Not being able to read to confirm the truth, and having attempted to quit caffeine and cigarettes, a nervous Rick Shaw had heard through the grapevine that his cinema mentor and landlord was infatuated with a second sequel/third movie that the world despised…
Word is, when you did the super epic review of JAWS 3D on Cult Film Freak, along with a few criticisms there’s a deep adoration beneath… Is this true?
First off: During that time, the early eighties, the 3D gimmick was very popular. Like the 1950’s, it was all about things coming at the screen, and being used for a JAWS film, you’d think the shark would be the main vessel to pop out at the audience, like the advertisement marquee in the second Back To The Future. Instead, probably due to the attempt of making the shark look real, up close, which was always a problem, only background props, like dragon heads decorating the underwater tour, are thrust upon the audience for them to reach their hands out at; a perfect smiley icebreaker on a first date. Or the very beginning when, instead of a suspenseful slaughter of a teen girl skinny dipping, or showoffs photographing Quint’s sunken Orca, in its perspective, the shark beheads a small fish… Pretty weak stuff…
But you like the movie, right? Or love it, even… Which is mind-boggling!
Calm down and we’ll take a stab at answering the overall big question… What makes JAWS 3D a movie that is very enjoyable and thoroughly addicting, and far more pleasurable than what’s called a Guilty Pleasure, has to do with a man who created his very own Sub-Genre: Irwin Allen’s big screen Disaster Films had pretty much ended with the very underrated WHEN TIME RAN OUT, but there were still TV movies with an eclectic all-star cast frantically stuck in a dire circumstance: Herein there’s not a cruise ship upturning or a giant building burning but a grandiose Sea World type of place, so ahead of its time there’s a parenthetical aura of Science-Fiction throughout…
So while the 3D aspect is pretty embarrassing, the third JAWS also fails to fill the shoes of not the Spielberg JAWS, which is a complete impossibility, but the semi-solid JAWS 2 that covered the teen body count sub-genre decently enough, and continuing my defense from the original site that got you so concerned, JAWS 3 had absolutely nowhere to turn but to make the location a gimmick rather than the creature or its sporadic human snacks, and it didn’t fail, entirely.

Autographed by Joe Alves
Okay, so… Do you think the Irwin Allen touch was intentional?
It was more of a shove, and, it was mentioned, in person… to director Joe Alves who just nodded his head vacantly, and not necessarily in agreement. More of an, “Ok, fine, I accept that theory.” Interesting fella. Had a bunch of storyboards for all three JAWS flicks. He was really short and my personal nick name for him was “The Wizard of JAWS” since he’d done everything, from making the shark to finally getting his chance to direct. So it probably wasn’t intended to be a Disaster flick involving a killer fish, and there is hardly an all-star cast. Dennis Quaid, as Chief Brody’s grownup oldest son, and his girl, Bess Armstrong as well as Leah Thompson and… Archie Bunker’s wife’s son weren’t even as familiar as Louis Gosset Jr. (who hadn’t won an Oscar yet) or Aussie heartthrob Simon McCorkindale; the first playing the Murray Hamilton “We need to keep the park open to make money at all costs!” and the Robert Shaw shark killer role, combined with an attention loving Geraldo Rivera exploitive journalist. But, long story short, what the director did create, somewhat successfully, was making the grandiose Water Park seem like an attraction where nothing could or would or should go wrong: its success not only important to Gosset’s bigwig capitalist but everyone employed, and to the public…
In Irwin Allen disaster movies, the first half introduces the characters while the second deals with the problems that occur in pockets along the way. Same exact thing happens here while the suspense, channelled into this particular plot-line and straying from the shark itself, beats the pants off of a current blockbuster that borrowed the idea: a large creature running amok and turning JURASSIC WORLD into shambles: A god-awful film that received excellent reviews, especially compared to this maligned disaster, or better put, Bonafide Disaster film that, while being pretty corny, campy and unbelievable, got an unfair shake and yet still holds up as a breezy piece of afternoon time-filling cinema, dammit. And that’s that! So don’t quit smoking till you’re old like me, and get wired on some coffee and take a look at the second JAWS film… Or if you already have, taken it in again and, see what you think…