Editorials
[Based on the Hit Film] Replaying ‘Jaws Unleashed’!
To this day I and many others have a fear of the ocean. That uncertainty about what could be lurking below you when you’re out there beyond the shallows. A helplessness born of being out of our element. The knowledge that there are things down there that might just graze a foot, but might also take a nibble at it.
This fear is probably more widespread than it should be because of that Summer of 1975 when a young punk named Steven Spielberg brought the terror of Jaws to cinemas and forever tarnished the rep of Great White Sharks and idiotic Mayors everywhere.
Bruce’s Digital History
Despite arriving at the infancy of video games, Jaws found itself in a digital form very quickly, albeit unofficially.
Atari had sought to license a shark-avoiding arcade game as a tie-in to the movie, but Universal Pictures did not accept. This did not stop Atari, who retitled it Shark JAWS (with the word ‘Shark’ deliberately made almost unreadable in the title) and published what is now believed to be the first ever movie tie-in video game (again, in a rather unofficial sense).
It would be another 12 years before we’d see ol’ Brucey in video game form, showing up on the NES in a loose tie-in based on the risible Jaws: The Revenge. It featured a snippet of John Williams score and focused on fighting not only the titular toothy one, but other angry sea creatures as well.
All adaptations followed one clear rule. It was the player vs the shark. It would be a staggering 19 years after the Nintendo Jaws title (and 31 years after the first Shark JAWS) before we had somebody turn around and say ‘Yeah, but what if you could be the shark?’
And lo, Jaws Unleashed was born, and the world was given a silly, over the top slice of shark power fantasy nonsense.
A Legend Unleashed
The developer to do it? Appaloosa Interactive, a developer founded in Hungary during the early 80’s and swimming in moderate success ever since on over 150 titles.
Appaloosa had experience not only with handling licensed game projects (The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Crossroads of Time, and South Park among them), but also with ocean-based action as it was responsible for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive Ecco the Dolphin games, perhaps the developer’s most notable work.
Jaws Unleashed, in a reverse of Shark JAWS, started life as an unlicensed shark game known as Sole Predator before gaining the Jaws license. The game was to be treated as a sequel to the original film, set 30 years after Brody blew Bruce into so many chunks. If Jaws: The Revenge had seemed like a daft idea for a story, then Appaloosa was going all out to make it seem somewhat sensible when the absurdity of Jaws Unleashed’s plot was detailed.
Amity Island is now thriving, the population is higher than it has ever been and corporations such as Environplus are boosting the local economy. What a perfect time to be a shark. And guess what? You. Are. Jaws! Which one I don’t know. Must be the shark equivalent of ‘John Smith’ as far as names go.
Jaws (you) rocks up at Amity Island and promptly eats the son of Environplus CEO Steven Shaw. Naturally, Shaw is a bit miffed about this and employs a shark hunter to eliminate you. Thankfully (for Jaws, not the many, many people he’ll end up chomping on) Michael Brody (yeah, keeping it in the family) manages to capture Jaws (not until after a few passes at the seaside buffet have been made by the hulking shark) and thanks to his research as a marine biologist, he discovers that it’s because of the sonic emissions coming off Environplus’ submarines that are making sharks a bit grumpy.
In a homage to the original film/lack of creative thought towards the plot, Brody tries to convince the Mayor of the problem. Of course, the Mayor ignores the warning because what could be more Jaws than that? His Royal Chompyness naturally escapes (getting his chomp on with a captive Orca along the way) and the game opens up. You’re now a shark in an open world with a fast n’ loose remit for destruction and bloodbaths, the potential is giddying.
Dead in the Water
The reality was unfortunately not quite so. Jaws Unleashed was born a glitch-ridden monster, with conventional mission structure often shoehorned in where it shouldn’t be applicable (human tasks clumsily-applied to a sodding Great White Shark). It also suffered from being needlessly pedestrian far too often for a game about eating things as a giant shark.
Yet when Jaws Unleashed embraced its sheer absurdity, it rose above its failings admirably. What was absurd about Jaws Unleashed exactly? Well, you could upgrade Jaws. Not with +7 armor and a sword of Smileyasonofabitch, but with abilities. The toothsome one could learn how to do moves like the ‘Body Bomb’ where Jaws would fling himself into the air at a ludicrous height and bomb back down on a target. You had to keep eating to prevent your health from diminishing (on top of regular damage).
