It’s very easy to spot the worst special effects from Jaws: The Revenge, and at this point I’m hoping every actor that was in it is able to look back and ask “What in the world was I thinking?”. So it was 1987 and Jaws was still fairly popular, that didn’t mean that it had to be relegated to such an intensely painful thing as this to see, did it? It would be so easy to just say it was terrible and then go ahead and leave it at that, but what was left unsaid could possibly haunt me for the rest of the night so I’ll keep going.
Jaws had been played out by this time. In fact it had been played out since the first movie and should have been left there. If anyone disagrees it’s likely because they were so scared of the first one that they got a taste for it and wanted more. You sickos. Just kidding, kind of, but really the first one was the absolute best and nothing even came close to it after that since it had been done, the scare had been delivered, and the formula was then merely copied and pasted before anyone knew what the heck that meant in the digital world. The effects of Jaws, the original movie, were fairly simple aside from the mechanical shark that was, quite honestly, terrifying to behold. The only reason I ever got over it as a kid when the dang thing leaped out at us on the Universal Studios tour was because I looked back after we’d moved on and saw the shark moving backwards into the pool from which it had come, setting itself up like some oversized Jack in the box.
That’s where the scare ended for me. Of course being so close to water for most of my life I’d grown up with a healthy respect for the ocean and everything in it. I’d been out on a boat more than once in my life at that point and knew that sharks didn’t just ram fishing boats for no reason, and they certainly didn’t go munching on people without any provocation.
But this movie, oy.
Let’s break it down really quickly. Sharks are not like dolphins, they’re simply too big and too heavy to flip up on their tails and start paddling around. Also, if one was that smart, it would likely be smart enough to stay the heck away from a spar jutting out from the front of a boat. And what’s with the roar? When was the last time you ever heard a shark roar like a monster in a B-horror flick. Plus, look at it this way, it’s almost like the shark is daring them to hit it as it wobbles there in the water, as though it’s saying “C’mon, I dare ya!” Well obviously the dare was taken and the humans won.
Unfortunately for the crowds in the theaters and those that rented the movie, that’s not how we felt at the end.
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