he reclaims his virility and community power, as well as saving Amity from the predations of a rogue predator. The book is so good that Spielberg made the canny decision to rope the author in to co-write the screenplay and Benchley’s narrative skills are abundantly on display here.

That being said, all of the symbolism of the work goes by the wayside and the focus of the film lies all in the surface detail. There’s no time for subtext here, or anything which might muddy the waters. Everything is shown up front and, especially, Sheriff Brody’s creaking domestic situation is jettisoned from the start – it’s all happy families, away! We are offered a huge, hungry shark and Spielberg plants his flag squarely on the delivery of that promise – to an extent. Given the technology of the time and endless experiments with the submersible puppets created for the project, in the end very little screentime is given to the rampaging fish and that’s all to the good in my opinion.

Spielberg’s skill here lies all in suggesting the huge pelagean to his audience without having it roar out of the scenery on a constant basis. To be completely honest, ‘Bruce’, as the giant animatronic was affectionately named, was a bit dopey-looking, stretching unconvincingly due to water-drag and bouncing a little too flippantly when out of its element. When seen from above through the water, the shark seems to have a tendency to bend, requiring it to do a little zig-zag shuffle in order to stay on course. In the end, Spielberg obviously decided that small glimpses were sufficient, and that suggestion and intimation would work better than a full-on Busby-Berkeley reveal. It was a decision that paid off in spades. Of course, all of the real shark footage by Rod and Valerie Taylor, intercut with the lame puppetry, pushed veracity right to the fore as well.

(As an aside, there’s a bit in the movie where two kids fake themselves a shark’s dorsal fin and swim onto a crowded beach, only to face the business ends of several rifles wielded by jumpy Sherrif’s deputies and a few Good Ol’ Boys, after terrifying the citizenry. It’s a cunning move: the kids’ hokey fin, while creaky, is sufficiently real enough to pass muster for a cheap audience scare; when we see Bruce’s fin later – arguably a better simulacrum - we are thus primed to overlook any shortfalls in effects credibility. It’s a slick move.)

What we lose in Great White Facetime, we more than make up for with Spielberg’s attention to the people of Amity Island. Whenever there’s a hint of shark in the water, the camera lingers on panicked faces and weeping parents in the vicinity. We become unsettled by our own empathic response to others whose fate we can relate to. How would you feel if a close relative went missing during a crowd panic on a public beach? You can watch this movie to find out. Spielberg is fascinated by people: the small, fussy details that he captures of sunbathers trying to relax on a beach, not only resonate with us – underscoring the humanity of the players – but also set out a background of tension and unease from which he builds the movie’s emotional core.

(Incidentally, before the killing of young Alex Kintner in the film, we see a fellow throwing sticks to his dog on the beach, a dog which runs into the surf never to be seen again. That dog’s name is ‘Pippin’. At the end of the movie “The Meg”, there’s another small dog, referenced during the crowd panic scene which echoes Spielberg’s fondness for background humanity, whose name also happens to be Pippin. I’m detecting fans in the water…)

“Jaws” is not a perfect film by any means: the scenes aboard the “Orca” in the third act with Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss blokey-ing around before the final destruction, for my money, are too long and too heavy-handed. It feels as though the writers are just cribbing from Moby Dick as hard as they can while Spielberg lets his cast chew the scenery for all they’re worth. I just fast-forward the film from the moment the cast starts singing…

In the final analysis, this is a great movie that might well have been a misfire in the Spielberg canon, had not masterful technical nous and experience been employed at just the right moments. The writers, the actors and certainly the director all gave of their best and a deserving Academy Award^TM was the result, one of only a handful ever awarded to horror cinema. From such lofty heights, the money began to talk and so we move on to…

Jeannot Szwarc (Dir.), “Jaws 2”, Universal Pictures / Zanuck/Brown Pictures, 1978.

In which, with the Best Will in the World, a majority of the Original Cast and Crew return to reprise their Roles before Bean-Counting Producers sink the Whole Enterprise.

With an Oscar^TM on the mantelpiece, there was no way that Hollywood wouldn’t cast a musing eye over the first film and think “perhaps we could spin a sequel out of that?”. It was inevitable, really. On paper, this looks like a Good Thing – most of the original line-up from the first film are here and those who aren’t, had good reasons for being absent: Richard Dreyfuss and Spielberg were both hip-deep in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” by this stage and were easily excused; the rest of the cast were obviously Keen to Get the Band Back Together. Sadly, no-one counted on the Accountants.

