Jaws 3-D (1983) Director: Joe Alves

★☆☆☆☆

Jaws 3-D is as bad as the title suggests. The third installment in the Jaws series relies on the cornball gimmick of creating a “3-D” horror movie, a popular cash-grab in the ’80s which has thankfully fallen out favor. The concept behind the plot is mildly interesting -a great white shark gets loose in Sea World and terrorizes the staff and animals. However, the film spectacularly fails to deliver on this idea. Roy Scheider who played Chief Brody in the first two films, laughed off the idea of continuing his role in this film: “Mephistopheles … couldn’t talk me into doing [it]..”

The film follows the next generation of the Brody children (one of whom is played by a young Dennis Quaid who claimed he was completely high on cocaine in every single scene of the movie). They work at a water park in Florida where a young great white shark has managed to sneak into the enclosed dolphin exhibit. The shark has trailed a water skiing troupe inside for some reason. It takes the staff nearly 2/3 of the movie to realize the shark is inside the park, however they absurdly decide NOT to kill the shark and instead display the shark on national television to promote the park. At one point they nurse another shark back to the health for some unknown reason. The shark runs amok in the exhibit and several people are eaten whole -and one of the attacks is shot from the odd perspective inside the shark’s mouth. In the end, the park staff attempts to drain the exhibit which requires them to dive deep into the exhibit, and some of the worst special effects ever devised are employed, most memorably when the shark breaks the glass into the park’s control room. Nothing about this film is intense or suspenseful. The staff members finally destroy the shark when one of the character’s gets eaten by the shark while he is carrying a grenade and the others manage to pull the pin thus killing the shark. Somehow all the dolphins survive, as well. It is a truly terrible movie, containing none of the legendary cinematic tropes featured in the original Jaws. The story is a bore and the characters are as hollow as the producers who lined their pockets with this film.