How the villain dies in a scary movie can be both the best and worst parts of a horror franchise. Sometimes it works, such as when Michael Myers burns at the end of Halloween 2 or when Jason Voorhees takes a machete to the head from young Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman) in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. Then there are the times when it all goes wrong, like when Myers is decapitated, but not really, in Halloween H20, or Voorhees is seen hurtling through space at the end of Jason X. It seems that the further along a horror franchise goes, the more outrageous its bad guy's demise gets.
The Jaws films are no different. What started with the first summer blockbuster with Steven Spielberg's 1975 classic became an over-the-top slasher by 1987's Jaws: The Revenge. It wasn't just the plot and special effects that got worse. Even how the shark died turned from something cathartic to completely nonsensical and hilarious.
'Jaws' (1975)
The original Jaws is a slow burn character driven film in which the shark is rarely seen. Instead, it's John Williams' iconic score that becomes the monster, causing our imagination to run wild. It's not until the final act that we get a prolonged look at the shark when Amity Island's police chief, Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), goes into the ocean on fisherman Quint's (Robert Shaw) boat, The Orca, along with marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss).
They lure the great white in with chum and try to exhaust it by weighing it down with barrels, but the shark keeps coming, destroying the cage Hooper dives down in before eating Quint on the sinking boat. Brody is all by himself now. Earlier, he threw an oxygen tank into the shark's mouth, and now, as the boat sinks, with only the crow's nest sticking out of the water, Brody takes aim from his falling perch at the shark swimming right for him. It takes a couple of shots, but then one hits the oxygen tank sticking out of the shark's mouth. It explodes into a geyser of guts as Brody laughs in triumph.
'Jaws 2' (1978)
Three years after the mega success of Jaws came Jaws 2. Steven Spielberg and Richard Dreyfuss didn't return, but Roy Scheider did as Chief Brody. The sequel still takes place on Amity Island, with another shark snacking on its residents.
The final act finds a group of kids in the water after they decide to go sailing, despite the fact that a killer shark is on the loose again. Chief Brody's young sons, Mike (Mark Gruner) and Sean (Marc Gilpin) are among them. Of course, the shark attacks their small boats, knocking many of the kids, including Mike and Sean, into the water. One girl is killed, along with a helicopter pilot who has piloted his small craft as close to the water as possible in a failed rescue attempt. Some of the kids make it back to the shore while others are stuck on a small island housing the town's power station. Brody goes to the water to save the day, only to crash his boat near the island. He then takes a small raft to the thick power line that sits atop the water and begins banging on it with an oar to get the great white's attention. The shark comes in fast, ready to chomp on Brody, but instead it gets a mouthful of the cable, which electrocutes it and instantly sets it on fire.
'Jaws 3-D' (1983)
The third film in the franchise, Jaws 3-D, aimed to do something different. As given away in the title, this one jumped on board the 3-D craze of the 80s. It didn't work well for another horror icon when Friday the 13th tried it for their third film in 1982, and it worked even worse here, with horrible looking 3-D dismembered limbs and a shark attack scene so bad that it's hard to fathom how anyone saw it during production and okayed it for the final product. Still, the film does deserve some credit for at least taking the plot away from Amity Island and moving it to SeaWorld in Orlando.
Roy Scheider was done with the Jaws films after the second one. It's his now adult son Mike, played by a young Dennis Quaid, who's the lead this time around as an engineer at the park. Wouldn't you know it, but another homicidal shark shows up, attacking poor employees and people just wanting to enjoy their summer vacation. The end scene harkens back to the first film. One man, Philip FitzRoyce (Simon MacCorkindale), encounters the great white under the water. He's going to take it out with a grenade, but before he can pull the pin, the shark takes him out instead. The shark then smashes through the glass front of an underwater control room in the worst 3-D scene imaginable. Mike is there, and now facing the attacking shark, he sees FitzRoyce's dead body in the shark's mouth, the grenade still in his hand. Mike takes a pole and uses it to pull the pin. KA-BOOM! The shark explodes like it did in the first movie, but this time it's not a geyser of guts but an absolutely awful 3-D animation of the shark's bloody jaw flying through the water.
'Jaws: The Revenge' (1987)
The Jaws franchise came to a merciful end after the atrocious last entry, Jaws: The Revenge. In this much maligned movie, the next killer shark turns into a slasher villain out to avenge the deaths of the other sharks who came before it by attacking everyone in the Brody family. After her son Sean is killed by the shark, Martin Brody's widow, Ellen (Lorraine Gary), moves to the Bahamas to live with her other son, Michael, now played by Lance Guest. Against all logic, the shark swims from Massachusetts to the Bahamas, somehow stalking Ellen. Michael works as a marine biologist, and it's now up to him and his friend, James McKay (Mario Van Peebles), to kill the psychotic beast.
The bonkers final act sees the pair with a contraption that sends out electric impulses. James gets it into the shark's mouth, and Mike begins hitting the shark with the impulses. It leaps out of the water in another act that goes against logic, with the shark almost standing up vertically and roaring like a lion. As the shark shoots out of the water one last time, its jaws open wide, it's speared in the neck by the broken bowsprit from Ellen's boat. Here, we're lucky enough to get not one but two gloriously bad endings. In the theatrical version, the bowsprit goes all the way through the shark's neck and out the other side in an unforgivably bad special effect. For video release, to hide how bad those effects were, the shark somehow explodes the moment it's stabbed.