After 38 years of most horror fans believing that Jaws: The Revenge is one of the worst movies ever made, I am here to tell you that the novelization isn't much of an improvement, though it has its charms. As with his adaptation for Jaws 2, author Hank Searls was working from an older draft that included some elements no longer shown in the final film, and also saw fit to make his own original contributions. It's certainly an interesting read at times. But in the end… it's still Jaws: The Revenge at heart.
If you've (wisely) remained ignorant of the plot of this fourth and final entry in the Jaws franchise, the film finds Ellen Brody (Lorraine Gary) grieving the recent death of Martin (from a heart attack) and living in Amity with her son Sean while older son Michael works as a marine biologist in the Bahamas.
Sean, who is now the chief of police, is carrying out a routine job just off the coast of Amity when he is attacked and killed by a shark, leaving Ellen to believe the shark is actually after her family. Michael convinces her to come to the Bahamas with him to start her life over, but wouldn't you know it, the shark follows them down there and continues his, well, revenge.
Yes, that is the actual plot to the third sequel to one of the most beloved and successful films of all time.
Before we get into what the novel sheds more light on about this particular movie, I have to point out something. As a professional novelization reader, it's borderline fascinating how Searls repeatedly refers to events from the original Peter Benchley novel that were not included in Spielberg's 1975 adaptation. It's the same thing he did with his Jaws 2 novelization (neither he or anyone else bothered to do one for Jaws 3D), but at least then we could give the benefit of the doubt and assume maybe he fudged some details (without a VHS or DVD of the original film at the ready, Benchley's book would have been his primary guide in 1978).
He'd have no such excuse in the VCR-drenched '80s, but he once again has Ellen Brody (Lorraine Gary) reminiscing about her affair with Matt Hooper and the mobsters killing the family cat. He even confusingly notes how Brody never fired his service revolver except at another cop who was shooting at seals, ignoring the (quite good) scene in Jaws 2 where he panics and fires it into the water at what turns out to be a school of fish. All in favor of a scene no one has ever seen on-screen! That he might have made up in the first place!
He's also somewhat charmingly stubborn about retaining all of the subplots from his Jaws 2 novel that were dropped/overhauled when the film itself got reworked after the director changed. Full scenes from that version reappear here, mostly involving Mike's scuba diving lessons and Sean's adventures with Sammy the seal, things that are in no way referenced in the 1978 sequel. It's almost as if Searls approached the job as if he were writing original sequel novels to Benchley's version, rather than novelizations of their cinematic sequels. The repeated references to Brody being cucked by Hooper and other never-filmed plot points lead me to believe that the author may be the only person on the planet who prefers Benchley's novel to Spielberg's film.
Speaking of Hooper, folks who know the behind-the-scenes info on this movie know that there was once a brief chance for Richard Dreyfuss to return, calling the family at Christmas to send his condolences regarding Sean, where we'd also learn that the oceanologist often spent the holidays with the family. This scene was dropped along the way, but sadly Searls didn't include it here, even though it was in the shooting draft (they kept holding out hope for Dreyfuss to the last minute, it seems).
It also lacks a few scenes that DID make the movie, such as Mike (Lance Guest) calling Sean prior to the latter's death, which made for the only time they interacted in the film. And he also skips the part where Hoagie (Michael Caine) gives Ellen a quick pilot lesson, though it is briefly mentioned later during a different scene (one with no equivalent in the film) where they fly together a second time.
Hoagie's character probably changes the most here, in fact. It's only alluded to with a line or two of dialogue in the final cut, but originally, Ellen's would-be new boyfriend was also working as a drug smuggler – or so it seems! Eventually, we learn he's actually working with the DEA to try to bring down a local crime lord to get his own revenge (for his daughter's death).
