It wasn't a propeller.. It wasn't a coral reef.. And it wasn't Jack the Ripper.. It was a Shark!

Rating: 7/10 (20 May 2012)

***SPOILERS*** It's when teenager Cassie, Susan Blacklinie, went skinny dipping one evening in the waters off Long Island Sound that she attracted this giant 25 foot great white shark who ended up taking her out and under for his dinner! With the July 4th festivities about to start the seaside town of Amity, who's economy depends on tourist summer dollars, the news that a killer and man eating shark is on the loose off it's waters is the last thing that the town fathers and its Mayor Vaughn, Murray Hamilton, want the public to know about! It's when against his better judgment due to the pressure put on him by Mayor Vaughn Amity Police Chief Brody,Roy Scheider, kept the beaches opened that the killer shark strikes again gulping down another victim in front of hundreds of terrified beach goers including Chief Brody. With panic engulfing Amity and after a false report of having harpooned and killed the shark he strikes again this time in shallow waters off Amity Island. This on July 4th taking down another victim and thus closing the beaches indefinitely until the shark, the real killer shark not a cheap imitation,is finally put out of commission!
With Mayor Vaughn and the town fathers finally coming to their senses their forced to hire the famed shark hunter Captain Quint, Robert Shaw, at $10,000.00 plus expenses to track down and kill the man eating shark before he adds more victims to his already impressive body count. There's also the young wise cracking Oceanographer Hooper, Richard Dreyfuss, who goes along for the ride together with chief Brody on Quint's shark hunting boat the Orca. It's Hooper's know it all attitude about marine life and sea fearing that starts to get under Quint's skin and almost leads the two to go at each other instead of at the killer shark. It's only later on that Hooper gains a new found respect for Quint when he finds out that his obsession with sharks and wanting to kill them was the result of an incident back in WWII where he almost ended up together with most of his 700 fellow US Navy sailors, on the torpedoed USS Indianapolis, being eaten by one of them.
With the three, Quint Brody & Hooper, shark hunters out at sea is when the killer shark, efficiently called Bruce, comes out in the open with his razor sharp and serrated teeth, as much as three rows of them,flashing. From then on it's a battle between man and beast on the open seas with the killer shark making the best of the situation. It's his turf or waters that he's battling in and he knows every drop of it. That's until Brody now on his own with nothing to lose, but his life, overcomes his fear of the high seas and together with a high powered rifle and full oxygen tank finally turns the tables on the surging like a train locomotive Bruce the Shark. With Brody leaving about just enough of him,all 25 feet and three ton's worth, to fully pack an 8 to 12 once sardine can!
P.S "Jaws" released in the early summer of 1975 became the biggest money making hit in motion picture history in only just six weeks after it's initial release! Surpressing and almost doubling the profits of the previous money earing champ "The Godfather" without as much as breaking a sweat in doing it. Not at first thought to become the mega monster hit, with all the troubles and delays in filming it, that it turned out to be "Jaws" astounded the movie critics as well as it's own cast & crew members who before it's release had them feeling that it was going to be the "Bomb" of the century, and end up destroying their careers, who tried to distance and disown themselves from the film. Check out the author of the novel "Jaws" that the film was based on Peter Benchley as a TV reporter on the Amity beach just before the killer shark springs or swims into action.