In the wash-up from the first movie’s after-party, the bean counters obviously did a thorough analysis of just who was going to the theatres to see their fishy nightmare. Turns out, it was chiefly the 18-25-year-old demographic - those youthful types who see cinema attendance primarily as a make-out opportunity for which scary content and darkened spaces are a crucial element - who were paying to see Bruce in action, and so the film was bent inevitably in their direction. If, like me you approach this movie expecting to see a – somewhat less effective but nevertheless capable – follow-up, you are going to be annoyed by the endless parade of young folk on display, who slowly and surely take over the entire narrative, leaving all of the interesting people marooned on the sidelines.

Roy Scheider is back as Sheriff Martin Brody, still chafing against the limits imposed upon him by the local council and their cash-obsessed governance. His kids are older and just as wilful and his wife Ellen (Lorraine Gary) is still suffering long, but is now employed by a growing hotel concern, taking over the island of Amity. When two New York divers go missing and a water-skiing double fatality heaves into frame, Brody immediately suspects a shark and – for reasons pushing credibility – is ignored. I mean, really: here’s a guy who has seen all the signs up close and personally and knows whereof he speaks – why would anybody fail to give him the time of day? Still, that’s how it’s played, with the mayor and local hotel consortium owner unwilling to let fatalities interrupt the cashflow, and Brody is back to Square One, as the Police Chief Who Cried Wolf. It’s almost as though the screenwriters just hit the factory pre-sets on all the characters.

By the mid-point of this overlong movie, Brody has vented his frustration by shooting at a school of fish offshore which he misinterprets as a gigantic shark and gets sacked by the Town Council for endangering beachgoers. There’s a display of incipient alcoholism and some vague discussion about looking for work but, despite this apparent setback, being fired in no way hampers Brody from this point onwards – which begs the question of why the screenwriters did it at all? By this stage we’ve also reached Peak Kid and the third act devolves into a tiresome sea wreck of tangled jolly boats and screaming teens, only a depressing minimum of whom get swallowed by the shark. Just before the credits roll, Sheriff Brody sails in to ham-fistedly save the day, using a submarine cable to electrocute the fish without – somehow – also killing everybody along with it.

It's a clunky plot, and one which was obviously bent out of shape during filming into a tortured, re-written non-event. On the plus-side, the shark looks a little better than in the original film and it’s clear that lessons were learned while pushing Bruce out into the water in the first movie and that these were taken to heart in the second. There are still a few occasions where the fish is obviously rubber, but they’re mostly blink-and-you’ll-miss-them moments. Mostly.

The difference between Spielberg’s vision for this material and Jeannot Szwarc’s is sex. Szwarc has a wolfishly lingering gaze when it comes to the young people who pass before his lens, whereas his predecessor is relatively unconcerned with such matters. Spielberg’s interest is all about the psychology of the characters, whereas Szwarc’s is primarily in the physical plane, and the movie rapidly devolves into a fashion parade of skimpily-dressed clothes horses as a result. It’s clear that a “sex sells!” ethos has pervaded at this point – setting the hallmark for all future shark flicks to come – and it only gets worse from here.

Joe Alves (Dir.), “Jaws 3-D”, MCA Theatricals / Universal Pictures / Alan Landsburg Productions, 1983.

In which 80s Style goes Full Bore and the movie relies on Technology Which Has Not Yet Been Invented.

There’s an enormous piece of irony that supervenes over this sequel – a bunch of scenes involve a captive orca in the film’s oceanic theme park setting, an orca named “Shamu”. If any of you don’t know to what I’m referring, I direct you to a documentary film entitled “Blackfish”. All will be revealed…

Suddenly, it’s the Eighties and everything is bigger and flashier and more brightly coloured. Everyone is wearing their corporate uniforms, or aerobics gear, or acid-washed denim. It’s a world of perms and mullets, and frankly I was down with everyone onscreen getting ripped apart by a kill-crazed shark. Sadly, it was not to be. Mostly.

