Stellan Skarsgård gets his arm ripped off, and is later scooped up into a shark’s mouth and thrown into a giant underground window. *Deep Blue Sea *is full of these cartoonish, yet controlled outbursts of gooey, giddy violence, which it inflicts upon its very likeable cast: Michael Rapaport gets rammed into a control panel before being split in half. First, the tiny pool bubbles up with blood then, we see the shark pulling Jackson’s still-kicking body down to the ocean floor, only to be joined by another mako, who then proceeds to bite off Jackson’s head. (I can only imagine Jackson, who was in the audience that night, high-fiving his Kangol cap in delight.)īut what makes *Deep Blue Sea *so much fun is what happens *after *Jackson gets grabbed by the giant mako, slammed to the floor, and dragged into the sea. At the *Deep Blue Sea *press screening in New York City in 1999, Jackson’s death was so utterly shocking, it prompted audience members to gasp and scream for what felt like minutes, before finally staring at each other with a confused look that said, Have you seen my shit anywhere? Because I totally just lost it. It’s a truly jolting moment, maybe the best unexpected-expiration since Drew Barrymore’s demise in Scream, or Angie Dickinson’s death in Dressed to Kill. It belongs in its own category altogether. *Jaws *is actually one of the greatest human movies of all time, and to simply think of it as a shark-flick-even the best shark-flick ever-feels reductive. But there are long stretches in Jaws in which the titular hunter disappears, and the movie transforms into a sharp examination of the petty, sometimes predatory behavior of the people on land: The way they favor their own bottom lines over the lives of their neighbors the way they try to out-alpha-male each other the way they allow their class differences to bubble to the surface. Yes, it's about a shark that is very, very good at being a shark, and it has one of the most hoot-inducing fish-bites-flesh scene of all time, when the creature drags Shaw into the sea, savoring each bite as though it were chomping on a chum-soaked stogie. When Blake Lively’s shark-pursuit drama *The Shallows *opens today, pretty much every review will inevitably invoke Jaws, for better or worse.īut that's an unfair comparison-in many ways, *Jaws *isn’t really a shark movie at all. For more than 40 years now, *Jaws *has stood as the standard-bearer of shark movies, an honor that remains unchallenged by neither the film’s three sequels, nor by the numerous knock-offs it inspired, like the Italian-produced non-classic The Last Shark. The obvious answer, of course, is Jaws, Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster about a working-class cop (Roy Scheider), a rich nerd (Richard Dreyfuss), and a perma-soused lunatic (Robert Shaw) who board a dilapidated boat and head out to kill a large fish by … I dunno, poking it to death, maybe? (*Jaws *is my favorite movie, and I’ve likely seen it more times than I’ve seen the actual ocean, but I’m still not sure those three guys had a well-thought-out plan for offing that thing). Here’s a question that even the most argumentative film-nerds would barely bother to debate: What’s the greatest shark movie of all time?
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