Everyone at Florida's Sea World is thrilled with the new "Undersea Kingdom,"
a maze of underwater plexiglass tunnels that permits visitors to get closer
to marine life than ever before. The opening ceremonies include many important
guests... and one uninvited baby shark who accidentally enters the park's
lagoon through a faulty sea gate and subsequently dies. The young shark's
35-foot mother soon follows her offspring, creating the most horrifying
tale of terror ever filmed in the water.
"Overman
was killed inside the park. The baby was caught
inside the park. Its mother is inside the park."
- Kathryn Morgan |
Back in 2001, I was trying to come up with a great birthday present for
my girlfriend, so I candidly asked her one day what she thought would be
a great film to post on The Flesh Farm. I'm pretty sure she might have
just thrown out the first film that came to mind just to get me back on
whatever topic we were discussing, but she suggested Jaws 3. Through
the next couple weeks, I searched every goddamn corner of the internet,
emailed companies and even called some well known poster shops trying to
locate an original poster print of Jaws 3, but it seemed as though
none existed. I had never experienced such difficulty finding any type
of movie memorabilia up until this point! Where the fuck were these posters?!!
Well, after viewing Jaws 3 recently to add it to the site, I found
out why.
I'm pretty sure that every copy was ripped off the theater walls and sacrificed
to the Gods of fire in the parking lot after disgruntled movie goers realized
they had been robbed blind. I can see them now - pouring gasoline, lighting
matches, dancing around the inferno like Kevin Costner in Dances with
Wolves, then breaking into an orgy that would bring a tear to a german
pornographers eye. Yes, my peoples, this movie sucks. It doesn't suck quite
as bad as the next sequel (Jaws: The Revenge) but I'm sure the hundreds
of poster-burning sex-fiends of 1983 still remember this film as being
one to forget, and the after party one to remember. Lets get to it...
The Gory Good: Yeah, I'm slinging a lot of
shit at this film but it still has some upsides. Take Bess Armstrong for
example... she is one of the only actors in the film to give a near flawless
performance. She also holds the trophy for being the most attractive female
in the film and perhaps through the entire Jaws series. Another
great aspect of Jaws 3 is the fantastic underwater footage seen throughout
the film. Granted it was shot at SeaWorld and inside giant tanks, opposed
to the previous films where they were mostly shot out to sea, but it still
delivers a breathtaking demonstration of the oceans inhabitants. That's
about it for the good aspects of the film, seriously.
The Bloody Bad: Where do I begin? The first
thing that must be stated is Jaws 3 has some of the worst special
effects that has ever stained the silver screen. The sheer magnitude of
it's shitness might make you pass out from laughter. You'll notice the
scenes I speak of when they appear. I'm pretty sure they hired a preschooler
to paste a shark on a slab of construction paper for the "climax" shot.
Why does this film need computer graphics for a severed arm floating in
the water when it would've been cheaper to simply throw a foam latex arm
in the water and sprinkle in some fake blood? The amount of stupidity that
seethes through some film-makers heads astonishes me.
Besides Bess Armstrong, the casting for the film is a tragedy. Lea
Thompson, from Back to the Future fame, gives a performance which
would warrant the death penalty in some countries and Dennis Quaid... well...
it's Dennis Quaid. The rest of the cast is not worth mentioning.
Tits and Ass: Sigh. Get ready for excessive
excitement. Just kidding... not even worth a quarter chubby. Fuck.
Slaughter/Carnage/Butchery: Take a look at
the coroner's report. Pitiful. Only four deaths which were not impressive
in the least. The only gore is after a group of tourists discover a park
employee floating in the lake. His body is taken to a back room where it
is examined. The corpse looks plastic... that's right... plastic. Last
time I checked, none of my murder victims have ever morphed into an oversized
plastic Halloween prop. Nope, they just rot with the others in the back
of the barn.
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- This film features the largest of the sharks
featured in the Jaws movies. It was 35 feet long compared with its
predecessors which were about 25 feet.
- Dennis Quaid would later refer to this movie
in an interview as "I was in Jaws what?"
- It is a fictional Sea World as featured
in the film as the real one is in Orlando, a landlocked city.
- The shark in this film snarls and growls.
This is quite impressive when you consider that sharks in reality have
no vocal cords or lungs.
- In later interviews, writer Richard Matheson
claimed that the film was bedeviled with script doctors that ruined the
central premise of a white shark swimming upstream and becoming trapped
in a lake.
- Although most scenes in this film were actually
shot in Sea World, where the film takes place, some environments depicted
in the film do not exist at the actual theme park.
- David Brown and Richard D. Zanuck, producers
of the first two films, originally pitched this as a spoof under the title
of "National Lampoon's Jaws 3, People 0". This was based on a suggestion
by Matty Simmons and John Hughes and was about a movie studio trying to
make a second sequel to Jaws. It opened with author Peter Benchley
being eaten in his pool by a shark and included a naked Bo Derek and shark
costumed aliens. Joe Dante was attached as director. The idea was crushed
by Steven Spielberg, who threatened to walk from his deal with Universal.
As it was, when Zanuck and Brown learned that their comedy was halted,
they quit the studio.
- Director Joe Alves was suggested to helm
the film by veteran editor Verna Fields who won an Oscar for editing the
first.
     
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