Nothing like a little blood and terror to ring in the 4th of July.
Keeping with the time honored tradition of not reviewing a continuation on this show until about 5 years later, let's talk sharks with Jaws 2. Now personally speaking I don't find this to be a bad sequel, it's no 1975 classic blockbuster but it does the job well enough. Released 3 years after the first, we do a bit of a time jump on Amity Isle with good old Roy Scheider still the head honcho of the police department despite the fact that honestly if I went through half the stuff he went through, I would have hauled my ass to Montana or Kansas and set up shop far away from any water source, but things start happening in the waters. Divers go missing, a boat explodes, and our man is paranoid as hell but can you blame him? Same goes for his kid Mike, who was the little boy about half a foot away from being chum and yet wants to go out sailing with his friends. How about...no? But anyway, we get a quasi-Friday The 13th premise with teenagers venturing out on sail boats through the deep blue sea and guess who stops by to ask them, do you know any sushi joints around here? Now with the first film being one of the biggest hassles in movie making history, production went from Massachusetts to off the coast of Florida but the director and main star were butting heads continously so even then it wasn't smooth sailing. Alright I apologize for that joke. They used as much of the original shark as possible with a new head mold with some gnarly burn scars, and while it seems more functional than the first it sure loves launching out of the water to get a nibble so we can all remark "Shark still looks fake.", but hey anything with that John Williams' score effortlessly gives me the heebie jeebies boy! Good grief, you wouldn't catch me out in the open waters of the ocean, you'd barely find me swimming in a lake. Production wise, it's still a solid movie with the second biggest budget of any movie in 1978 behind Superman. Acting is spot on from everyone, no one phones a line in especially Roy, and credit where it is due for those young girls who have to convey immense shock and terror. I buy it! The directing style isn't too far off from Spielberg, a faux Spielberg that touches on bits and moments from the first yet still does it's own thing. You can tell they were kinda being chicken shits when it came to blood in this though, the body count increases a fair bit but you don't get to see legs drifting to the seabed or the ocean turning red, I mean come on! Sensibilities didn't change that much in the 70s, you still smoked around your kids and never wore seatbelts even though they existed. What's a few limbs and blood curdling screams gonna hurt? Bollocks! It handles all it's elements well enough, it's not some shoddy production where they maybe could get two actors from the first movie and fix everything in post. No, you get plenty of returning cast members, decent effects, a nice score from Williams, more people chomping, a simple enough plot where even if you went to the kitchen for about 20 minutes to cook you wouldn't miss anything. It's okay, I think it's no doubt going to be the high point of this week. I give it 2.5 stars, 6.5/10, and next time we look at a movie that hurt Sea World's reputation almost as bad as Blackfish with Jaws...IN 3D!!