The set-up here is that a “Sea World”-analogue theme park has established itself on Amity Island (an island where all things are, apparently, possible) and Michael Brody – Martin’s oldest son, played by Dennis Quaid – is the head of the engineering and maintenance section. His girlfriend, Kay (Bess Armstrong), is the park’s head biologist, working with the aquatic mammals and dispensing timely and valuable information about ocean lifeforms. At the start of the movie, Michael’s brother Sean shows up simultaneously with an edgelord, British wildlife photographer named FitzRoyce and his minder, who are here to popularise the park with a proposed dramatic photo-shoot. The Eighties: it was all about the camerawork… The Brody boys and Kay go out for dinner and encounter Kelly-Ann, a member of the theme park’s water-skiing performance troupe, and she and Sean fall in ‘lerv’. From this point on, Sean is completely dropped by the narrative flow and Kelly-Ann only resurfaces to receive her comeuppance for having a roving eye for cute boys in “jockey shorts” (these were the days before Speedos were a household word). The real business here concerns Michael and Kay, the undeniably insane photographer played by the reliably unhinged Simon MacCorkindale, and their employer, Calvin Bouchard, played cringeworthily by Louis Gossett Jr.

The story revolves around a 10-foot-long Great White shark that enters the park lagoon and ravages about the place. In short order, our heroes contain it – FitzRoyce wants to kill it horribly while being filmed, as an inducement to park attendance (!), while Kay points out that no other aquarium park on the planet has ever captured and maintained a Great White shark before and so it behoves them to try and be the first. Calvin bats the options around, amid a flurry of off-colour racial observations, and fails to come up with a decision: capture it first and cure it, he says, then he’ll decide. It turns out that there’s another, bigger, shark in the lagoon, hiding in the filtration system and, when the smaller shark dies, it goes on a toothy revenge spree and tries to empty the lagoon of its human population. FitzRoyce, clutching a hand-grenade, winds up stuck between the shark’s fangs, so Michael pulls the pin with a makeshift hook and the island of Amity is safe once more. It’s that naff.

Bad as the writing is for this sequel, the effects are even worse. As a third instalment, a decision was logically made to film this horror in the 3-D format, which is fair enough. However, this automatically means that the camera lingers on long, pointy objects jutting out from the screen, objects or scenery which have little to do with the furtherance of the plot. At one point, jokey mechanical octopus arms ensnare visitors to an exhibit in the theme park; they easily escape, laughing gleefully as they do so, but the camera becomes fixated on the extended lengths of one of these arms, for an unsupportable duration. Similar moments occur throughout the film, along with an odd, double-vision fuzziness that muddies the corners of the screen. Watching this with a pair of 3-D glasses, of course, would make all of this explicable, but none of it saves an already creaky filmic endeavour.

Finally, there’s the shark, and several other pieces of visual trickery. There are some jump-scare moments where pieces of shark-gnawed cadavers are revealed dramatically, and these are mostly alright – movies and television have been faking body parts long before the “Jaws” franchise popped up. However, it’s how they are presented that makes them curious. At one point a severed arm is displayed, suspended underwater, for several moments: at no time does gravity take hold of it and allow it to settle towards the seabed; at no time does a stray current propel it along in its grasp. It just hangs there, becoming increasingly obviously matted-in against the background. Later on, the evil shark rams its way into the submerged control centre of the park through the heavy glass window. What we see is a matte-shot of a badly sculpted shark hanging motionless on the screen; it pulls slightly forward, towards us; then an overlaid shot of breaking glass signals to us that it has broken into the control room. This is followed by a cut to our actors screaming and being soaked by firehoses. Not convincing. It would take some years before Rennie Harlen filmed this exact scene in anything like a realistic fashion. Obviously, the 3-D format put some constraints on the presentation of some of these events in the film but nevertheless, it’s these sorts of images that should make a director go “ah, no – let’s try that again” rather than just running with it. But no, here we are – enduring a film trying to use visual gimmickry that just wasn’t around at the time.

With the shark exploded and the theme park saved, it only remains for our two lovers to declare that she will, of course, drop her career in favour of his in exchange for a vague promise that he will do likewise “next time”…  And: Sean who?

Joseph Sargent (Dir.) “Jaws: The Revenge”, Universal Pictures, 1987.

In which Sense goes Right Out the Window and Taste and Style along with it.

