Beach Week 2017: Deep Blue Sea (1999)

It’s always amusing to me when reviewers or audiences label Renny Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea (1999) a rip-off of the 1970s shark hit, Jaws (1975).

Why?

A close examination of the film makes it absolutely clear that Deep Blue Sea rips-off a different Steven Spielberg mega-hit: Jurassic Park (1993).

Deep Blue Sea, is -- in very real terms -- a wet Jurassic Park.

Think about it for a minute.

Both films involve genetically engineered animals in pens who prove far smarter and far more resourceful than their god-playing human scientist-parents imagine.

Both films -- released in the 1990s -- also draw their creative energy from the Pandora’s Box of the Clinton Age: Genetic Science.

In 1990, for example, the Human Genome Project began in earnest, unlocking the secrets of our biological make-up, and horror movies responded…with fear and worry. 

Over the next ten years at least, the horror genre gave us cinematic visions such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1997), and Mimic (1998), films wherein ambitious scientists make…monsters.

Deep Blue Sea is decidedly a part of that mad scientist “school” (forgive the fish pun), not of the “revenge of nature” pack that Jaws more legitimately seems representative of.

Beyond matters of categorization, Deep Blue Sea is a fun, well-paced horror romp. Not all the CGI effects hold up very well today.  And the Scream (1996)-like material that sees L.L. Cool J lamenting that “brothers” never survive situations like the one in Oceania is risible at best.  Today, it feels horribly clichéd.

But sharks -- genetically engineered or not -- are terrifying nemeses.

On their terrain, we are just…appetizers.  Deep Blue Sea effectively taps into that universal fear of being in alien territory, hunted by a life-form that better understands the geography.  So there’s suspense and action here to go along with the goofy self-referential humor and don’t-tamper-in-God’s-domain lesson.

I don’t entirely respect myself for feeling this way -- especially since I hold movies to a high standard in terms of what they achieve and how they achieve it -- but Deep Blue Sea is a lot of dumb fun.

“If they eat you, it’s because they think you’re a fat little seal.”

Following the escape of a test shark from the facility, corporate mogul and disaster survivor Russell Franklin (Samuel L. Jackson) wants to check up on one of his controversial investments: a sea-going laboratory called Aquatica.

There, Dr. Susan McAlester (Burrows) has created genetically-enhanced sharks so she can extract from their over-sized brains a hormone that will cure Alzheimer’s in humans. 

Following a storm at sea, the next-gen sharks -- all three of them -- stage a life-threatening break-out of the facility.

McAlester, Franklin, shark wrangler Carter Blake (Jane) and others are trapped inside the sinking laboratory, and the sharks are on the prowl.

But what do the sharks want?  Just another meal, or something else?

“Beneath this glassy surface, a world of gliding monsters.”

Beneath this shark-y-surface…a world of Jurassic Park tropes.

Both Jurassic Park and Deep Blue Sea commence with an accident.  In Spielberg’s film, a work is killed at night on Isla Nublar when a Velociraptor is transferred from one cage to another.  In Deep Blue Sea, a shark escapes Aquatica, and nearly kills a group of horny teenagers before being caught. 

The scene and set-up in the latter is derivative of the former, but still I like how Harlin executes it; particularly the moment when red wine spills into the ocean water, right above the camera’s eye. 

This is isn’t the only time in the film that the water will run red, so the moment is portentous, to say the least.

After the accident, both Jurassic Park and Deep Blue Sea share another similarity.  They each feature a flight to a far-flung facility that involves a visitor who is in a position to assess that facility and its work. 

In Jurassic Park, Alan (Sam Neil), Ellen (Laura Dern) and Ian (Jeff Goldblum) fly to Isla Nublar to determine if the facility is safe to be opened to the public.  In Deep Blue Sea, Samuel L. Jackson’s Franklin flies to Aquatica to make the same assessment.

In both films, a sense of wonder comes next.  Alan and Ellen see real living dinosaurs, and also see how they are created in a lab.  They even witness a velociraptor emerging from an egg.  In Deep Blue Sea, Franklin witnesses shark wrangler Carter (Thomas Jane) riding a shark in the tank.  Then, he sees the operation to aspirate shark brain juice for Alzheimer’s treatment.

But of course, something goes wrong in both cases. 

