Here’s another movie from my
childhood. I was 12 when Jaws came out in the summer of
1975. My friends and I saw it at the
Wright-Patt base theater. A ticket cost
all of 50 cents to see a movie there [75 cents if the movie was rated “R”]. A Facebook friend and I had a brief
conversation about whether Jaws is a horror movie. He just thought it was a summer-themed
movie. I think it’s a horror movie
because it’s the last movie I can recall that actually made me jump out of my
seat. Since this is my blog, I win. But seriously, after this movie came out, a
lot of people were suddenly afraid to go in the water. People started to “see” more sharks [real or
imagined]. To this day, people still
have negative stereotypes about sharks because of this movie. We still have a damn shark-fishing tournament
here in Northwest Florida.
“Whoa! Moments – for me, there are five “Whoa! Moments in Jaws:
1. The one-eyed head – Hooper [Richard Dreyfuss] is swimming along under water, and he
comes upon a small sunken boat with a nice bite taken out of it. Right as he looked in the hole, this human
head with one eyeball ripped out of its socket just popped out. Nobody saw it coming, most especially
me. That literally made me jump out of
my seat.
2. “You’re Gonna Need A Bigger
Boat…” – Chief Brody [Roy Scheider] is throwing
chum into the water. He’s got his back
turned, but right as he turns around, the big-ass Great White makes his
appearance with all of his pearly whites.
Tell me that isn’t scary…
Apparently, that line uttered by Brody was an ad-lib by Roy Scheider.
3. Flying Shark – John Entwistle did an album called Whistle Rhymes in 1972. A
line in one of the songs [I Wonder]
said “Out of the window and into the sky/I’m so glad that sharks can’t
fly…” This was before Jaws.
After dragging the boat backwards for a while, the shark decides to
attack the Orca. It didn’t ram the boat like it did earlier in
the movie – it went airborne and broke off the back of the boat. That leap killed the Orca. Brody was right – they
needed a bigger boat.
4. Quint Becomes Lunch – I don’t think I ever saw a guy get eaten alive by a shark [or by
anything else for that matter], at least not as graphically as when Quint [Robert
Shaw] became lunch. After the shark
killed the Orca, Quint started to
slip into the water, into the waiting jaws of the shark. That was pretty graphic stuff for 1975…
5. “Smile, you son of a bitch” – Quint is
dead, Hooper is missing, the Orca is
sinking. What’s a lone survivor [or so
he thought at the time] to do? How about
throw an oxygen tank at the shark and hope for the best. We know how it all went down, and this isn’t
a scary Whoa! Moment, but it is pretty damn cool… Everybody in the audience cheered when the
shark blew up. For the record, this
can’t really happen. This myth was
“busted” on Mythbusters, but I
digress…
The
Indianapolis Story – Quint tells the story of how the
USS Indianapolis delivered the atom bomb to Tinian Island, and then was sunk by
a Japanese submarine on the trip home.
The story of how all the survivors [of which he was one] stayed in the
water, only to be eaten one at a time by lots of sharks until a rescue could be
made. At the time I didn’t know it was a
true story. I just thought it was just a
device for making Quint hate sharks [Quint really wasn’t there, but who’s in
Hollywood is going to check?]. Now we
know why Quint hates sharks. As for
Quint’s monologue, it covered only three-quarters of a page in Peter Benchley’s
novel. I’ve read that Robert Shaw turned
Benchley’s words into Quint’s monologue.
Quint
as Ahab – Ever since his experience on the
Indianapolis, Quint was a shark hunter.
The way he drove the Orca to get the shark suggests he’s obsessed with
killing it, just like Ahab and his great white whale.
Joe Bob Briggs rating - 2 naked breasts [but it was really dark], 5 dead bodies, 20 gallons blood, shark-fu, Orca-fu
No comments:
Post a Comment