Well. This is not bad, actually. Having Carl Gottleib as writer again (with Howard Sackler) no doubt helps. OK, obvs another Great White isn't going to attack Amity Islanders again, and we're clearly playing the same game (who will survive this scene?) but without the beautiful Brodie/Hooper/Quint relationship that is one of the key factors in the original's success. (Brodie does put in a call to Hooper, but amusingly he's on an Antarctic research trip and 'out of contact till Spring'). And mayor (or whatever he is) Murray Hamilton surely can't be such a putz again, though in the original cut, the mayor is the only one to vote
for Brodie (in fact the story of mayor and developer Joseph Mascolo just fades out, as does animosity between Brodie and developer over his wife). Intriguingly, Dorothy Tristan's original draft had Amity Island a ghost town following the first film, with the developer and council in debt to the Mafia - thus ignoring Brodie's warnings made more sense...Universal disliked that (good) idea and brought in Gottleib to make it more humorous and actiony.
Strangely, unless we saw a cut ITV print that was on at 11.35 pm, there's hardly any gore in it.
Anyway, Roy Scheider's good as always, and the focus on the predicament of the teens is well done. John Williams wrote the score again, and the widescreen cinematography of Michael Butler (confusingly, no relation of the original's Bill Butler) is fine. And there's a great scene in which a girl water-skiing is pursued by the shark.
With Lorraine Gary, Mark Gruner (older son), Jeffrey Kramer (deputy), and a bunch of 70s attired teens including Ann Desenberry, Donna Wilkes, Marc Gilpin (young Brodie) and Keith Gordon, who I guess we recognised from Stephen King's
Christine and
Dressed To Kill. And three more malfunctioning mechanical sharks.
Verna Fields, editor of the original, was one of Universals' executives by this time - one of her contributions was to break up a fight between Scheider and Szwarc.
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