And that something is universally preceded by a storm’s arrival.  In Jurassic Park, a storm wreaks havoc when Nedry leaves his post with the security systems down.  He then drives his car into the mud, and is killed by a Dilophosaurus. But the storm also sends away the park’s main personnel, for reasons of safety.  

In Deep Blue Sea, a storm rolls in, while most of Aquatica’s staff is off for the weekend, resulting in a helicopter crash, and an explosion. 

In both cases, the subtext is all about Mother Nature.  Man (John Hammond) -- or woman (Dr. Susan McAlester) -- attempts to play God, to re-write nature.  So Forces of Nature respond.  Aggressively.

Man proposes and God disposes.

The primary boogeymen in both films -- the velociraptors and sharks, respectively -- are also defined by the dialogue as “hunting in packs.”  Similarly, the beasts are under-estimated vis-à-vis their intelligence.  The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park figure out how to mate, even in the absence of males. 

And the sharks of Deep Blue Sea figure out to how to sink Aquatica so they can swim through the above sea gates.

Both the raptors and the sharks escape their cages, too, to wreak havoc.

And finally, just for fun, Samuel L. Jackson’s character dies in both films.  We see his severed arm in Jurassic Park. We see a severed leg in the water in Deep Blue Sea.

Near the finale of both films, too, survival depends on characters being able to turn the power back on in the respective facilities.

I could go on and on here, I suspect, but you get the point. Deep Blue Sea is, more aptly, Jurassic Sea World, or some such thing. 

Yet, the wholesale aping of Jurassic Park doesn’t automatically render Deep Blue Sea a disaster. Harlin adds his own over-the-top stylistic touches to the material, slathering the film with whirling pans and zooms, and thus a real sense of visual kineticism.  The movie itself may not be as deep as the ocean, but it’s a ore-than adequate roller-coaster ride experience. 

Intriguingly, the film also gives us a lesson in mechanical sharks vs. CGI sharks. In Deep Blue Sea, the scenes involving the mechanical shark interacting with the actors still hold up.  The scene in which one scientist, Whitlock (Stellan Skarsgard) gets his arm bitten off by a shark is terrifying, and more than that, terrifyingly real.  The CGI shark scenes, by contrast, look like living cartoons, no more real today than Jabberjaw.

Over the years, I have watched Deep Blue Sea probably six or seven times.  Not because it is a great film, but because it is a gory, fast-paced horror film with plenty of action, and a few laughs.  

Just like Dr. Susan McAlester (our primary transgressor and tamperer in God’s domain…), the film goes down the gullet pretty easily. 

Beach Week 2017: Deep Blue Sea (1999) Movie Trailer

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Beach Week 2017: Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

During a funeral for a shark victim in Jaws: The Revenge (1987), a character notes that “to everything, there is a season.” 

That observation also applies, alas, to the later sequels to Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). By the time of this final, gloriously awful sequel to the first film, the franchise had long endured past its season, and freshness date too.

Ironically, at some level, the filmmakers seem to understand this fact. 

Either that, are they are spectacularly unaware of the dialogue being spoken in their own film, and just plain hapless. Early on, for instance, a pilot named Hoagie (Michael Caine), asks Mrs. Ellen Brody (Lorraine Gary) if she has ever been to the Bahamas.  She answers that she has not.

At which point Hoagie says the following: “The first time’s the best for everything.  After that, you know too much, and nothing’s quite the same.”

I agree 100% with Hoagie. 

He’s right, and he’s insightful (and he’s a really cool character, because his clothes don’t get wet even when’s submerged for minutes at a time underwater...).

As per Hoagie’s wit and wisdom, the first Jaws remains the best, and the more times we go back into the water to see Brody family fighting sharks, the less impressive the sight is.  At some point, it just gets old...and stale, and the screenwriters must use desperate tactics to maintain interest.

Jaws: The Revenge is an object-lesson in this wisdom, as it concocts an absurd, incoherent, inconsistent plot about a shark’s plan to kill the family members responsible for its own death.

My God...what did I just write?  

Yes, that’s right -- per the movie’s dialogue -- “The shark [singular] that killed Martin and Sean” has returned from beyond the grave to murder the other Brodys, to avenge itself. 

Technically, that makes Jaws: The Revenge a zombie shark movie.

At the very least, it’s dead in the water.

“It came for him. It waited all this time, and it came for him.”

