The holiday weekend’s just hours away, and we’re mighty spent from a long week of writing and tending to Microkhan Jr. So we’re gonna outsource this week’s Bad Movie Friday to the late Richard Jeni. His target? The egregiously awful Jaws: The Revenge (aka Jaws IV).
As Jeni rightfully points out in his routine, there are all sorts of logic problems with this movie. (Would you really become a marine biologist if your family had been tormented by sharks on multiple occasions?) But nothing in the film is more head-thunkingly stupid than the sequence in which the titular shark follows Lorraine Gray‘s plane to the Bahamas—and actually beats it there. Yes, when the plane lands, we get a shark’s POV shot of the arrival. We absolutely kid you not.
We can buy a lot of absurdities in the pursuit of a fine shark-eats-man flick. But a great white capable of traveling at over 500 miles per hour? And with the navigational sense to follow a plane located 35,000 feet above the ocean? We gotta draw the line somewhere.
The really sad part? Michael Caine wasn’t able to accept his Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters because he was off making this abomination. They were supposed to be finished in time, but they had some technical problems getting the animatronic shark’s eyes to roll back. Yeah, like that was the big hurdle to cinematic greatness.
scottstev // May 22, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Wow, what a great find. I remember loving this bit as a wee lad and thinking it was fantastic. I think it was on a comic showcase, and it was one of the best bits on that show. Usually the comics were pretty lame. I’m glad it’s as sharp as it seemed to me at 10 years old.
Brendan I. Koerner // May 22, 2009 at 4:01 pm
@scottstev: Glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, this was the first thing I thought of when I read about Jeni’s suicide. I watched it this morning while writing the post, and cackled with far more mirth than is appropriate for a library.
scottstev // May 22, 2009 at 6:09 pm
The last word on “Jaws: The Revenge” belongs, as it should, to Michael Cain. I paraphrase: “I’ve never seen the movie, and I heard it’s terrible. I have seen the house I bought with the money I was paid to make it, and, indeed, it is lovely.” Only the Brits can get away with slumming in film. all post-Brando actors always seem slightly embarrassed to be in a terrible movie.
Brendan I. Koerner // May 22, 2009 at 7:04 pm
@scottstev: Given all the dreadful movies he’s been in, Michael Caine can likely afford diamond-encrusted everything.
The slumming cameo I’ve truly never understood was Robert DeNiro in “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.” But then again, he gets a lifetime pass for Johnny Boy in “Mean Streets.”
Before They Were the Enemy // Aug 13, 2010 at 10:32 am
[…] I do wonder whether the makers of Jaws IV: The Revenge were familiar with the Hawaiian notions of shark intuition and locomotion, and used that information to justify their seemingly ridiculous concept. […]
The Simple Logic of Slumming | Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner // Feb 25, 2011 at 10:09 am
[…] I have no plans to watch the Academy Awards this weekend; any enterprise that once saw fit to honor the abysmal Crash is simply not worthy of my time. But I do harbor some fond memories of ceremonies past, including the most hilarious no-show in the Oscars’ history: Michael Caine’s failure to accept his Hannah and Her Sisters Best Supporting Actor statuette. Caine was stuck in the Bahamas on that fateful evening, waiting for the Jaws: The Revenge crew to get the animatronic shark’s eyes to roll back. The punchline, of course, is that Caine sacrifice his Oscar moment for a historically awful movie—a sequel so godawful that it was one of Bad Movie Friday‘s very first honorees. […]