Week’s Worst

This maddening mess sees three violent and disturbed teenagers break into the home of an unhappily married and extraordinarily unlikeable couple. The pair are beaten and tied up within seconds, and the assailants then proceed to sit on the couch waiting for the couple’s son to come home so they can kill him for being a grass.

This lasts for almost 80 minutes, and it is excruciating; a mind-bendingly dull and lazy waste of time; time that could be spent doing something infinitely better, such as attempting to clean your teeth with a pneumatic drill whilst swallowing a rusty cheese-grater.

The painfully clichéd unhappy couple argue over dinner in a monotonous and badly scripted fashion about an affair that she may have had a while ago (it’s hard to keep track of the conversation due to its poor delivery). They answer the door and are attacked. They are subjected to occasional abuse of a severe nature, whilst the clock ticks down (somewhat erratically) to their son’s arrival, which is due to be met with a fatal response. That is literally it.

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Utterly compelling, brilliantly scripted, a masterclass of acting and direction – the original Jaws is quite simply one of the greatest films ever made…

Following up Quint’s devastating Indianapolis speech, as well as Chief Brody’s awesome toe-to-toe with the shark in the finale, was never going to be easy. Director Jeannot Szwarc had a fairly acceptable attempt with Jaws 2, which saw Roy Scheider’s Brody electrocute a bigger, badder and very annoyed underwater beastie, whilst single-handedly carrying the film on his shoulders.

The almost vertical decline in quality would follow.

Jaws 3-D was an upsetting mess with Dennis Quaid portraying Brody’s eldest son Michael, who is now working at SeaWorld. The aquatic park manages to attract a psychotic 40-foot (?) shark that can roar and swim backwards. Suffice to say, this was not a positive step, and certainly not Quaid’s finest moment. The shark death: protagonists use a very long rod to pull the pin out of a grenade that is still in the hands of a diver eaten earlier in the film (what?).

If you haven’t seen it, we assure you it makes even less sense than you think.

Surely the best thing to do at this stage is kill the franchise before anyone turns mental and goes on a mad, murderous rampage in disgusted protest. Alas, this was not to be, and a fourth instalment was given the green-light.

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