Sometime after the death of Sheriff Brody in Amity, Sean Brody has become a police deputy. Near Christmas one year, a great white shark sets a trap for him in the harbor, lodging a piece of wood near a buoy.  As Sean attempts to clear the debris, the shark strikes, and kills him.

In mourning, Ellen Brody (Gary) becomes convinced that the shark that killed both Brody (by heart attack…) and Sean is after the whole Brody family.  

Accordingly, she wants her other son, Mike (Lance Guest), to quit his job as a marine biologist and stay away from the water.  Instead, Mike invites his Mother to visit his family -- his wife and daughter -- in the Bahamas, where he is working on a grant.

She agrees, and in the Bahamas romances Hoagie (Caine), a local pilot.  But before long the shark shows up, threatening Mike, and Mike’s daughter, Thea, when she rides on a banana boat.

Ellen takes to the sea alone aboard a ship, Neptune’s Folly, and decides to meet the shark on its own terms…

“I know it’s coming…”

I must confess, it’s tough to know where exactly to begin with this film. 

I suppose the best starting point is Ellen Brody.  She tells us herself that Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) died from a heart attack (brought on “by fear”) and yet she blames the shark explicitly for his death. I guess Martin's exercise and eating habits had nothing to do with his condition. The shark made his heart fail.  

Ellen also appears to possess some kind of psychic link with the attacking shark, and knows when it is nearby, and what it wants. She possesses the certainty of the devout in “knowing” these ridiculous things, and yet the movie validates her by making everything she believes absolutely true. Yes, the shark is killing Brodys! She is right...and righteous!

The shark that killed Ellen's husband (and was killed by her husband), and that also killed her son is indeed after her family. In fact, it has traveled from Amity to the Bahamas in about a day, without benefit of airplane, and it operates, essentially, like a Brody-seeking missile, able to detect (by smell?) when a Brody is in the ocean.  Alas, the Brody-sensing, avenging-angel zombie shark has one flaw: it is clumsy. It doesn't get Thea on the banana boat. It gets her neighbor, seated directly beside her.

Missed it by that much...

In short, Ellen Brody makes a series of very dumb, even ridiculous assumptions about the shark, and the movie validates all of those assumptions. This isn’t just a shark, it’s a shark back from the dead…with a vendetta!

Ellen is special in other ways. She has the Marvel-esque ability to flashback (in sepia-tone coloring) to events that she could not possibly have witnessed. She remembers Sean’s death, though she was not in the boat with him when he died.  And she remembers Martin’s execution of the shark, though she was not aboard the Orca with him at that time.  The movie actually cuts to images of these scenes, as Ellen wages war with the zombie shark.  So she has the power to connect not just to her enemy, psychically, but to access the memory of all shark-fighting Brodys in history!

Quite a lady, I’d say.

Let’s move on to the shark next. 

This shark can sense people of the Brody clan, has returned from the dead, and feels anger and resentment towards those who ended its life the first time around. 

My question, of course, involves shark intelligence.  Could a shark understand that it died, and came back to life?  If so, would it really devote its new life to killing off human enemies?  I mean, a shark always has to swim forward, doesn’t it?  Well, this is one shark obsessed with looking back.

This one-of-a-kind shark is -- uniquely -- able to swim the approximately 1,100 mile distance from Amity to the Bahamas in a day.  A typical shark can swim about 35 to 50 miles a day, if memory serves, so this guy is lightning fast.

And when challenged by Ellen on the open sea….the shark roars at her. You read that right, too.  It roars like a lion at its nemesis.  Maybe it is trying to prove it is king of this watery jungle.  But the problem is that sharks, unlike people, do not possess vocal cords. A shark is physically unable to roar like a lion.  But hey, this is a zombie shark, right?

Then, during the final battle, this one-of-a-kind shark jumps onto the bow of Neptune’s Folly and fatally explodes into a million pieces. There’s only one explanation: a great white shark self-destruct sequence.  If you are a zombie shark, back from the dead and seeking vengeance, it’s a given that if you fail, you have no alternative but to explode. It's a rule.

Allow me to continue this discussion regarding the behavior of other characters in the film.  Hoagie – he who does not get wet even when submerged in the ocean – flies his perfectly functioning plane into the ocean and scuttles it, so that he, and others, can swim to Ellen’s location, on Neptune’s Folly.  Does that sound smart to you?

