Sean Brody - The youngest sibling of the Brody clan, Sean grew up to be a cop on Amity Island. Don't bother getting attached to him though; he ends up becoming Christmas dinner for a Great White Shark.
Michael Brody - Lance Guest! The eldest Brody child, Mike lives down in the Bahamas with his wife and child, and is working towards a degree to become a full-fledged marine scientist by studying conch. Ah yes, life is good for Mike... until his mother comes down for a visit...
Ellen Brody - Lorraine Gary! After Sean's death, Ellen packs her emotional baggage and heads down to the Bahamas with her son. During her stay, this "shark magnet" finds romance, and apparently develops a telepathic link with the film's antagonist.
Hoagie Newcombe - Michael Caine! The carefree British airplane pilot that woos Ellen Brody. He's fond of telling bad jokes, boring stories, and is immune to shark attacks.
Carla and Thea Brody - Michael's wife and daughter respectively. Carla is an "artistic welder" by trade and her daughter appears to have grandma's unlucky ability to attract giant man-eating sharks.
Jake - Reggae Mario Van Peebles! Michael's co-conch-researcher who decides that studying a Great White Shark would be far more interesting. At the film's climax he dies while attempting to feed the Great White a large flashlight. Oh wait... no he doesn't... huh?!
The Great White (a.k.a. JAWS) - The last known relative of "Bruce the Shark," this undersea predator has some sort of unexplained grudge against the Brody Clan. Not only does this particular shark roar, but it also seems to have telepathic abilities (how else could it track someone halfway across the globe?) and can teleport anywhere it wants to. Bruce IV ends up getting hit with the broken bowsprit of Michael's ship and dies one of two ways, depending on which version you see: Bruce gets impaled, the front of the ship breaks off, and he quietly sinks to the ocean floor or the bowsprit hits Bruce and causes him to explode for no apparent reason.
Hollywood has always found a way to torture moviegoers over the decades. These
days the cinematic powers-that-be shove lackluster remakes down our throats, and we the people, for some damned reason, keep
going to see them! Back in the 80's though, the movie sequel was the cash cow of choice, and many films', actors', and directors'
reputations were tarnished by the development of unnecessary franchises. (See Highlander II: The Quickening and
subsequent sequels for more info.)
Even the mighty JAWS, the prototype for the Summer blockbuster, ended
up with a series of sequels, each one worse than the last. JAWS 2 was actually
pretty decent, with good effects, and an equally good cast. Then came JAWS 3D
which was overall pretty bad, especially when not seen in gimmicky 3D. But that was a mere blemish on the face of the JAWS'
franchise in comparison to JAWS: The Revenge.
 
 
Sean Brody getting punk'd by a Great White Shark. Your movie ladies and gentleman. |
The film opens during December and everyone on Amity Island is in a festive holiday mood. Sean Brody and his widowed mother Ellen
are prepping for Christmas dinner. Sean, now part of the local police force, is called out on duty to remove a log that is
jammed beneath a channel marker, because apparently the Coast Guard was too busy to do so. Sean grudgingly takes a boat out
and attempts to remove the offending log, only to be attacked by a Great White Shark!
Rather than just pluck him off the side of the boat, the shark takes its time and slowly kills its prey, somehow allowing Sean
to survive long enough to call for help while clinging to that accursed log he was sent to remove. Naturally no one hears his pleas
because there is some sort of Christmas concert practice going on at the nearby pier, and he is eventually yanked under the
ice cold water to his doom. Wow... ok, let me go back and summarize this scenario, in order to show you how ridiculous it is.
The shark laid a trap for Sean Brody, knowing full well that A.) he is a police officer and B.) that if the Coast Guard
wasn't around that he'd have to dislodge the log from beneath the buoy. Hell, the shark may have caused an incident that kept
the Coast Guard busy so that it could carry out its nefarious plan. After setting the trap, the shark waited for its victim,
snuck up on him, then slowly killed its target. Cripes! It even chewed up that damned log, so in a way, it even left a calling
card for the rest of Sean's family!
