Scream-O-Rama 2023 Day 7: Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

  This is considered one of, if not the, worst horror movies ever made and it's still better than Who Can Kill a Child?.  Content warning:  blood

Ellen Brody (Lorraine Gary) becomes convinced a Great White shark is deliberately targeting her family after her son, Sean (Mitchell Anderson), is killed in Amity harbor.  Her other son, Michael (Lance Guest), thinks she's losing her mind and convinces her to visit him in the Bahamas while he works on his grad school project of tagging conch snails, and most importantly, the waters are much too warm for Great Whites.  Ellen eventually starts to relax, helped along by garrulous pilot Hoagie (Michael Caine), but Michael begins to believe her crazy theory when a Great White shows up and starts attacking his boat.

Everything about this movie is bad.  The script is terrible, it cribs way too much from the original Jaws without improving in any way, the timeline makes no sense, they stuck Mario Van Peebles with a bad Bahamian accent, and the foam rubber shark is laughable.  You can literally see the string used to move the fin in one scene.  There's no actual footage of a real shark, not even stock footage, in the entire movie.  It would have made just as much sense to have Hoagie actually be the shark in disguise and probably more entertaining.

 And yet.  At no point during watching did I actively hate anyone involved.  I didn't wish doom upon their houses, yea, unto the seventh generation.  I wasn't frantically Googling to make sure I hadn't missed some reason why this was considered a classic.  If I had a thought at all, it was "damn, I wish I could spend Christmas in the Bahamas."  Oh, yeah, it's a Christmas movie. 

Unrelated, but this is also the debut film of Judith Barsi, one of the saddest stories in child acting.  For my fellow 80s kids, she was the voice of Ducky in The Land Before Time.  At the age of ten, she and her mother were murdered by her father, an abusive alcoholic.  There's a little real-world horror for you.

All the Jaws films are currently streaming on Netflix.