Full disclosure: the magic of streaming services was unable to provide me with a complete version of this film (for free anyway; no way was I going to pay good money for it). What I have seen of it comes from reviews and interviews, random clips and trailers circulating on The Interwebz and other reviews by critics. It doesn’t – needless to say – look good.*

To begin with, promotional material that was released before the movie first screened airily stated that this was “the third film of the remarkable Jaws trilogy”, tacitly declaring the 3-D movie non-canon and to be disregarded by the film-going community. This is strong stuff, to say the least, and maybe – maybe – would have been supportable had the ensuing film been any good at all. To say that this film is universally reviled is likely a stretch, but it’s just a little one, when even the actors appearing in it dismiss it as awful. Michael Caine, for example, described it as such and declares that while the movie was bad, the house he bought for his Mum with his $1,000,000 acting fee for two weeks’ work was fantastic. Ouch!

The plot of this instalment is as follows. Sean Brody has become a deputy in Amity Island’s police force; Michael, his elder brother, has become a biologist and has relocated to the Bahamas for reasons of study, where he has also married a woman and manifested a daughter. One night in Amity, Sean is on duty mending a buoy, when a giant shark surfaces and rips his arm off; it then submerges his boat and eats him. His mum, Ellen Brody, flies to the Bahamas to try to forget her grief by having a holiday-fling with Michael Caine (we’re glancingly told that fear of the shark induced a fatal heart-attack in Martin Brody), but it’s not long before the giant shark appears once more and attacks Michael and his family in earnest. Ellen believes that the shark is Hell-bent on revenge, and it is theorised that this embittered shark – scion of the OG Great White in “Jaws” - was birthed just as Sheriff Brody electrocuted its mother at the end of “Jaws 2” – I’ll leave the credibility of that theory for you to decide. Anyway, this fish hates Ellen and her family and wants to kill them; Michael and his stereotypical Rasta friend-slash-tech-wizard, Jake, build gadgets and use them to try and kill the shark before the body-count rises; they do so after Ellen runs it through with the prow of her sailing ship. Apart from a nice little sequence where the shark chases Michael through a sunken battleship and he barely gets away, it’s pretty much a train-ride from go to whoa.

As far as it goes (and that’s not far), it’s a pretty straightforward run. However, a few things let it down: the Bahamian characters all felt creepily like bit-part actors from a James Bond movie and the whole ‘killer shark is tracking us down to exact its vengeance’ storyline is just ludicrous. There are moments when we’re asked to believe that a human being in SCUBA gear is handily able to outswim a marine predator in a flat-out swimming race, which are also useful moments to get in some eye-rolling exercises. Mainly though, it’s – again – the technology of manifesting the shark that is the major problem.

There are points in this film (what I’ve seen of it) where you have to wonder- how was it possible to drift so far from standard shark anatomy? This beast has ridges and divots that no shark has ever generated, and the gill slits are just whack. In close-up shots, it looks like the fish has some kind of all-over fungal infestation, making it look sort of fluffy, and there are seams and joins galore to distract the eye. Further, it is never photographed below its lateral line, a fact which gradually becomes suspicious to the viewer, and the moment you make the connexion that the jerky motions of this animal are those akin to some object attached to front of a forklift, the penny drops and the magic trick is revealed. All that being said, the effects are still better than any of the previous films, and that’s saying something.

A final note: in the climax of this film, Ellen drives her ship full speed at the giant shark and pinions it just as it's being electrocuted by her son - the movie poster just above highlights this moment in spirit, if not in essentials. It has very strong parallels to the way in which Johansen finishes off Cthulhu at the end of their encounter. Is anyone else getting strong "The Call of Cthulhu" vibes? 

*****

Well, that brings me to the end of my “Jaws” franchise ride. While embarked upon this project, I also discovered that there is a theoretical fifth movie release slated for 2025, but I can’t find any verifying sources for that being a real thing. It’s likely just wish-fulfilment and some ingenious AI jiggery-pokery on the part of some savvy fan rather than anything real. It’s interesting to note that Spielberg was canny enough to spot the inherent dangers of filming a story like this and was able to turn the tables on the process, rather than the subsequent directors who all fell straight into the potholes. As we’ve seen from other films outside of this franchise (many now franchises of their own) generating believable (and not so believable) sharks for the purpose of a movie release has become a trivial procedure and even the worst shark films nowadays can boast some impressive visuals, if nothing else.

* Since writing this, the endless Mystery that are streaming services has made the fourth (third?) movie available in full. I have made the foray into the fullness of this film and - needless to say - it's exactly as reported.