After Sean's death, Michael (Lance Guest, looking nothing like Dennis Quaid from JAWS 3D)
arrives on Amity with his wife and daughter, to lay Sean's body to rest. Once the funeral is over, Michael tells his mother
that she should come down to the Bahamas and stay for a while, instead of grieving by herself in a house full of Roy Scheider photographs.
Ellen accepts and soon they are on their way to Nassau in a small plane piloted by Hoagie. (Michael Caine? What are you doing in this
piece of dreck?!) This crazy British fellow is full of stories and gleefully terrorizes his passengers in order to
entertain young Thea Brody.
 
Lessons learned: Great Whites can easily fit within sunken naval vessels... and teleport behind their prey. |
Once safely on the ground, the action begins as... Hoagie begins to woo Mike's grieving mother, Carla Brody pretends to be
Jennifer Beals (minus the whole exotic dancer by night thing), and Michael and his sidekick Jake put tags on slow-moving conch.
Eventually, that pesky Great White Shark shows up (HOW DID IT KNOW WHERE TO FIND THEM?! HOW DID IT GET THERE SO FAST?! MAKE SENSE
YOU STUPID MOVIE!) but doesn't really do anything besides pop up out of the water and chew on things that aren't people!
Mike and Jake keep their sudden aquatic "discovery" a secret from Ellen, and attempt to study the elusive Great White Shark.
They tag the deadly beast with a heart monitor, so that they can know when to get their butts out of the water. However, this
doesn't really serve much of a purpose, because despite giving them a heads up by three miles, the shark manages to get the
drop on Michael while he is underwater in a submersible. The shark chews Mike's mini-sub to pieces, allowing him to escape into
a nearby shipwreck.
Undaunted, the giant Great White shark ventures within the ship and attempts to eat Mike. He barely escapes from his
teleporting attacker (HOW DID IT GET BEHIND HIM WHEN IT WAS IN FRONT OF HIM MERE SECONDS AGO?! ARGH!) and decides to use
his air tank to propel him safely to the surface. (I guess he's never heard of "embolisms" or "the bends," or maybe he happens to have
a decompression chamber on his crappy ship? Or maybe screenwriter, Michael De Guzman doesn't know jack-sh*t about
scuba diving! Yeah, that must be it!)
Days later, Carla unveils her commissioned artwork (i.e. bunch of rusty junk welded together and painted red) during a boring
service on the beach. Her daughter Thea begs to go out for a ride on the "banana boat," and seeing as how their can't possibly
be anything dangerous out on the water (considering that Mike hasn't told anyone about the shark yet), Carla agrees. Moments
later, the shark, obviously attempting to snack on Thea, arrives on the scene and snags a victim off the back of the
banana boat.
 
"Whoops! Sorry ma'am. My target was actually the little girl to your left!" |
Ellen wigs out and steals Michael's research boat and sets sail for revenge, though it doesn't seem like she has
any plan of attack other than "I'm going to find that shark and..." Michael finds out his mom and boat are missing so he grabs
Jake and together with Hoagie, the trio of heroes begin scouring the seas for the stolen ship. They eventually find Ellen and
make an emergency landing in the water, and for some reason, the shark decides not to attack until Hoagie attempts to jump
into the water.
Luckily, everyone makes it safely to the ship (including Hoagie who is not only alive and unharmed, but completely dry!)
but they soon realize that they are up the creek without a paddle. Mike and Jake then develop a plan that involves them
feeding a big flashlight/strobe light to the shark which will somehow shock it when another similar device is flashed in
its general direction. (Yeah I can't figure it out either. Clearly we are dealing with science!) The first part of
the plan works like a charm... aside from the fact that Jake somehow falls off the bowsprit and into the shark's mouth. (Doh!)
Michael, intent on avenging his fallen comrade, begins flashing a strobe light at the shark, causing it to rise a few feet above
the water and roar! As he continues doing this, Ellen flashes back to the death of Sean (which she never witnessed)
and the final moments of JAWS when Chief Brody is attempting to shoot
the tank of compressed air that is stuck in the shark's mouth. (Which she also didn't witness!) She steers Mike's ship directly at the leaping, roaring, shark
and buries the splintered bowsprit into the Great White's body.