During the hours you spend with Jaws Unleashed, you’ll see a shark catch and throw an explosive barrel at an oil pipeline on purpose. The result of which is the complete destruction of an Environplus refinery. Jaws also obliterates an undersea facility, eats the Mayor and Shaw, and to top it off, survives having a bomb dropped on him, having already been in close proximity to several explosions beforehand.
The game is utter nonsense and a technical garbage fire, but there’s a strange charm to its shonky daftness that sort of holds up to this day (albeit for ten minutes at best). It’s a procession of admirably stupid moments. Moments such as seeing a shark flip and twist in the air like it was in SSX Tricky. Or having to work out how to use key cards (solution: eat the guy with the key card). Or simply causing insane amounts premeditated carnage despite being a supposedly regular shark. The battles with other sea creatures are of interest, at least in fleeting terms. Jaws gets to battle other sharks, an orca, a blue whale and a giant squid along the way.
Critics weren’t particularly enamored with Jaws Unleashed at launch. The average score on PlayStation 2 was an underwhelming 52/100 (pretty much awful in the strange world of video game scoring). That didn’t stop it performing well commercially. Jaws Unleashed closed in on half a million sales over three platforms.
Jaws Unleashed is also sadly the final resting place for its developer. After 24 years in the business, Appaloosa Interactive ceased operations shortly after the release of Jaws Unleashed in 2006. For a developer best known for the elegant undersea adventures of Ecco the Dolphin, bowing out with a crude, over the top tale of a vengeance-driven shark feels somewhat ungracious.
The great Ernest Dickerson turns seventy-five years old this month, so we’re looking back at his most memorable contribution to the horror genre – 1995’s Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight!
The film hit screens while the Tales from the Crypt series was winding down its run on television, and it stands apart with a story that feels a step or two removed from the franchise norm. That was the smart play, though, as the show’s stories – and those from the original EC comics – work best in short bites. The result is a film that holds up beautifully as a gory good time.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995)
Commentator: Ernest Dickerson (director), Michael Felsher (moderator)
1. Dickerson was in post-production on Surviving the Game when he got a call from his agent saying that producer Gil Adler wanted to meet about a Tales from the Crypt feature film. It went well, so Dickerson met with Joel Silver next and secured the job.
2. The original screenplay for the film came to the producers as a spec script wholly detached from the Tales from the Crypt brand. They added the Crypt Keeper (voiced by John Kassir) bookends to make it fit.
3. Dickerson was more familiar with the original EC comic books having read them as a kid, but he had watched a few episodes of the HBO series, so he knew what the current vibe was for the project.
4. Adler directed the film’s wraparound segments, meaning Dickerson never actually got to work with the creepy puppet. “Gil and the Crypt Keeper had a great relationship,” he adds, “they worked together for years.”
5. While he was new to the Tales from the Crypt family, Dickerson had previously worked as a director of photography on the Tales from the Darkside anthology series. That show is underappreciated in my humble opinion, and I will go to bat for both it and the equally underloved Monsters.
6. A big appeal of the horror genre for Dickerson is the idea of dark mysteries that challenge our imagination. For this film, that came down to the mythology being created between the characters.
7. Five executive producers are listed in the opening credits, but Dickerson says the only two he had dealings with were Silver and Richard Donner. The other three were Walter Hill, Robert Zemeckis, and David Giler.
8. Dickerson had only ever seen Billy Zane in movies with a full head of hair, so he was surprised when Zane showed up on the first day with a bald head. “He had this case, and he opened up the case that he had all these hair pieces in, and he says, ‘So which one of these do you think I should use?’” Dickerson looked at him and suggested he just go bald for the character.
9. While the bulk of the opening exteriors were filmed in a desert just outside Los Angeles, the shot of the old church at 11:26 was created on a warehouse hangar soundstage where the film’s interiors were shot.
10. When he had read the script, Dickerson pictured the character of Jeryline (Jada Pinkett Smith) “as a little, tough lady.” He had recently seen Smith in Menace II Society, and while the producers had someone else in mind for the role, he fought to get her instead.
11. Just as Zane surprised Dickerson with his hair (or lack thereof), Smith arrived on the first day with her hair dyed platinum white. He “liked the idea” but asked her to please get it tweaked so it looked more yellowish blond. “It’s definitely a statement.”
12. He had seen Brenda Bakke in the 1989 sci-fi/action film from Japan, Gunhed, and thought she’d be great here as Cordelia. The rest of us might recognize her from Death Spa or Trucks.
