Rish's Reviews
Well, kids, this time it's personal.
From the director of Colossus: The Forbin Project and the first episode of "Star Trek" (you know, the one with Clint Howard?) comes one of the most reviled sequels ever made. When this came out, I was just getting into reading movie reviews, and they were the most vociferous I can remember. Because of that, I never bothered to see this movie, nor even wanted to.
Still, I had to check this out. It's all for you, Damien, after all.
The film starts back in Amity. Ellen Brody (Lorraine Gary) still lives there, along with her two sons, Sean and Michael, having lost her husband to a heart attack sometime between films. Unfortunately, you can't keep a bad fish down, and Sean (having followed in his old man's footsteps as a policeman on the island) is killed by yet another Great White Shark. Michael, a marine biologist in the Caribbean, takes his mother home with him to get away from it all. There, Ellen meets the unlikely-named Hoagie Newcombe (Michael Caine), and they begin a sort of romance. Things look up for the long-suffering woman. But did I mention that you can't keep a bad fish down?
They say that Michael Caine will do anything for money, and this might have been the movie that started that. Lorraine Gary is what my dad would've described as "homely." And yet she gets top-billing and the flick really centers around her. What, was she the head of Universal's wife or something? She can at least act. The rest of the cast isn't too bad, including Lance Guest (he was The Last Starfighter, you know), the afore-mentioned Michael Caine, the nice-looking (and very Aryan) Karen Young, and Mario Van Peebles as the token "funny" character. Oh yeah, and the "I don't think that's funny at all" lady comes back too.
There was a nice moment where Michael uses his oxygen tank to escape. And there was a very nice moment where they showed a couple shots of Roy Scheider from the original. I like that we get to see the familiar Martha's Vineyard locations, if only for a few minutes. They also redo a scene from the 1975 film, but it only serves to remind us how great the first one was.
The law of diminishing returns was never so clearly exemplified than by the films in this series. Each just gets exponentially worse than the last one. Heck, such Jaws ripoffs as Piranha and Orca: The Killer Whale are better than this. That being said, it was a weak film, but not a horrible one. Not really. At the one hour point, the movie wasn't all that bad. Sure, the shark's the phoniest of all four movies, and it makes no logical sense that it could follow them from Amity Island to the Bahamas, but . . .
Okay, maybe it is pretty stupid.
The silly ending actually tops Jaws Not-In-3D where someone we saw the shark eat turns out to be alright (apparently foreign audiences were deemed stronger and this wasn't included). Also, the shark eats a plane this time around (hmmm). There's a moment toward the end where the shark actually begins to growl like a dinosaur. Now, I know some idiot will try to convince me that the same sound effect was used in the first movie, but it's not the same, and no one likes a smart ass.

Trivia Question: Who are the only characters to appear in all four Jaws movies?
Why, Michael and Sean Brody, of course (though I think they were played by different actors in each, and you could technically count the shark too, I suppose).