Jaws: The Revenge is a 1987 American thriller film produced and directed by Joseph Sargent. The fourth and final film in the Jaws franchise, it stars Lorraine Gary, who came out of retirement to reprise her role from the first two films, along with new cast members Lance Guest, Mario Van Peebles, Karen Young and Michael Caine. Acting as a direct sequel to Jaws 2 (retroactively ignoring the events of Jaws 3-D), the film focuses on a now-widowed Ellen Brody (Gary) and her conviction that a great white shark is seeking revenge on her family, particularly when it kills her younger son Sean, and follows her to the Bahamas.
The film was made in less than nine months, with production commencing in September 1986 so that the film could be released the following summer. Many critics suggested that the rushed production compromised the quality of the film. The film was marketed with the now infamous tagline "This time, it's personal."
Jaws: The Revenge was the lowest-grossing film of the franchise, with $51.9 million total gross on a $23 million budget
Plot
On Amity Island, Martin Brody, famous for his deeds as the police chief, has died from a heart attack. Martin's widow, Ellen, still lives in Amity, close to her younger son, Sean, and his fiancée, Tiffany. Sean works as a police deputy, and when he is dispatched to clear a log from a buoy a few days before Christmas, a great white shark appears and kills him.
Martin's older son, Michael, his wife, Carla, and their five-year-old daughter, Thea, come to Amity for the funeral. Michael works in the Bahamas as a marine biologist, and on his arrival, Ellen demands he stop his work. Having just received his first grant, Michael refuses. Thea convinces Ellen to return to the Bahamas with them.
The pilot of their small plane, Hoagie Newcombe, takes an interest in Ellen. Ellen begins spending time with him. Michael introduces his mother to his colleague Jake McCay and his wife Louisa, and they spend Christmas and New Year's together.
A few days later, Michael, Jake and their crew encounter the shark, which followed the family from Amity. Jake is eager to research it because great white sharks have never been seen in the Bahamas due to the warm water. Michael asks him not to mention the shark to his family. Ellen has nightmares of being attacked by the shark. She is able to sense when the shark is about to attack.
Jake decides to attach a device to the shark that can track it through its heartbeat. Using chum to attract it, Jake stabs the device's tracking pole into the shark's side. The next day, the shark ambushes and chases Michael through a sunken ship, and he narrowly escapes.
Thea goes on an inflatable banana boat, and the shark attacks the back of the boat killing another passenger. Ellen boards Jake's boat to track down the shark, intending to kill it. After hearing about what happened, Michael confesses he knew about the shark, infuriating Carla.
Michael and Jake are flown by Hoagie to search for Ellen and find the shark in pursuit of their boat. During the search, Hoagie explains to Michael about Ellen's belief that the shark that killed Sean is hunting her family. When they find her, Hoagie lands the plane on the water, ordering Michael and Jake to swim to the boat as the shark drags the plane and Hoagie underwater.
Hoagie escapes from the shark, and Jake and Michael hastily put together a device that emits electrical impulses. Jake is then mauled by the shark, but manages to get the device into the shark's mouth before being dragged underwater. Michael begins blasting the shark with the impulses. It repeatedly jumps out of the water, roaring in pain.
Ellen steers the sailboat towards the shark, while thinking back to the shark's attack on Thea and also imagining Sean's death, and Martin defeating the first shark. As the shark is rearing up, she rams the broken bowsprit of the boat into it.
In the original version of the film that was screened in the U.S., the shark bleeds out and dies after being impaled. In the revised ending (for international theaters and DVD release), the impaling causes the shark to immediately explode, and its corpse sinks to the bottom of the ocean (footage from the ending of the first film is used to show this). Jake dies in the original cut, but in the revised ending, Michael hears Jake calling for help, seriously injured but still alive. A short time later, Hoagie flies Ellen back to Amity Island.