And Mario Van Peebles' character, Jake, speaks with the worst, most stereotyped Caribbean accent you've ever heard. It's a relief when the shark gets him, and a disappointment when he shows up, miraculously alive, after the final battle. 

And Mike?  Well, he has a mother who can’t stop talking about the fact that a great white shark is out for revenge against his family, but when a great white shark actually shows up in the Bahamas -- for the first time in recorded history, according to Mike himself -- what does Mike do? He keeps it a secret.  

Of course. 

Because then it has a better chance of killing his daughter on the banana boat.

Again and again, over and over, Jaws: The Revenge proves itself ape-shit crazy in terms of logic, characterization, and even the basic details of the movie's narrative.

Still, almost nothing in the film’s silly story is as deflating as the moment at the kitchen table with Mike and Thea, aping the moment from Jaws (1975) when Sheriff Brody’s son imitates his movements at supper.  Aww, isn’t that sweet?  Thea is imitating her Dad during a shark attack crisis just like another Brody imitated his father during a shark attack crisis!  

It’s a charmless, derivative moment that adds nothing to movie.  Instead, it reminds us how good the original Jaws really was.

And what's up with the famous ad-line, "this time it's personal?"  I would wager that for every shark victim in the previous Jaws movies, the attacks were also pretty damn personal. It's not like the shark was handing out business cards and making appointments for carnage.

Jaws: The Revenge is a terrible movie, starring an extremely limited actress, Lorraine Gary, but at least it is audacious in its stupidity.  The movie is so over-the-top dumb that you can’t help but giggle your way through it.  

In my opinion, this unintentional humor gives Revenge a leg (or fin…) up over Jaws 3-D.

Beach Week 2017: Jaws: The Revenge Movie Trailer

Beach Week 2017: Jaws 3-D (1983)

The last two films in the Jaws franchise are terrible. We all know this fact.

What isn’t settled, perhaps, is the question of which entry -- Jaws 3-D or Jaws: The Revenge -- actually takes the crown as the very worst installment of the bunch. 

Traditionally, I have favored Jaws: The Revenge (1987) as representing the absolute nadir of the saga.  But a recent re-watch of Jaws 3-D (1983) suggests that maybe I had it wrong. Though Jaws: The Revenge is consistently, unceasingly dumb and ridiculous, it somehow manages to be entertaining in its stupidity. You can laugh at it at the same time you acknowledge how bad it is.

Jaws 3-D is dull, over-long and unceasingly dumb too...only without the unintentional laughs.  That makes it a bigger drag to sit through.

In short, Jaws 3-D is a horrible, ill-conceived mating of the disaster film format and the shark attack film.  

Most 1970s disaster flicks are set in one scenic locale (a tall building, a ship at sea, etc.) and chart how chaos progresses there, often following some form of usually-natural threat, whether an avalanche, an earthquake, or a storm in the ocean.  

The Jaws films, by contrast, have focused on the Brody family and its ongoing travails with great white sharks.  Aiming for originality, Jaws 3-D blends the two approaches.  Here, the Brodys contend with a great white shark at an amusement park populated by thousands.  

And hey, isn’t that the plot for this summer’s Jurassic World (2015)?

Anyway, a very young Dennis Quaid here plays the older Brody son, Mike, and John Putch is the afraid-of-the-water Sean Brody. 

As the film begins, preparation are underway for “Preview Week” at Sea World (replete with “The Undersea Kingdom,”) a new amusement park/attraction owned by controversial entrepreneur Calvin Bouchard (Louis Gossett, Jr.). Mike is the chief engineer there, and his girlfriend is a marine biologist, Kathryn Morgan (Bess Armstrong) whose job it is to tend to dolphins.

A small great white shark is soon detected in the Sea World lagoon, and publicity hound and D-list celebrity FitzRoyce (Simon MacCorkindale) wants to hunt and kill it for the paparazzi. But Kathryn, realizing that there are no great white sharks in captivity, sees that this incident represents an opportunity for the park, and for science. Sensing dollar signs, Calvin agrees, and the shark is captured rather than killed.  It later dies in captivity.

Unbeknownst to any of these individuals, however, the shark’s angry mother is already in the Sea World lagoon too, ready to strike back…on Opening Day.

It’s a cliché, for certain, to say that a Jaws film lacks “bite.”  But -- what the hell? -- Jaws 3-D really lacks bite. 

