Jaws: The Revenge (1987)
Following Jaws 3D, which had begun as a National Lampoon project to make the third Jaws film a tongue-in-cheek comedy named Jaws 3, People 0.”, the idea came around again for a humorous effort for the fourth entry. This time it would be unrelated to the National Lampoon effort or the prior Jaws entries, save for having a killer shark as the antagonist. Universal’s Motion Picture Chair Frank Price developed this comedy, surrounding the surf-punk culture in Malibu. Steve de Jarnatt drafted a script.
But in 1986, Universal experienced a bad run, without a single film among the top money earners. Their highest-grossing films, Out of Africa and Legal Eagles, were so expensive to produce that they weren’t profitable. Other high-budget comedies like Howard the Duck, Brighton Beach Memoirs, and Brazil were major busts at the box office. MCA president Sid Sheinberg knew Universal needed a hit and in a hurry but it wouldn’t be by throwing away their most lucrative franchise by making a pricey comedy unrelated to the first film.
On top of this, Sheinberg didn’t care for De Jarnatt’s script because it didn’t have a part for his wife, Lorraine Gary, who hadn’t worked in many years after appearing in the first two Jaws films. After seeing 20th Century Fox score big with Aliens, Sheinberg felt that Ellen Brody could be the next Ellen Ripley, pitting her against an unstoppable killing machine of her own in the next Jaws film. If they did Jaws right, if they brought terror with the same kind of emotional underpinning for the heroine, it could be the cash bonanza they needed and might make Gary a sought-after actress again.
Universal rushed to put the film into production, scheduling about nine months from idea to release, rather than the typical two years normally allotted to major film releases. As Sheinberg was personally taking hold of the film, he cut through many of the hurdles that tend to slow down a movie’s schedule, including putting together the shark builders and visual effects crew before a script was even in development or a director attached at a substantial pre-production cost. He read all the revisions and attended the planning meetings to make sure everything was on course to hit their deadline.
When Sheinberg first told Gary about his plans, she thought her husband was joking. Gary hadn’t worked as an actress since Steven Spielberg’s 1941 back in 1979. She had stopped trying once the phone no longer rang for parts for her to play. Although her husband ran one of the largest movie studios in Hollywood, it was a handicap because directors didn’t want to hire her, either because they didn’t like Sheinberg, or they thought they’d get into trouble with her husband if there was a disagreement.
During the phone call from Sheinberg in October of 1986, Joseph Sargent, known more for directing dramas, questioned whether he was the guy for the job of a killer-shark blockbuster. Sheinberg insisted that the new Jaws should have a more human element. When audiences genuinely care about the characters, they find horror films much more terrifying. Sargent had a reputation of putting characters above conceptual elements and finding the humanity in the stories. In Sheinberg’s mind, Sargent could get the franchise back to what made the original special. Sweetening the deal, Sheinberg offers something Sargent couldn’t refuse – total control as the producer.
Now Sargent just had to deliver a movie that didn’t have a story or cast within 10 months, half the time of a typical film. He immediately hired TV writer Michael de Guzman hired to script. Sargent and De Guzman made a conscious decision to connect their story to the first film only, ignoring the other two sequels that came before it. In their minds, this was going to be the actual sequel to Jaws. Given no guidance on what the studio wanted other than Ellen Brody was the protagonist, they planned to have Martin Brody die at the beginning, a moving funeral, and the rest of the story on Ellen Brody getting revenge on the shark that killed her husband.
After turning in a draft, Sheinberg loved the angle, and the execs at Universal felt they had something special. Sheinberg was so enamored of the story he sent a copy to Steven Spielberg, who replied that he only got eighteen pages in but could read no more because it brought back too many memories. He wished Joseph Sargent well, knowing from experience that a Jaws shoot was the most difficult of all shoots.
Despite vowing to never return, Universal hoped Roy Scheider would return for his character’s death. Scheider wasn’t interested. Universal asked him to name his price: Scheider wanted a million dollars. For only nine days’ work, Universal thought that was outrageous, but couldn’t negotiate him down. They wrote out Martin Brody as having died of a heart attack years before from living in continual fear. The death changed to the younger Brody son, Sean, now the deputy for the Amity police. Sean’s funeral scene meant for Martin originally had a phone call of condolences from Matt Hooper and a visit from Larry Vaughn from Jaws. However, Dreyfuss had no interest and Murray Hamilton had just died of lung cancer. Amity community bit players from Jaws, like Mrs. Kintner and Mrs. Taft, appear.
De Guzman had a somewhat larger problem in explaining why the Brody family were the targets of so many attacks from great white sharks. Sargent thought they could play with the mythos a bit, perhaps even get mystical, that a new shark was angry for Chief Brody taking out two of their own and would be carrying out a vendetta against the Brody family (despite the scientist in Jaws 2 telling a paranoid Martin Brody that sharks don’t take things personally). The shark could be a metaphor about the deadly nature of fear and obsession, keeping people from moving on with their lives, and how such things can consume us and our families.