Cast
Production
Development
As MCA Universal was going through a difficult period, its CEO Sidney Sheinberg saw that a third sequel to Jaws was likely to make a good profit, following the commercial success of Jaws 3-D, despite generally attracting negative reviews. Sheinberg also saw an opportunity to promote the Jaws ride at Universal Studios. Around this time, Sheinberg approached Joseph Sargent about directing the film. Sargent had worked with Lorraine Gary in 1973's The Marcus-Nelson Murders, for which he won a Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Miniseries or Movies for Television, his first. Steven Spielberg cites this television film, which later spawned Kojak, as motivation for casting Gary as Ellen Brody in the original Jaws film, in addition to the fact she was the wife of the studio's chief executive Sheinberg at that time. Regarding Revenge, Gary remarked in an interview: "I made a good deal on this film, but I didn't make as good a deal as I would have if I weren't married to Sid."
In an interview with the Boston Herald, Sargent called Revenge "a ticking bomb waiting to go off", saying that MCA Inc. president Sheinberg "expects a miracle." Sheinberg asked Sargent to direct the film in late September 1986. According to Sargent, Sheinberg "cut through all the slow lanes and got Jaws: The Revenge off and running." The first draft was completed in mid-December,
The film was developed under the working title Jaws '87, but by February 1987, the title Jaws: The Revenge was being used. The colon within the title is used by some sources although the colon is not included in the film's opening credits, or on the poster.
The film has no continuity from Jaws 3-D. In its predecessor, Mike Brody (played by Dennis Quaid) is an engineer for SeaWorld, whereas in Jaws: The Revenge, he is a marine research scientist. One of the Universal press releases for Jaws: The Revenge refers to this fourth film in the series as the "third film of the remarkable Jaws trilogy." de Guzman's script featured an appearance by Matt Hooper, while the producers still hoped to recruit Richard Dreyfuss to reprise his role as Hooper for the project.
It was proposed that Martin Brody was to be the shark's first victim.
Gary is the only principal cast member from the original film who returned. Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss refused to participate. Scheider had other commitments, and also had clearly expressed a desire not to play the character again. Lee Fierro made a brief cameo as Mrs. Kintner, the mother of Alex Kintner (Jeffrey Voorhees) who was killed in Jaws, as did Fritzi Jane Courtney, who played Mrs. Taft, one of the Amity town council members in both Jaws and Jaws 2. Cyprian R. Dube, who played Amity Selectman Mr. Posner in both Jaws and Jaws 2, is upgraded to mayor following the death of Murray Hamilton, who played Amity Mayor Larry Vaughan, in the first two Jaws films.
Gary states that one of the reasons she was attracted to the film was the idea of an on-screen romance with future Academy Award winner Michael Caine.
<blockquote>The first day we were to work together I was nervous as a schoolgirl. We were shooting a Junkanoo Festival with noisy drums and hundreds of extras. But he never faltered in his concentration and he put me completely at ease. It was all so natural. He's an extraordinary actor – and just a nice human being. However, Caine later claimed: "I have never seen it [the film], but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific!" In his 1992 autobiography What's it All About?, he says that the film "will go down in my memory as the time when I won an Oscar, paid for a house and had a great holiday. Not bad for a flop movie."
Lance Guest played Ellen's elder son Mike. Guest had dropped out of his sophomore year at UCLA (1981) to appear in another sequel to a horror classic; Halloween II. Karen Young played his wife Carla. She commended the director's emphasis upon characterization. Mitchell Anderson appeared as Ellen's youngest son, Sean. Lynn Whitfield played Louisa, and stunt performer Diane Hetfield played Mrs. Ferguson, the victim of the banana boat attack.
In addition to the 124 cast and crew members, 250 local extras were also hired. The majority of the extras were used as members of the local high school band, chorus and dramatic society that can be seen as the Brodys walk through the town, and during Sean's attack. A local gravestone maker produced 51 slabs for the mock graveyard used for Sean's funeral. Production commenced on February 2, 1987, by which time "snowstorms had blanketed" the island for almost a month, "providing a frosty backdrop for the opening scenes." Cinematographer John McPherson recalls that filming in the Vineyard was very cold, and required seven generators and lots of equipment. He says the six-day shoot covered 22 pages of the script.
