Jaws: The Revenge

Wow.  Just...wow.  The fourth and (presumably) final installment in the Jaws series, Jaws: The Revenge, is quite possibly the absolute lowest point in the history of movie franchises.  Sure, there are a handful of worse movies out there, but the difference is quality between this and the original Jaws is staggering.  Is there a greater drop off in quality between a great film and its sequel?  I don't think so, but please leave a comment if you have a better nomination for the crown.  Oh, and before I forget to mention it, this review contains SPOILERS, because you should never ever ever want to watch this movie without knowing exactly what you are getting yourself into.

The first sign we have that something is going to go horribly wrong with this movie can be seen during the opening credits.  No, I'm not referring to the fact that Mario Van Peebles has high billing, although that is another bad sign.  I'm talking about SharkVision.  You know how, in the original Jaws and in many other horror movies, the camera assumes the Point of View of the killer?  Well, here the camera is underwater at times, which makes sense from SharkVision; however, the camera then lifts out of the water so that it can see clearly, just above the waves, and it spends most of its time in this position.  Let's just assume that SharkVision is the intended purpose of these shots...does that mean that this shark swims while floating on top of the ocean?  Wouldn't that mean that the beast couldn't breathe?  And wouldn't that make it a hell of a lot easier for the locals to kill?  I hope that is the intended inference I am supposed to draw from that camera work, because the alternative is that the shark has its eyes on its dorsal fin.

The presumed pre-production shark model

Anyways, it is almost Christmas time on Amity Island, where all these movies take place.  Ellen Brody (Lorraine Gary) has been living with her son, Sean, and his wife ever since her husband (Roy Scheider's character) died between movies.  Lucky bastard.  Sean, like his dad, is a local policeman and one night he is given the task of retrieving a broken piece of the dock that is stuck to a dinghy in Amity harbor.  It's the last emasculating chore he will ever have to do; as he reaches for the floating wood from the safety of his boat, a giant great white shark pops out of the water and bites his arm clean off.  It's frighteningly realistic, too; it positively doesn't look like a guy who pulled his arm out of his sleeve and is just pretending that the arm is gone, and that he simply has an arm-shaped tumor beneath his shirt.  He doesn't have to live with that tumor long, though, because the shark eats him (and a decent part of his boat) almost immediately.

When his body is discovered, Ellen immediately realizes what has happened.  The shark that didn't actually ever kill anyone in her family before is now targeting her family.  I'm not joking.  That is her conclusion, and that is the premise of this film.  Do yourself a favor and turn the movie off NOW.  Ellen's other son, Michael, comes to Amity for the funeral with his wife and daughter and invites Ellen to spend some time with them in their island home in the Bahamas.  She agrees.  The end.

But wait...there's more!  Apparently, the shark was notified that the Brodys were leaving Amity and it decides to follow them to the Bahamas.  Wow, that's pretty unbelievable.  What is completely unbelievable is that the shark arrives maybe a day or two after the Brodys.  Yes, a great white shark traveled 1200+ nautical miles --- and entered into waters where great white sharks don't live, mind you --- just to kill off Ellen Brody's bloodline.  Again, this is the professionally-written story.  People were paid to come up with this.

In the Bahamas, the shark tries to eat Michael, but fails and quits, because a shark that traveled 1200 miles to taste Brody meat is going to give up after four minutes.  Before the shark disappears, Michael manages to tag it with a device that reads the shark's heartbeat; the louder the beat, the closer the shark is.  That might seem like an oddly specific tool for Michael to randomly have at his disposal, but only if you haven't self-medicated by this point in the movie.  As an added treat, Mario Van Peebles has a very "authentic" Jamaican accent, mon.

Only one of these characters dies in this movie.

After getting its heartbeat measured, the shark somehow figures out A) that Ellen has a granddaughter and B) who she is and C) where she is and D) exactly when she will take her first dip in the ocean after returning from Massachusetts.  The result?

Oh.  My.  GAWD!  It's eating Tommy Shaw from Styx!

  The stupid shark misses the granddaughter (she's in the pink) and eats somebody else!  When Michael finds out that his daughter has been near a shark attack (she wasn't actually harmed, mind you), his response is, "I should have known..."  Instead of telling him that nobody can predict shark attacks, Mike's wife screams at him something along the lines of "YOU KNEW AND DIDN'T TELL US?!?!?"  What, that a shark was in the ocean?  Go figure!  In any other instance, I would ask what is wrong with these idiots.  Unfortunately, they are correct to be paranoid, because the shark is after them.  It's not paranoia if somebody's really out to get you your script is really that insultingly stupid.

