Movie Title: Jaws: The Revenge
Genre: Adventure, Horror, Thriller
Writer: Michael De Guzman
Starring: Lorraine Gary, Lance Guest, Mario Van Peebles, Karen Young, Michael Caine, Judith Barsi, Mitchell Anderson, Lynn Whitfield, Fritzi Jane Courtney, Lee Fierro
Review: After her son Sean is killed, Chief Brody's widow, Ellen (Lorraine Gary), believes that her family is being deliberately targeted by a great white shark that's on a quest for revenge. Now, she heads to the Bahamas with her eldest son Michael, who soon learns that the same shark has made the long trek from Amity Island to the Caribbean just to eat up those Brodys. I wish I was making this up! It's the one of the most baffling, perplexing, and laughable movies ever to be made and released by a major motion picture studio. And that's not all - "This Time It's Personal" because it's Jaws: The Revenge.
Where do I begin? Jaws: The Revenge is a prime example of the "So Bad It's Good" flick - but it's all bad. The plot, script, directing, editing, acting (except for Michael Caine), special effects, and, of course, the shark, are all horrendous and make you question why the hell this movie got made, marketed, and released. I wonder if Universal man this movie just so they could send executives to the Bahamas for a few months. Makes sense to me.
As you work your way through the Jaws franchise you do notice a dip in quality as the series progresses. But, where Jaws 3-D wastes the potential of a clever premise, Jaws: The Revenge has a ridiculous premise and fails miserably to make it believable, engaging, or interesting enough for anyone other than those people that enjoy taking a gander at a train-wreck of a movie to get anything out of sitting through it.
Michael Caine is the only enjoyable part of movie for me. He's the consummate professional, even though this is one of his many "paycheck movies" (see the Fun Facts below). He does have the honor of being part of not only one of the worst movies ever made, but the most obvious movie blooper ever! After being attacked by the shark and then swimming to safety he climbs on a boat and his clothes are bone dry. WHAT!? That's just one of the many, many, many problems with this stinker. Plus, the way the shark is vanquished at the end doesn't make a lick of sense. I've seen the movie several times and it still makes no sense. At this point I'm beginning to think that it's not supposed to. The international version's ending makes much more sense. It's such a bizarre mess - and all the more reason to watch, maybe.
The weirdest part of the movie is just how fake and none threatening the shark looks throughout the run of this movie. For years audiences complained that the shark always looked fake, but when you go back a watch the original you'll swear that you were watching Shark Week. During it's "attacks" the shark is almost completely exposed out from the water. It just sits on top of the waves, not moving, unlike any shark ever. When I was a kid I did see the actual shark prop they used at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and it looked just as bad as it did in the movie. Oh, and if all of this isn't bad enough the shark, at one point, roars like a lion, dinosaur, or some kind of monstrous creature from past B-Movie. And there's so much bad jammed within this movie it's unreal.
I could go on and on about this grossly incompetent cinematic monstrosity, but I don't think I'd be able to stop. If you're a fan of the Jaws franchise, extremely bad movies, or wasting 90 minutes of your life, then take a deep dive into possibly the worst movie ever made - Jaws: The Revenge.
Fun Fact: This is one of Michael Caine's notorious "paycheck movies", along with The Swarm (1978), Ashanti (1979), Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979), The Island (1980), The Hand (1981) and Blame It on Rio (1984). When Caine was asked about this movie in an interview, he answered, "I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."