Despite De Guzman’s attempt to complete his script in the five weeks allotted, it still was incomplete at the time they started to roll film. Revisions were handed down nearly every day that changed some facet to accommodate shifts in budget and the availability of talent on board. Given an initial $15 million budget, Sargent used his carte blanche mandate to set most of his film in the Bahamas, wanting to spend time in paradise. The familiar stomping grounds of Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard for the opening scenes. By February of 1987, it would be retitled as Jaws the Revenge. Due to unforeseen delays, its release date had to move. They felt that it would move well past July, but they managed to rush as fast as they could to pull together something for a July 17 release date.
Although the fourth in the series, it doesn’t have the title of Jaws 4, because of a deliberate attempt to continue the series by ignoring Jaws 3. This is why Sean, who is deathly afraid of the water in Jaws 3 gets eaten, while his brother Mike, a construction engineer in 3, is now a marine biologist. It also doesn’t hitch anything onto Jaws 2, opting to make references only to the first film. The first proposed title was Jaws 1987, shortened to Jaws ’87, scheduled to come out for the Fourth of July weekend in, of course, 1987. Eventually, it became Jaws: The Revenge in an attempt to continue the series with chapter names rather than numbers.
Michael Caine plays Hoagie the air-taxi pilot taking the remaining Brody family to Nassau, where the waters are said to be too warm for the liking of great white sharks (the setting is winter, making it the coldest time of year for the waters), and where Mike Brody works as a marine biologist (despite being a construction engineer in Jaws 3.) While in a new and beautiful place, Ellen lets her guard down and begins a flirtatious relationship with Hoagie. Soon, the have an unexpected visitor in the ocean that seems to only have a taste for the Brody family.
Caine claims he took up Jaws: The Revenge because his films are too boring for his 13-year-old daughter it would be one she and her friends would enjoy. The $1.5 million he received to do the film (2.5 times Gary’s paycheck) while enjoying a Bahamian vacation might be more of the real answer. Caine missed being in Hollywood to accept his first-ever Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters because of bad weather and multiple delays due to malfunctioning mechanical sharks. Because they were in danger of not making their goal of a July release, they had to finish their shoot in a tank for underwater sequences \, with water dyed a special shade of blue to match the ocean Bahamian waters, and a backlot recreation of the Nassau village at Universal. The delays also caused him to be unavailable for his scheduled movie, Switching Channels, where his part was recast with Burt Reynolds.
While promoting the film, Caine called Jaws 2 and 3 so awful he was rooting for the shark, not realizing that most fans of the series consider Jaws the Revenge to be the worst of them all. Once he found out that Jaws: The Revenge was even more critically panned than the other sequels, Caine glibly responded that though it may be terrible (he never watched it), the house he built with the money he received is terrific. He also said he would always have a fondness for his time making Jaws: The Revenge because of that house, his Oscar win, and a great vacation.
Mario Van Peebles initially turned down the role of Jake, having been turned off by Jaws 3-D, but after he read the script and changed his mind because he would get to play a kind of character different than he had played before. Just as Sargent had carte balance to make Jaws: The Revenge his way, he extended the same courtesy to Van Peebles, who created the Jamaican accented Jake and his personality, including much of his dialogue.
Henry Millar took over for Joe Alves in constructing the new sharks, about seven different variations in total, including four that were about 23 feet long, requiring the work of about 85 craftspeople and technicians to put together and manipulate. One of the sharks used in underwater shots needing a self-propelled prop was created by altering the five-foot mechanized whale created by Industrial Light & Magic for in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
To promote the film, as with Jaws 2, Hank Searls wrote a novelization based on an early script. Once again, it reveals several subplots written out of the final draft. The biggest among the reveals in a reason for the shark targeting the Brodys: the shark is under the control of a Haitian witch-doctor named Papa Jacques. Jacques became Michael Brody’s sworn enemy after getting called out as a con artist exploiting the Bahamians. He puts a curse on the Brody family by controlling the shark to attack them to show Mike how legit he actually is. In the end, when the shark is killed, Papa Jacques dies with it, as he and the shark were one. Other subplots: Hoagie had a money-laundering and drug-running backstory that put his life in constant danger from vicious gangsters. Hoagie is later revealed as an undercover DEA agent taking down a drug lord responsible for his daughter’s death. We also learn that the shark is the offspring of the sharks from Jaws and Jaws 2 (born as she was electrocuted).
Five days following its US release, Universal reshot the ending in a tank at the Universal backlot. Audiences hated Mario van Peebles’ character, Jake, dying, so he is shown to miraculously survive. This new ending was for foreign prints, but also made its way to TV and home video releases. They added an introductory voice-over narration about ‘fate or circumstance’ driving the shark’s behavior. There are also two different endings for the shark. In the theatrical version, the shark is gored by the sailboat’s bowsprit, bleeds out, then sinks to the bottom of the ocean. This ending came about because Sid Sheinberg mandated that the Sargent have the shark die in a manner different from the other films. In home video releases, the shark inexplicably explodes upon getting impaled, which, ironically, happens in the first film.
