Roll Up - Roll Up - Meet the guy who didn't like it much!

Rating: 6/10 (11 October 2004)

A killer shark throws a seaside town in to chaos.
In my movie writing I tend to be benign about movie that seek only to entertain the popcorn munchers, because they keep the industry going. However there are good popcorn movies and bad popcorn movies.
(Indeed there are popcorn movies that fall in to the middle.)
I was in the playground when this movie came out and the school morons thought this was fantastic - "did you see that naked woman being bitten in half - wasn't that great. All that blood in the water - fantastic!" They said, wide-eyed with wonder.
(In most movies rated PG women are not bitten in half, so congratulations to Steven S for getting a horror movie stunt shown to kids. And he repeated the trick in Jurassic Park!)
I am sorry that special effects were anything other than special in the 1970's. Yes the shark looks as dead as a dodo, but sharks do look a bit like that anyway. I have been to one of the few places where you can view sharks close to in safety and they do look a bit dead-in-the-eye. They like to come very close just to see you!
At the risk of starting a "I'm right - you're wrong" debate, let us look at what this is: A cheap thrill ride. Psycho and The Shinning were also cheap thrill rides, so let us not knock it for that, but it is worthless as any kind of document about sharks. A few rouge and hungry sharks kill humans, but they really don't like us much. Of all the food in the sea we are among their least favourite!
(Does Steven S ever think how much misinformation he has given the world with this film?)
The opening shots are, as our school moron said before, skillful and shocking. John Williams is a genius and produces more fright with a chamber orchestra than Spielberg does with a film camera! A master craftsman at work.
Sadly the script is flabby and indeed it is just an exercise in filling time before the next cheap thrill or even cheap thrill that never happens. When this film moves it moves well - but Schneider's paranoia is one note and pointless. We know he is right and the town-folk masses are wrong. A better script would have made him doubt himself.
We have read about how difficult life filming "on the boat" was. The steady cam - not available at the time - was designed to overcome these problems. It looks like they quit early, they could (and should) have extended the climax having kept us waiting for it for so long. Films like The Perfect Storm show that you can keep a scene going longer than they realized in the 1970's.
What I learned from Jaws is that films can get away with the murder if they open and finish well. What people who own the video or DVD do in the scenes that involve Schneider's troubled domestic life I don't know - probably hit fast forward I guess.
Most blockbusters are actually poor movies: Spiderman, Superman and Batman got a lot of hype and word-of-mouth - but future generations will see them as the flimsy flashy trash that they really are. What is the legacy of Jaws - spreading a load of c**p about the nature of sharks and making teenyboppers - who have even seen a real horror movie - scream?
Yes - there are plus points. Lots of pros at work both behind and in front of the camera and a great score - but all these people working their hardest cannot disguise that all they are working with a third rate pulp novel from a third rate novelist.