It's this stuff that gives the book the bulk of its action, as he escapes several attempts on his life, sometimes with the Brody family caught in the middle. None of it is particularly intriguing, but it certainly would have helped the movie be a little more exciting during its frequent lulls. With a series low body count (a mere two, or three if you managed to see the original ending where Mario Van Peebles' character Jake dies), a brief shootout and a plane fight could only have helped keep the audience awake.
The plane fight is probably the best “I wish we could have seen this“ part. In the movie, Hoagie flies Mike and Jake out to the ocean, landing in the water as the shark chases them to Ellen's boat. But here, there's a fourth person in Hoagie's plane: the drug lord, who plans to kill them and parachute to safety. A skirmish on board has him falling out of the plane near Ellen, who is unaware that the man is a villain and attempts to help him – it's a pretty good sequence! And gives the shark another victim, one I doubt reshoots would spare like they did for Jake.
Speaking of Jake, remember how he and Mike were working on a study of conches? Well, if you ever watched the movie and thought, “I wish there were way more about this stuff,” you're in luck! We get several scenes of the two men arguing about the best way to tag conches, why they're studying them, and even how they reproduce. Jake's wife, Louisa, also plays a much bigger role, culminating in a curious yet somewhat sad scene where she is at home washing his socks (just the socks, specifically) and suddenly realizes he is about to die.
She knows this because she practices voodoo, but for the forces of good! For the more traditional scary-movie kind, we have Papa Jacques, a character Searls seemingly invented entirely on his own, who plays a fairly large role here. He's got it out for the Brody family for various reasons, and it's thanks to him that the shark makes its way from Amity to the Bahamas. As Searls explains, it's not the shark itself that is seeking revenge, but Papa Jacques, inexplicably using the dumb thing as his vessel. As he did with Jaws 2, the author gives us a few scenes from the shark's perspective, and it's clear that he is suddenly compelled to swim to warmer waters, not driven by some kind of personal vendetta against a 50-year-old woman.
Unlike Hoagie's drug-running activities, which were more prominent in the older drafts and reduced to a couple of vague references in the feature version, the voodoo elements were entirely Searls' creation. The author sought to provide a more thorough and plausible explanation than the one presented in the film, and this is what he came up with. To his credit, it DOES indeed make more sense, but it creates another problem: it actually makes the movie even more complicated and silly than it already is.
By stripping out all the voodoo stuff (which also involves a few scenes where characters go into trances and walk into the water), we are left with the idiotic but at least simple story of a shark trying to finish off a family that's taken out two of his ancestors. And yes, definitely two and not three, as Searls follows the movie's lead and pretends Jaws 3D never happened.
In the movie we can just sort of assume they didn't have time to mention the events of that one. Still, with so much of the novel taking place in the characters' thoughts, particularly their family's shark history, it's impossible to believe that Sean or Mike would neglect to think about the time they were menaced by one of these things at Sea World.
The shark also gets more to do. Searls has him take out a baby seal and its mother, and later he comes across a whale that's dying from a harpoon attack, enjoying the easy kill to fill its belly as it makes its way to the Bahamas. During a long death-free stretch, the author has him splash a boat and scare the owner, and then, prior to the banana boat scene, he eats some preppy guy who is water skiing. So if you add in all of these victims, if this version were the one we got, then Bruce would have racked up his biggest body count in the series, instead of his lowest.
Ultimately, Searls did the best he could with such a junky, curiously low-action narrative, and by creating so much of his own material, he can hardly be accused of phoning it in. His repeated flashbacks to his own material from the Jaws 2 novel are pretty grating at times, but it's undeniably a more fleshed out version of this dumb, dumb story.
If you are a Jaws 4 apologist, by all means, track the book down (it's not unreasonably priced via third party sellers, though I am happy I only paid a quarter for it at a library sale) and enjoy this alternate take, which is somehow even sillier but also just as drawn out and melodramatic. That said, for true insanity that's also FUN, you're still probably better off playing the GTA-style Jaws Unleashed game for the PS2. You get to blow up a yacht in that one!