Now, if you're watching the original version, the shark gets impaled, blood shoots out of its mouth, and then it sinks to
the bottom of the ocean with the front part of the ship in tow. But, if you watch the DVD version, the shark explodes
on contact for no apparent reason, plus we discover that Jake has somehow survived being a Great White Shark's chew toy, as
he is found floundering nearby.
This movie is straight up awful and should never have been made! The effects are goofy and totally unconvincing (give me 1975's "Bruce the shark" any day!),
the all-star cast (not counting Mario Van Peebles) is totally wasted here, and the script is an awful hacked-up mess that makes
absolutely no sense! Had the film makers followed the plot of the novel that was based on this film, I think this entry
into the JAWS series would have been a bit better.
For instance, in the novel, the shark is called upon with voodoo to get revenge on the Brody clan. Yeah, that would be a bit
hard to swallow, but all the elements are already in place, so this would have been an acceptable reason for a giant
fish to seek out and kill one particular family. Also, the character of Hoagie apparently brings laundered money into the Bahamas
as a second source of income.
It is alluded to quite briefly in the film ("Hoagie, what do you do when you're not a pilot?" Laundry!) and could have
been a cool little subplot that would have at least distracted us from the rest of the film's glaring issues. However, all of that
was not meant to be, and a final(?) nail has been put into the coffin of a franchise that should never have existed in the first
place.
So how radioactive is this cinematic shark turd?
Geiger Counter Reading:
 
- ONE AND-A-HALF 'RADS' -
WARNING: This movie is HARDLY RADIOACTIVE!
The plot is nonsensical, the shark
effects are terrible, and worst of all... its boring!
This review is part of SHARKATHALON!
Click on the image for more
shark-themed articles and reviews!
Michael: "May I cut in?"
Hoagie: "Please. The world would be a better place if more sons danced with their mothers."
(Vault Master says: Yes, it would be a better place Hoagie, but not in this case. Michael seems to have such an unnerving fixation on his mother, that the only dance I think he wants to do with her is the "horizontal mambo." :: SHUDDER ::)
Michael: "I've always wanted to make love to an angry welder. I've dreamed of nothing else since I was a small boy."
(Vault Master says: So... you never ever dreamed of flying a spaceship and fighting against evil alien armadas for the sake of Earth and other peaceful galaxies?)
Hoagie: "Damn passengers. You're all the same! Complain, complain... [shark pops up out of the water] Oh shit!"
- Beginning - View the world through the eyes of a shark... on a pogo stick.
- 8 3/4 minutes - Relax Sean, it's "only a flesh wound."
- 12 minutes - Sheesh! It took forever for Sean to die!
- 15 minutes - Flashback to the original JAWS. I wish I was watching that instead.
- 17 minutes - Man this movie is totally WATER LOGGED! HA! (Sorry for the bad pun.)
- 22 minutes - NIGHTMARE SEQUENCE!
- 33 minutes - What the hell is a Junkanoo?!
- 40 ½ minutes - Michael is just a little too overprotective of his mother...
- 49 ½ minutes - Thrill as Mario Van Peebles gives a fake rubber shark an ear piercing!
- 54 ½ minutes - Yet another NIGHTMARE SEQUENCE!
- 59 minutes - Michael is attacked by the dreaded Fake White Shark.
- 68 minutes - Bruce (the shark) definitely needs glasses. He totally just missed his target!
- 76 minutes - Maybe Hoagie can write this off as an "act of God?"
- 77 minutes - Hmmm... Hoagie seems fairly dry for someone who just climbed out of the ocean.
- 83 minutes - How can someone flashback to something they never witnessed?
- 84 minutes - Miniature boat and shark explode! But why?
- 86 ½+ minutes - The End Credits.
LEAVE YOUR OWN COMMENTS ABOUT THIS MOVIE IN...
And feel free to e-mail me at vault_master[at]bmoviefilmvault[dot]com if you have any
questions, personal recommendations, or information about the films reviewed here on the site! Don't be shy! Your
feedback helps make The Vault better!
Review posted on November 14, 2000.
(Review last updated on June 10, 2010.)
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