Jaws targets Brody family members in all of his movies, and Jaws: The Revenge’s novelization explains why: the shark is actually a voodoo curse. Released in 1975, Steven Spielberg’s original Jaws film is an undisputed classic, and was also the original summer blockbuster. Unfortunately, its sequels proved to be mostly regrettable efforts. While 1978’s Jaws 2 was decent enough, Jaws 3-D and Jaws: The Revenge primarily serve as examples of what not to do when making a horror sequel.
A common thread running throughout the Jaws franchise is the titular shark’s love of targeting the Brody family. After the first film’s shark is killed off by police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), another great white returned to menace the Brodys and Amity Island. In Jaws 3-D, the featured shark attacks Sea World in Florida, which just happens to employ Martin’s now grown son Mike Brody (Dennis Quaid). Finally, Jaws: The Revenge focuses on Martin’s wife Ellen Brody (Lorraine Gary), now a widow after Martin died of a heart attack. Ellen travels to the Bahamas to be with other family, and a murderous great white actually follows her there, after killing one of her sons back in Amity. Clearly, sharks do not like the Brodys.
Sporting the ridiculous tagline of “This time, it’s personal” and featuring a killer shark that inexplicably roars like a lion, Jaws: The Revenge is rightfully a laughing stock. After all, sharks can’t hold grudges, can they? It turns out that Jaws: The Revenge actually got an official tie-in novelization that attempted to explain why Jaws seemingly has a vendetta against the Brodys. Unfortunately, the explanation is one of the strangest one could imagine.
Jaws: The Revenge Novelization Makes the Shark a Voodoo Curse
In the Jaws: The Revenge novelization, written by author Hank Searls, it’s heavily implied that the reason killer sharks are relentlessly targeting the Brody family is that older son Mike (not Dennis Quaid, this movie ignores Jaws 3-D) earned the ire of a local witch doctor named Papa Jacques while working as a marine biologist in the Bahamas. A practitioner in voodoo, the witch doctor sent Jaws: The Revenge’s shark after Ellen Brody and family to get back at Mike for not believing in his powers and branding him a fraud. While this doesn’t necessarily explain the sharks in the other films, it’s still a completely stupid attempt to explain The Revenge’s already silly plot that was smartly left out of the actual movie.
Jaws: The Revenge Was So Bad It Killed the Franchise
Then again, it’s possible including voodoo and a witch doctor wouldn’t have made much of a difference for Jaws: The Revenge, a movie so bad that it killed the franchise. While most popular horror properties never truly stay buried, there hasn’t been a new Jaws movie since 1987, over 30 years ago. Just about every possible thing was done wrong when making Jaws: The Revenge, and it isn’t even entertaining in a “so bad it’s good” way. If anything, there might well be a voodoo curse on the franchise. Amusingly enough though, Lorraine Gary’s co-star Michael Caine was once asked about his work in the film, and bluntly responded “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.”
More: Jaws: 10 Facts About The Shark They Leave Out In The Movies