Meanwhile, Ellen has been rediscovering the single life with a local pilot (Michael Caine, who was infamously filming this instead of accepting his Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters) when she hears the news of her granddaughter's not-shark attack.  Ellen does the only logical thing the script allows her to do --- she steals her son's boat, heads into the ocean, and plans to kill the shark with...um...well...she doesn't bring any weapons, so...kindness is my best guess.  How's she going to find the shark?  The answer to that is, and I quote, "It will find her."  Oh.  Okay.  Sure.  That makes sense.  Here is the original ending of the film, which was later changed for the theatrical release because audiences didn't like it:

Now, you're probably thinking, "No kidding, they didn't like that ending --- sharks don't roar!"  You have no idea.  What they ended up doing for the final cut was keep most of that ending (roars included) and changed what happened when the boat hits the shark.  As soon as they make contact, the shark explodes for absolutely no conceivable reason.  And that was the ending that test audiences liked more.

I just don't know what else to say about this movie.  I am disappointed in everybody involved, naturally.  I've seen other Joseph Sargent movies that have been both entertaining and good, but this is inept in every possible way.  Aside from the insultingly ridiculous story, the terrible cinematography, and the poor use of actors, the editing of the shark attacks makes it impossible to understand what is happening; you are left to infer what you saw, based on the aftermath.

The acting is painfully bad, although Michael Caine seemed to be having a good time.  He must have been drunk.  When he is asked about this movie, he usually gives a response something along the lines of it being the movie that gave him an island vacation, paid for a new house, and he won an Oscar while filming it, to boot.  Michael Caine is a glass half-full kind of guy, apparently.  Everyone else is B-movie quality at best.  The worst, though, was whoever played Sean.  There is a scene where he is trying to leave the police station to go home for Christmas Eve or whatever; he keeps walking out the door, but six or seven seconds after he closes the door, the police receptionist shouts "Hold it!"  You would think that it would take at least six seconds for him to walk back in again (probably more, if you factor in reaction time and rolling his eyes), but he opens the door almost immediately each time she does this...almost as if he wasn't really leaving the station, but just waiting for a cue to deliver his lines.

There are just two more things I want to touch on before I drown my memories of this movie with scotch.  The first is Ellen's unmistakable sixth sense.  When her family is attacked, she somehow knows; she has a shark sense.  Nobody mentions this, but it is an accepted fact in this movie.  The second is that Ellen has flashbacks to shark attacks just before she mysteriously blows the shark to hell.  The first clip is of Sean dying (which she wasn't there to see).  The second is of the shark not really attacking her granddaughter (for which she was way too far away to actually see anything).  The third was of her late husband preparing to not-quite kill the shark at the climax of the first Jaws (which she wasn't present for).  That is some memory she has, isn't it?

I would give this movie zero stars, but the exploding shark bit was too funny to hate.  It is the second-best (or worst, depending on you point of view) movie I have seen with an exploding shark, after Adam West's Batman: The Movie.

Now, I can understand people that want to watch bad movies and laugh at them.  There is a lot to laugh at in Jaws: The Revenge, but it's more conceptual humor than laughing at what the characters say or do in the film.  Well, except for the exploding shark, that is too awesome for words.  Because the ideas are funnier than watching the movie itself, I give this movie the Lefty Gold rating of

By the way, there has only been one shark attack fatality in Massachusetts in recorded history, and that was over 80 years ago.  Just FYI.

White Lightning

Now THAT is a movie poster!  It's got it all: guns, fire, a car chase, a woman, jugs of green liquid the size of a man, flying through the air.  I also love the inset picture of Burt Reynolds; it's like the producers saw the movie poster and asked, "But which one is Burt Reynolds?" and they picked out a picture from Tiger Beat.  I am confused by the tag line "White Lightning: Take a Bite and Feel All Right!"  Take a bite of what?  White lightning?  Burt Reynolds?  The green jug?  That just sounds like a rap lyric (judging from the skill of the rhyme, I would have to guess Young MC --- he has more rhymes than the whole damn zoo) more than a line that would actually fit this poster.  However, the other tag line, at the top of the poster, is awesome.  "White lightning never strikes twice --- 'cause once is enough!"  That makes it sound like Burt Reynolds plays White Lightning, a race car driver or something.  Or, it may be a subtle racist jab.  Sure, white lightning can do the job, done in one, but what about black, brown or yellow lightning?  Is this poster implying some sort of superiority based on the color of lightning?  Or maybe "White Lightning" is the title song in this, an Aryan Nation update of Grease!  Ah, the joys of accusing something of unintentional racism...good times.  Side note: kids, racism is bad and stupid. 

