Awfully Good Movies - Jaws: The Revenge

Awfully Good Movies – Jaws: The Revenge

Before there was The Meg 2, there was Michael Caine in the equally ridiculous shark sequel Jaws: The Revenge! This time, it’s preposterous!

By Jesse Shade

August 23rd 2023, 10:00am

Last Updated on August 24, 2023

Just when Jason Statham in Meg 2: The Trench made it safe to go back to the water, Awfully Good Movies is looking back at the fourth and final installment that ended it all for the shark franchise that started it all… JAWS: THE REVENGE!

With Universal Pictures desperately needing a hit after Howard The Duck flopped hard, they went with another Spielberg-free sequel to the 1975 blockbuster classic, with the events of Jaws 3-D ignored and Lorraine Gary coming out of retirement to reprise the role of the now-widowed Ellen Brody, now having to face a new shark that’s coming specifically for her family to avenge what her late husband did to those last two sharks. As the infamous tagline promises: “This Time, It’s Personal.”

And if that plot wasn’t enough to scare off audiences (and Roy Scheider) from this movie, most of the film is dealing with Ellen chilling in the Bahamas alongside a paycheck-seeking Michael Caine as their possibly drug-running pilot and Mario Van Peebles as her son Michael’s badly accented co-worker in the field of oceanic research. But when the shark does eventually rear his smiling face in the Bahamas–yes, after swimming all the way from New England–the movie veers straight for one of the most insane climaxes in all of film history, after Universal reshot the ending for European and home video release that now had the shark both roaring and exploding to death out of nowhere.

So while JAWS 4 is a largely boring footnote to Steven Spielberg’s still-classic original, there’s plenty of Awfully Goodness to justify its peculiar place in the JAWS series. And best of all, Michael Caine used his money off this crap to buy his elderly mom a new house… awww, this time, it’s adorable!