Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!
Jaws 2
Release Date: June 16, 1978
Cast: Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, Joseph Mascolo, Jeffrey Kramer
The Buzz: Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…
Keywords: Shark Attack, Waterskiing, Beached Whale, Lighthouse, Ribbon Cutting
The Plot: It’s been a few years since that pesky shark attack ruined the summer for the residents and tourists of the quaint New England island town of Amity. Brody (Roy Scheider) is still the chief of police, and inexplicably enough, sleazebag Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) is still the mayor. (“Re-elect Mayor Vaughn! He didn’t let all of you get eaten!”) Mrs. Brody is now working for a slick real estate developer, and eldest son Mike is a horny teenager with a sailboat. Everything seems normal, until a series of freak accidents awaken a fishy fear in Brody. Two divers disappear after stumbling upon the sunken ruins of the Orca, Quint’s boat from the first movie. A waterskiing boat blows up. A killer whale washes up on the beach with huge chunks bitten out of it. Brody’s shark fever gets out of control when he shoots up the surf in front of a huge crowd of beachgoers, only to find he’s been targeting a harmless school of bluefish. Worried that Brody will scare off all the developers, the mayor and city council give him his walking papers. But the joke’s on them, as Mike Brody and his gaggle of teen buddies learn when they go sailboat racing the next day and Amity’s new shark starts using them as its own personal concession stand.
The Test of Time: I can’t think of many movies I ever anticipated more rabidly than Jaws 2. When everyone else my age decided Star Wars was their favorite movie, I still stood by Jaws – I even remember being bummed out when Lucas’s clunky space opera overtook my beloved shark movie as the all-time box office champ. So when I heard a sequel was on the way, I was all over it. By the time the movie opened, I had already consumed the making-of book, the novelization (a cut above the usual hack job, written by Hank Searls as a follow-up to Peter Benchley’s novel, complete with a continuation of the Mafia subplot that never made it to the movies), and the Marvel comics adaptation (based on the early footage shot by original Jaws 2 director John Hancock, who was fired a few weeks into production). I think the future movie critic in me made his first appearance that day in 1978 when I walked out of the matinee show. I’m not sure I was disappointed, exactly, but I knew something wasn’t quite right. It may have been my first realization that the director was more than just the guy who called “Action!” and “Cut!” They might have both gotten their starts on Night Gallery, but there was a big difference between Steven Spielberg and Jeannot Szwarc, even if I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.
Thirty years later, it’s a little easier to figure out. (In case you’ve lost track of Szwarc’s career, he went on to direct Supergirl and Santa Claus: The Movie, and currently helms episodes of Cold Case and Without a Trace.) With Robert Shaw’s character dead and Richard Dreyfuss deciding he had better things to do, only Scheider remained from the original Orca crew, and he made it clear to anyone who would listen that he was basically doing the sequel at gunpoint. To fill in the gap, Universal essentially fused their shark movie with a teen sex comedy, with the result that we spend much of the running time waiting for some really unappealing young actors to get eaten. Even the most effective moments in Jaws 2 are pale echoes of scenes from the first movie, as when Brody wades out into the surf, overturns a piece of driftwood, and a burnt corpse pops up. The one kernel of a new idea is Brody’s shark paranoia threatening to ruin his career and marriage; it’s possible Jaws 2 would have been more interesting if it turned out there wasn’t a shark at all, but of course, that’s a movie that would have never been made. The shark sequences are sorely lacking Spielberg’s sure-handed touch, and naturally, the bigger and better mechanical fish looks much faker than the original. Obviously, Jaws 2 wasn’t the first such follow-up – we just saw Damien: Omen II last week, after all – but it was really the birth of the blockbuster sequel, the “tentpole” movies that would come to dominate the summer season, which is reason enough to look back on it with very little fondness at all.
Quotable Quote: “Open wide!”
2008 Equivalent: A redundant sequel/remake about a powerful, dangerous beastie? The Incredible Hulk, of course.
Previously on Summer of '78: Damien: Omen II