Roar With Pride: Ten reasons to love and enjoy Jaws The Revenge

Jaws The Revenge (1987) is often derided by many not just as the worst Jaws film, but one of the worst films ever made.

It sank the Universal shark film franchise and never recovered, taking the shark series from being a multiple Oscar winner to a multiple Razzie nominee, even taking home a gong for worst special effects.

With a crazy storyline about a shark that follows a family to the Bahamas and the leading lady who can sense the shark, you get the sense that the filmmakers may have had too much of Quint’s pretty good stuff, but you know what there is a good shark film waiting to get out of Jaws The Revenge.

Once you look past the roaring shark – which now seems to be a shark film trope – and the exploding shark (depending on which ending you watch) there is some good stuff there, so here’s what I think are the ten greatest moments in Jaws The Revenge.

1. The score

Jaws The Revenge may seriously unspool as it races towards its climax, but the opening titles – apart from the interesting type face choice for the film’s title – hooked me from the off, with the shark’s point of view as it stalks the shore of Amity Island above and below the surface. And part of the reason that works so well is the score, of course it is a reworking of the classic John Williams shark theme, but this – by Michael Small – was the first time I’d heard several of the elements woven together and is an exciting rendition and remains a favourite to this day.

His score throughout the whole movie is a real highlight and delivers exactly how it should, and really helps elevate the film, working hard compensating for the shark you do see, but isn’t all that great.

Small had scored some of the greatest scores of the 1970s from The Parallax View (1974), Klute (1971) and Marathon Man (1976) both of which featured Roy Scheider from Jaws (1975). Small died in 2003.

2. A return to Amity Island

With a return to the filming location of Martha’s Vineyard, with was used in both Jaws and Jaws 2 (1978) it feels like the Jaws franchise was coming home, and we were getting to see Amity Island around Christmas, so it was genuinely exciting to see the Island in another season and just to be back there where it all started. After the antics at SeaWorld in Jaws 3D (1983) for some this very much felt like Jaws coming home.

3. The death of Sean Brody

Originally the opening death scene had been planned to be that of Chief Brody (Roy Scheider), but not even the devil could get him to return for Revenge, which I don’t think many Jaws fans would have been able to stomach. Instead, we get the demise of Sean Brody, now a deputy on Amity. The scene isn’t that graphic, and we don’t really see much of the attack, as it is told more in the edit but we do get the haunting juxtaposition between death by shark and Christmas carollers, which makes for one of the most memorable deaths in the series of one of its most beloved characters, who we have seen grow up through each subsequent Jaws film.

4. Familiar faces

A return to Amity also means a wonderful fleeting return of some familiar faces. Ahead of Sean Brody’s funeral Michael Brody (Lance Guest) and his family arrive to his mum’s house, where she is being comforted by none other than Mrs Taft and Alex Kintner’s mum (another poignancy of a mum who has lost her son to a shark attack comforting another mum whose son died in the same way).

5. The film’s handling of grief

Jaws The Revenge brings a family together through loss, and many of us can relate to that. I think Lorraine Gary does a great job of playing someone who has lost her youngest so, whether it be flashbacks to happier times at the funeral to her breaking down on the ferry when she knows others can’t see her. Even Michael Brody just deciding to leg it and off down the beach on Amity, before he can finish his sentence. It helps ground it in a sense of reality.

And if you think about it the shark is like grief, although Ellen and Michael have escaped from Amity Island, the grief still catches up with them, both during the day and when they are asleep at night.

6. Michael Caine

Lance Guest who plays Michael Brody is the anchor of the film, but you can’t help but smile when Michael Caine appears on screen. It almost seems unreal to see him in a Jaws film, even though it was one of his infamous paycheck movies, but we fall for his roguish charms, just like Ellen Brody does.

Caine may have been there for the sun and the money (we aren’t sure if he was paid in cash or check) but he lights up the screen and has a great rapport with the cast, especially Ellen. At the time it was refreshing to see on older romance on the big screen, albeit one framed around a series of shark attacks, with Caine saying that it was the first time he’d played romantic scenes with someone the same age.

7. The underwater chase scene

Perhaps the standout moment of Jaws The Revenge and the scene that gives us an insight into how much better it could have been is the underwater chase sequence between the shark and Michael. It is genuinely creepy and thrilling to see him be chased through – quite literally at times- the wreck of a boat, and gave us something new and memorable to the Jaws series.

8. The banana boat attack

For a film about a shark that attacks people, there are only two kills (three if you count Jake in the original theatrical release version) and this second one after Sean Brody takes a while to come, and doffs its cap to that of Alex Kintner and Jaws as it takes place on a packed beach. In broad daylight, and this time the shark takes down a woman on a yellow banana boat. Rumours her fingers were pruning but she just wanted ten more minutes on one last banana boat ride are completely unfounded.

It's quite a disturbing scene, especially as young children are on the boat, which beats a hasty retreat as the poor woman is swallowed whole as we see her taken beneath the surface. To paraphrase Quint, I’ll never go on a banana boat again.

9. The plane stunt and water landing

Hoagie’s plane buzzing the boat Ellen has stolen just as the shark rises out of the water is one of the shots of the film, with Caine’s character then ditching the plane in the water for a daring landing, that still looks impressive. Sadly, the plane soon becomes another thing on the menu for the shark, well a helicopter and its pilot did get devoured in Jaws 2.

10. Echoes of Jaws

Legacy films are all the rage these days, with the likes of Top Gun: Maverick and Ghostbusters: Afterlife packing them in the aisles, each echoing elements of the original instalments of those films, and Jaws The Revenge does exactly the same.

We have Lorraine Gary from the first two films, a picture of Chief Brody in the Amity PD office, get a reference to Lenny by Sean (who we can only assume is Hendricks), those returning Amity Island cameos – of both people and places – and echoes back to key scenes, such as Ellen seeing Michael Brody and his daughter Thea copying hand and face gestures just like Chief Brody and Sean did in the original.

For many the sepia flashbacks to actual scenes from Jaws don’t work, or make sense – especially when in the final scene Ellen flashes back to Chief Brody saying “Smile, you son of a bitch!” Clearly Ellen wasn’t there, but Ellen’s husband will have relived those moments to her, so she would have known what went down. Perhaps it is the sepia or the delivery that doesn’t work, or that it was trying too hard to link it back to the original. For many, that was a step too far.

Whether you agree or not, these are the things that I enjoy about Jaws The Revenge and keep me returning to the final film in the Jaws franchise. And, yes, it is a Christmas film.

Words by Dean Newman

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