Actually, White Lightning refers to moonshine, the illegal homemade liquor that can be delicious and/or used to thin paint.  Our boy Gator (Burt Reynolds) is in the Arkansas (I knew this movie was racist!) pokey, doing time for running moonshine.  He gets word that his brother just died; the police say he drowned (which he did), but everybody knows that Sheriff Connors (Ned Beatty) was responsible for it (which he was).  Gator makes two decisions that day.  The first is to escape prison to take down that dirty, crooked Sheriff; he starts out okay, but the warden unhurriedly brings him back in after only a few minutes.  It was quite the jail break, and I'm very glad that it was captured on film.  The warden was fairly indifferent and the prisoner gave up immediately.  In Spanish, they call that muy divertido.  Wait...does divertido mean "boring as hell"?  I know muy means "Shoot me in the face to stop this from being."  The second decision is to work for the Feds, going undercover to bring Sheriff Connors to justice and take down any dirty backwoods moonshiners that are fueling Connors' crime empire.  What is the best way to do that?  Car chases.  Lots and lots of car chases.  Along the way, Gator comes to understand the value of moonshinin' to the semi-honest backwoods folks of Arkansas and he manages to find love by stealing away his partner's woman (Diane Ladd).

This is a movie that is definitely a product of its times.  I'm not just saying that because Burt Reynolds is in it (with no mustache, but he does chew gum throughout).  You don't often see forty minutes of car chases in movies nowadays.  That is mostly because that was the limit for special effects in the 60s and 70s, but car chase movies, when done right, can be a lot of fun.  This movie has cars jumping off dirt ramps, a car with a Confederate flag on the hood, and a car jumping onto a barge, all in the first chase.  I did appreciate that the filmmakers went out of their way to explain the need for car chases in the movie, but it isn't terribly necessary; Gator is transporting moonshine, so he has to avoid local cops.

The acting is about what you would expect from a Burt Reynolds vehicle.  Basically, Burt gets to be cool and irresistible to women, and everyone else is a chump.  And it's true; Ned Beatty, Bo Hopkins, Diane Ladd all look pretty stupid in this movie.  That's not a terrible thing, unless you're trying to argue that too much money is spent on education in Arkansas, but this is a pretty one-sided affair.  It is worth noting that this is the uncredited film debut of Laura Dern; she has a bit part, but you can spot her.  The direction isn't all that bad.  Joseph Sargent knows that the car chases and Reynold's smirk are what people want to see in this movie, and he certainly delivers.  Honestly, as far as car chase/Burt Reynolds movies go, this is probably the best.

But for those of us that look for more in their movies than cars on dirt roads and Burt Reynolds chewing gum, there are a couple of head-scratching moments.  When Gator makes his first daring car escape by driving his car off a pier and onto a barge, shouldn't the police following him know where the barge is heading?  I would think that it would be a regular trip, or at least one that someone on the docks could help them figure out.  Even if the next bridge was too far away to beat the barge, I bet the police on the other side of the river would be more than happy to pick up Gator as he tries to haul his now undoubtedly damaged car off the boat.  Ned Beatty's character is kind of silly, too.  Sure, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief enough to say that, maybe, a corrupt Sheriff could be "running the entire county," both the law and the crime.  But he makes a speech during the film where he argues that police don't make enough money with their day jobs, so it's only right for them to supplement their money with moonshine; the police make their money and the people get their cheap booze.  Beatty estimates that the average, legally taxed, fifth of liquor costs $7 (well, it is the 70s), but moonshine only costs six bits a gallon!  First off, what the hell is a bit?  Oh, it's twelve and a half cents.  That seems like a fairly arbitrary amount, but whatever, Mirriam-Webster.  More importantly, though, Beatty's argument ignores the car races, public danger, exploding stills, toxic unregulated booze, and murders that are a side effect of this business.  I have no problem with the Sheriff being a corrupted jerk, but that speech was a really inept attempt to give him depth.  Perhaps the biggest middle finger this movie gives to logical thought is the ending.  SPOILER ALERT: So Gator manages to trick the Sheriff into driving his car into a lake, which apparently immediately kills him.  Suspicious, but fine.  Whatever.  Why doesn't Gator get thrown back into jail at the end?  He caused a lot of damage, led to the death of the suspect, and he burned his list of moonshiners because they're good people.  So...the FBI lets him out of prison to build a case and he fails in every way possible, and their response is "enjoy your freedom"?  Really?

Still, you don't turn on a movie like this because you enjoy thinking.  This movie definitely succeeds in its mission to be a car chase movie starring Burt Reynolds.