The cast and crew moved to Nassau in the Bahamas on February 9, beginning principal photography there the next day. Like the production of the first two films, they encountered many problems with varying weather conditions. The location did not offer the "perfect world" that the 38-day shoot required. Cover shots were filmed on shore and in interior sets.
The underwater sequences were coordinated from an boat called Moby II. Second unit director Jordan Klein says that it was initially challenging for the actors to get used to the "foreign environment" of performing underwater. Stunt performer Gavin McKinney stood in for Lance Guest in the scene with the moray eel because it was potentially dangerous.
Principal photography completed in Nassau on May 26, although the special effects team continued working until June 4. Production then moved to the two sets which had been constructed at Universal Studios for the Neptune's Folly sequences, and also some reshoots of Sean's death. A tank had been painted to replicate Nassau's seabed, and a huge backdrop was painted to look like the Bahamas sky. However, as John McPherson points out, the backdrop looked rather artificial, which the production had no remaining time to resolve.
The film was shot in the Super 35 format, with Arriflex cameras equipped with Zeiss Superspeed lenses for underwater sequences. Cinematographer John McPherson also supervised the underwater unit, which was headed by Pete Romano. Whereas underwater photography was normally filmed with an anamorphic lens, requiring overhead lighting, Romano filmed these "sequences with Zeiss, a 35 mm super-speed lens, which allows the natural ambiance to come through on film." While the sharks for the first two Jaws films were pneumatically operated, the larger shark used in Revenge and more precise movements led to a decision to power this shark hydraulically. According to Hydraulics & Pneumatics magazine, "the articulated shark was mounted on top of a hydraulically operated scissor lift ... which raised and lowered the shark so it would appear that he had surfaced or submerged." The carriage was capable of propelling "the shark through the water at speeds to 7 <nowiki>[</nowiki>knots<nowiki>]</nowiki>" (). Seven sharks, or segments, were constructed from a combination of fibreglass, a metal frame and latex skin. The models were operated from a platform capable of rotating 180 degrees underwater, with a hydraulic arm operating the sharks.
Instead, Ted Rae, who had worked on Jaws 3-D, was commissioned to create a stop-motion shark for Jaws: The Revenge. When designing and sculpturing the models, Rae tried to strike a balance between matching the full-scale sharks built by Millar, and the live action footage. Rae criticized the full-scale models, saying they "looked like a concrete log with teeth... and doesn't look as good as the shark in the first film."
The film company returned to Universal to finish shooting on April 2.
Adverse weather conditions and problems with the mechanical sharks meant that the product was delayed and exceeded its $23 million budget. Despite this, the production was hurried in order to meet the July 1987 release date.
A television documentary, Behind the Scenes with Jaws: The Revenge, was broadcast in the U.S. on July 10, 1987. Twenty-two minutes in length, it was written and directed by William Rus for Zaloom Mayfield Productions.
Ending changes
In the ending of the original US theatrical version, Ellen rammed Neptune's Folly into the shark, impaling it on the prow of the boat, mortally wounding it. The shark then causes the boat to break apart with its death contortions, forcing the people on the boat to jump off to avoid going down with it. American audiences disapproved of this ending. Sid Sheinberg says that the impact of the shark and Jake dying "was too much for the audience in one finale". Following this, additional footage was filmed to portray Jake's survival, and special effects shots using miniatures which, Downey says, "saw the shark inexplicably explode after being speared by the boat". Universal used this ending on home media releases. The re-shot ending reportedly began filming only five days after the film was released in the United States. The original ending can be seen on cable broadcasts.
Re-shooting the ending prevented Michael Caine from collecting his Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Hannah and Her Sisters in person. In a 2010 interview with Time.com, Caine said that he had asked Universal to reschedule filming, but it was not possible due to the logistics of all of the boats and equipment that was involved.