The 1983 sequel never generates a real sense of terror, in part because the visual special effects are so bad that they take your attention away from the characters and their predicaments. For instance, a model, or miniature shark is used on several occasions, and it swims right at the screen, in full view, looking absolutely immobile and unreal.  A better director might have sought ways to hide the model shark, or feature it more judiciously. It's baffling that the Spielberg approach -- a reliance on P.O.V. and the genius of John Williams -- isn't repeated here, since the effects are so clearly lacking.

The moment when the shark strikes a plate glass window is perhaps the worst use of the aforementioned great white miniature. A fake shark, matted against a background, appears to strike  a fake window.  It's layers upon layers of incompetence here, one of the worst composites you'll ever see in a major motion picture.

The shark carnage -- body parts, bones, and so forth -- is similarly rendered in a lame way, with sizable matte lines showcasing for posterity their unreality.  Even something that should have been simple -- making a run-of-the-mill submersible look "real" while underwater -- is utterly botched here.

The silliest moment in terms of effects, however, arrives in the finale, as two dancing dolphins are matted into the respective corners of the frame while Mike and Kathryn swim to safety. The results are so atrocious that they look like a bad Hallmark card come to life. 

Notice below, how you don't even see the entire dolphin bodies, and how they don't seem to be in the water (making ripples or waves), but standing in front of the water.

Beyond the terrible, movie-destroying effects work, the editor on Jaws 3-D tries desperately to gin up tension, and largely fails.  The main technique used is slow-motion photography.  So suddenly, during the finale, we get exaggerated, interminable close-ups of Louis Gossett, Jr., Dennis Quaid, and Bess Armstrong dropping their jaws in terror, their eyes popping at some off-screen menace.  

But the shots last so long that they are kind of funny.

Jaws 3-D  also attempts to ape the naturalistic, staccato dialogue made famous by the first two films, but never gets anywhere in the same ball-park. No real human connection is made with the characters here, and so the banter about leaving the park for another country, or Mike and Kathryn getting married largely falls flat.  Similarly, Sean’s attempts at pitching woo with Lea Thompson’s character -- a water-ski performer -- seem unimpressive. All these moments reminded me of a bad Friday the 13th film of the 1980s; one populated by interchangeable teenagers who would later serve as victims for Jason.

One can  also that the filmmakers hoped to create a new triumvirate here, to replace the classic Brody-Hooper-Quint threesome of the 1975 original. We’ve got our Brody (two for the price of one, actually...), our fish-loving scientist (Armstrong), and the self-confident, somewhat amoral hunter, FitzRoyce (MacCorkingdale).  

Suffice it to say that it’s a weak B-team by comparison to the trio we met in Jaws.

Also, the film’s final moments are lacking suspense, and silly to boot. We’re to believe that FitzRoyce -- killed by the shark two-thirds of the way through the film -- is still whole and intact (though not alive) in the shark's mouth, still clutching a grenade for the finale.  

So the weapon is right there, on the shark’s tongue, I guess, waiting for Mike to detonate it in time for a happy ending.  

Do sharks not chew their food? 

Do they just let it sit in their mouths for hours on end, slowly but passively digesting it like a sea-going Sarlacc?

And would not the water loosen the grenade at some point, anyway? 

Heck, what about the movements of the shark?  Wouldn't they cause the bomb to detonate?  And if Fitzroyce's corpse is just lunging there, unchewed inside the shark, how does the shark have room for her next victim?

Let’s just say it’s extremely convenient that when the chips are down, and the shark is in the room with the heroes, that Mike has an easy way to kill it. 

Just pull the ring and dive for cover.

One of the few scenes that I liked in Jaws 3-D, or which I felt achieved the desired effect, involves Mike and Kathryn discussing his family history, and the event that changed the Brodys forever: the shark attacks his father dealt with.  He talks about the repercussions of those shark attacks in Amity, and the moment serves not just as a call-back to better (and beloved) films, but as an acknowledgment of how a tragedy can change the path of one’s life forever.

But for most of its run, Jaws 3-D is a tired, poorly visualized disaster, with unlikable characters, plenty of clichés, and almost no scares whatsoever. 

The film is a suspense-less effort in three dimensions or two.  It is unbelievable to me not only that another film in the saga was produced after this floater, but that the follow-up is arguably as bad (if not as dull) as this sequel is.

Beach Week 2017: Jaws 3-D (1983) Movie Trailer