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.