Hank Searls’ “Jaws 2” (1978) is a prime example of the riches to be found in the novelization form, as it adapts an early draft of the film and shows what it could’ve been with a bigger budget. I hoped for the same from Searls with “Jaws: The Revenge” (1987), the third of the “Jaws” book trilogy (since “Jaws 3” got skipped over). It is better than the movie – that’s a very low bar — but it’s still pretty bad and ridiculous.
A losing battle
Perhaps “Jaws: The Revenge” was a losing battle from the start, as Searls – adapting the screenplay by Michael de Guzman – chronicles a shark that’s being manipulated by a voodoo master in the Bahamas.
Granted, this makes marginally more sense than a shark seeking to kill every member of the Brody family on its own volition. That’s how it plays in the film, which is heavily edited compared to what Searls is giving us. But the voodoo addition doesn’t help all that much, because a shark seeking revenge for any reason is utterly stupid (as comedian Richard Jeni so perfectly outlined).
“Jaws: The Revenge” (1987)
Author: Hank Searls, based on the screenplay by Michael de Guzman
Series: “Jaws” No. 3 (This is a novelization of the fourth film, but the third film didn’t have a novelization.)
Genre: Pulp thriller
Setting: The Bahamas, 1987
This concludes Reviews from My Couch’s summer series highlighting classic (and not so classic) shark horror entertainment through the years. Find past reviews under the Sharks tag.
Searls shows an appealing pulp sensibility at times. If Hoagie (played by Michael Caine in the film) were the main character, “Jaws: The Revenge” would be significantly better. He’s a hardboiled hero seeking his own revenge on the island chain’s drug kingpin.
But Hoagie is played as a mysterious man, so we don’t get to know him till it’s too late to save the book. Instead, the main character is the grieving Ellen Brody (husband Martin and son Sean have recently died). Or perhaps it’s her grown son Michael, a marine biologist in the Bahamas.
Searls writes a lot about Ellen’s grief, but in shallow fashion. And Michael’s job of tagging conch shells for a government-funded study of migration patterns is boring.
The painfully absent center
I was hyper-aware of the absence of Amity police chief Martin Brody (who dies of a heart attack before the book begins). Sure, in Peter Benchley’s “Jaws” and Searls’ “Jaws 2,” he’s your basic salt-of-the-earth protagonist trying to do the right thing amid raging political and economic forces. But as I realize in retrospect, Brody has presence on the page, and no one steps up to replace him in “The Revenge.”
Searls is working with a worse screenplay, but he himself is less engaged than on “Jaws 2.” When he writes flashbacks to his previous novelization, he copies and pastes the text. These flashbacks are for the sake of blunt continuity more than character growth or depth. (Also, references specific to Benchley’s “Jaws” tell us that novel is now part of this continuity, whereas it wasn’t in the “Jaws 2” novelization, which continued from the “Jaws” movie rather than Benchley’s work.)
When reading the “Jaws” book trilogy, we’re not distracted by seeing actors who look nothing alike slide into the roles of Michael and Sean in each film. But Searls writes them as roles more so than people. Sean getting eaten by a shark and Michael being threatened have no more impact than if they were random side characters.
The author’s inclination is to go for a dime-store-novel romp, and “The Revenge” is at its best during Hoagie’s forays into the drug underworld. But Searls is held back by having to pen the generic shark-attack stuff, which is unfortunately the novelization’s heartbeat. (Literally: One of the conch trackers records the heartbeat of the shark, which is the offspring of the “Jaws 2” shark.)
“Jaws: The Revenge” isn’t painful to read in the way the film is painful to watch. But it’s still a story of a shark controlled by voodoo. That’s damn hard to take seriously, even in a pulp adventure.