In a weird way, it was the fulfillment of an earlier promise by the studio to go in a more intentionally comedic direction and serves as the perfect "oh-hey-look-whats-playing-on-TBS" distraction for any low and doggish summer afternoon.
First, a bit of back story: after Roy Scheider refused to return for any more "Jaws" sequels, having only agreed to "Jaws 2" after quitting "The Deer Hunter" (yes, seriously, he would have played the John Savage part), the producers decided to get inventive. They turned to Matty Simmons, publisher of the National Lampoon, to oversee a new project, conceived as a spoof with the title "Jaws 3, People 0" (John Hughes and Tod Carroll wrote the script, which is completely bizarre and insider baseball-y). They'd even gone so far as to hire Joe Dante, who had made the delightful low budget "Jaws" send-up "Piranha" for Roger Corman. Eventually, cooler heads prevailed and the sequel was shelved, with the studio opting instead for whatever it was "Jaws 3D" ended up being. ("Jaws 3" was so bad that when Universal issued a press release for "The Revenge" they called it the "third film" in the series. Damn.)
If the movie wasn't trippy and odd enough, then let us take a closer look at the finale. There were actually two versions of the climax released by Universal. In the initial theatrical release our heroes pilot a boat into the shark (you know, because it spends more time hovering outside of the water than swimming through it). The dying shark shakes around and tears the boat apart, which puts our humans back in mortal danger. It's stupid as hell, but there are some nice flourishes; I love the blood that fountains out of either side of the shark (conceivably being kicked up by its gills).
Also, it's so incomprehensible that it takes on a kind of dreamlike feeling; "Jaws: The Revenge" as cubist masterwork. Roger Ebert, for his part, couldn't believe that the filmmakers "film this final climactic scene so incompetently that there is not even an establishing shot, so we have to figure out what happened on the basis of empirical evidence." (Occasionally this is the version they'll show on television.)
Universal, unhappy with the way the film originally ended, ordered a new ending for foreign and home video audiences. Now, when they ram the shark with the boat (which is, by the way, interspersed with flashbacks to the "Smile you son of a bitch" moment from the first movie, a flashback to something that Ellen Brody clearly wasn't around for), the editing becomes more chaotic and then the shark explodes. Why it explodes is anybody's guess. But like the rest of the movie, logic doesn't really matter and for much of the film's lifespan this has been the canonical ending that everybody has seen.
Still, it's hard not to get a kick out of "Jaws: The Revenge." Everything about it is so gloriously absurd, you can tell that everyone involved was just kind of going with it. It's the kind of movie that maybe you come across every five years and only see 10 minutes of it at a time and can't believe what you're watching is the actual movie, but it is. The gorgeous photography, filmed in Martha's Vineyard and The Bahamas, only adds to the surreal sensation the movie gives off.
It's so insane, in fact, that it tips into the comically absurd, something that the franchise had toyed with in the previous film. (The entire movie was completed in an astounding nine months.) Michael Caine, for his part, said, "I have never seen it. However, I have seen the house that it built and it's terrific."
Even without the house, it's kind of terrific.
