Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

aka Jaws 4, aka Jaws 4: The Revenge

How bad is it? It finally killed a series of sequels that should never have happened.
Should you see it? I think not.

Jaws was a terrific summer escapist movie. Years later, an anemic sequel was made and promptly ignored. Then a third film was made, with nothing going for it except being filmed in 3-D. Five years after that, this trash got made. This film is no different from any other mediocre animal attack film, except for the premise: the shark is smart and wants revenge. This time, it's personal! Ludicrously, the shark swims down the eastern seaboard to the Caribbean, chasing down its prey, encountering Mario Van Peebles as a Jamaican scientist and Michael Caine, who's cameo is blink-and-you'll-miss-it. The film's star is Lorraine Gary, the one person to appear in all Jaws films, and the quality of the films is directly equivalent to how little screen time she has; I'm guessing she was married to a producer of the film, because it's hard to imagine how this got made otherwise. The silliness of a sea creature wanting revenge is not in itself deadly - "Orca" mined that with aplomb - but the film flounders under the weight of bad acting.

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