The final cost of Jaws the Revenge was $23 million., not including advertising and other promotional costs. Despite debuting at number 3, word of mouth was not kind, and it fell out of the top 10 by week 3. All told it grossed about $20 million in the US, and another $31 million worldwide, for a total of $51 million. So, it didn’t really lose money. Despite Sid Sheinberg trying to recharge his wife’s acting career, Jaws: The Revenge marks Lorraine Gary’s final acting credit. It would also mark the end of Joseph Sargent as a director of big-screen films, as well as for Michael De Guzman as a screenwriter.
Few but those nostalgic for 80s schlock champion it today, as it holds a rare 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It also received seven Razzie Award nominations: Worst Picture, Worst Actress (Lorraine Gary), Worst Supporting Actor (Michael Caine), Worst Director (Joseph Sargent), Worst Screenplay, Worst Visual Effects (which it ‘won’), and “Bruce the Shark” for Worst Actor. Despite the drubbing, Razzie co-founder listed Jaws: The Revenge as one of the 100 enjoyably bad movies ever made.
Joseph Sargent would wonder years later how grown men with years of professional training could get involved with something so idiotic. He rationalized that the issue was that there was such a push for a fresh approach, and such a need to finish the production at twice the speed, that no one wanted to put the brakes on by scrutinizing or trying to overthink the impossible.
Anyone that has heard of Jaws the Revenge knows that it is considered one of the worst films ever made. Reviewing it would seem unnecessary. I thought I’d take a different approach since a negative review is a given, by coming up with ten positive things to say about the sequel that ended the Jaws franchise once and for all. We’ll see if I can scrape up that many…
1. It ignores the equally awful Jaws 3. There’s a reason it isn’t called Jaws 4. Instead of having to see Jaws 3 before Jaws: The Revenge, you have the option of ignoring at least one awful movie. Of course, ignoring both is, by far, the best available option.
2. It has the shortest running time of all Jaws films. Jaws 2 isn’t must-see entertainment, but at two hours, it is burdened by stretching out its thin material to the breaking point. Jaws 3 is about 20 minutes shorter but contains about as much filler. Jaws: The Revenge is the worst of the films, but the creators show mercy by not assaulting our intelligence for longer than 90 minutes.
3. It is the funniest of the Jaws films. Although the humor is completely unintentional, Jaws: The Revenge‘s laughter quotient rivals some of the best comedies ever made.
4. You learn things about sharks a lifetime of study would never reveal. Did you know that sharks carry out personal vendettas against human families? Did you know they can form psychic links with these humans? Did you know they could follow airplanes traveling hundreds of miles at high speeds? Did you know that sharks like to growl while attacking, despite their lack of vocal cords? Did you know that sharks could glide for hundreds of feet with most of their bodies above the water? All this and more are learned throughout the course of this highly educational film. The camera never lies!
5. It shows that the suspense of the Jaws films wasn’t all about the John Williams score. Despite utilizing the same score as Spielberg’s original Jaws, this one can’t even muster one-hundredth of the amount of tension, intrigue, or fright. The soundtrack does, however, feature a few late 80s pop tunes that rank high on the scare factor. If you don’t think that The Jets’ “You Got It All” is nausea-inducing, wait until you see the slow, sensually close dancing of Michael Caine and Lorraine Gary that accompanies it.
6. It reminds you of how great the first Jaws is. Sure, we all know how entertaining Spielberg’s original is, but the constant flashbacks and allusions to the first film can only make everyone viewing this travesty think it the greatest film ever made just by sheer comparison. Interestingly, some of these flashbacks occur to characters that weren’t even there to witness them. You’ll have the urge to stop Jaws: The Revenge halfway in order to re-watch Jaws, if you don’t just stop halfway outright just to end the pain.
7. It eventually ends. Few will ever see the final credits, but, painful as they are to get to, I have. Yes. they are there.
Ok, so this was only seven out of ten, but anyone that has seen this fiasco must realize that coming up with ten “positive” things to say about it is downright impossible. Watch this tripe only if you mean to laugh at how astonishingly bad it all is. You’ll love the psychic connections, spiritual mumbo-jumbo, Mario Van Peebles’ terrible faux-Rasta accent, Michael Caine cashing his check, and the fakest shark action ever put to celluloid. This one’s so bad, that, like a car wreck, you can’t avert your eyes from it, no matter how horrific it is. Just as Jaws made people everywhere afraid to go back into the water, Jaws” The Revenge proved to be a stinker of such magnitude, they were also afraid to return to the theater for another Jaws excursion.
Qwipster’s rating: F
MPAA Rated: PG-13 for violence, sexuality, and language
Running Time: 90 min.
Cast: Lorraine Gary, Lance Guest, Mario Van Peebles, Michael Caine, Karen Young, Judith Barsi, Lynn Whitfield, Melvin Van Peebles (cameo)
Director: Joseph Sargent
Screenplay: Michael De Guzman