13. Felsher comments that the film’s setup does a good job not telegraphing who’s going to live or die, and he uses the “nice guy” (Charles Fleischer) and “the kid” (Ryan O’Donohue) as examples. “You don’t play by those rules here,” he says, and Dickerson replies that he wanted to subvert those rules. That extends to Smith as well because she’s Black, “and usually in movies like this they’re the first folks to die.”
14. Dickerson says they had forty days of filming, “which, the way I’m used to working, was a very generous schedule.” It was budgeted at around $10 million.
15. This probably won’t surprise you, but Zane improvised the bit at 26:25 after he jumps out the window and says, “Fuck this cowboy shit! You fuckin’, hodunk Podunk, well, then, motherfuckers!”
16. In the original script, the demons that The Collector (Zane) raises from the dirt actually looked more like the people they used to be. “They were more human,” but the very smart decision was made in pre-production to make them look far more unique instead.
17. The demons are killed by shooting their eyes, but Dickerson felt there should be one more element to it. “Shoot out their eyes, you gotta duck because the souls come shooting out, and if it hits ya, boom, it can kill ya.” This is a fun touch.
18. He’s been asked more than once if these demons are where Peter Jackson got the idea for how the orcs would look in his Lord of the Rings movies. “They do look like orcs.”
19. He recalls having seen Ronny Yu’s The Bride with White Hair shortly before going to work on Demon Knight, and he hoped to bring some of that staged style into his own film. An example of that in practice is Brayker’s (William Sadler) brief flashbacks to Christ on the cross.
20. Character deaths were mostly based on the idea that “each person’s downfall was going to be predicated by their weakness.” The Collector discovers someone’s weakness and then uses it against them. Cordelia wants to be loved, Jeryline wants to travel, Uncle Willy (Dick Miller) is a horndog for both liquor and ladies, Danny loves horror comics, etc.
21. Dickerson says that plenty of genre classics were in the back of his head while making the film, including Assault on Precinct 13, Alien, Aliens, and more.
22. Cordelia is possessed into a demonic form, and Dickerson’s idea for how she’d look was originally a bit different. “Since Cordelia was a prostitute, I thought that her mouth should actually be a vertical slit that was in her stomach… which would open up with teeth and a tongue.” It was nixed, he says, when “the wife of one of the producers read that and said ‘no way you’re putting that in the movie.’”
23. The key makes an appearance in the followup, Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood, but it wasn’t originally meant to. Apparently, early test audiences expected it to be a more connected sequel to Demon Knight, so the filmmakers added it in to appease them. This is where I go on record saying that Bordello of Blood is a fun time. Can’t touch Demon Knight, obviously, but it’s more entertaining than its reputation suggests.
24. They had to film Uncle Willy’s bar scene “dream” twice, once with the women topless and once with them in bikinis, to have versions for both theaters and television broadcast. “Dick’s a pro.” (To be fair, Dickerson says this in regard to Miller having to endure the makeup application, but the sentiment fits both situations, so…)
25. Dickerson says he’s “always amazed at the love that people show this film,” and adds that fans bring it up to him incredibly often. This is great to hear, as we should always be telling artists how much their work means to us while they’re still alive and able to hear it.
26. Zane also suggested the gag at 1:08:21 with the sponge coming out of his mouth. The beat reminds Dickerson to praise the actor even more, adding that he was an “ally” to the director when “bad ideas” came down from the studio suits.
27. He didn’t get any pushback on killing little Danny. He did insist on one added element, though, as he wanted to immediately follow the boy exploding in the air with a shot of his bloody and torn sneaker hitting the ground below. “And the sneaker had to be a hightop.”
28. Dickerson says there’s “something kinky sexy about” Smith being covered in blood, and then the two commentators go quiet for almost two minutes out of respect for the scene. It’s a good opportunity to reflect on how Dickerson had previously mentioned Alien and Aliens as films being in the back of his head during filming, and how two scenes here reflect that – Jeryline stripping down to her underwear for the final confrontation feels like a nod to Ridley Scott’s film, while an earlier scene with Irene (CCH Pounder) and Dep. Bob (Gary Farmer) realizing they’re surrounded and choosing to blow themselves up alongside some of the demons is something of a callback to the air vent sacrifice in James Cameron’s film.
29. Asked about the film’s critical reception at the time of release, Dickerson says it received good reviews from horror-loving critics and then talks about the importance of horror in general. “Horror has always been a great way of putting out ideas, of talking about some of the things that affect us as people. Some of the best horror, like the best science fiction, talks about what it’s like to be human. Some of the best horror gets very political.”
30. The original ending would have featured The Collector showing “his true self, which is a demon made of fire.” They spent a lot of time trying to make it work, but it was “extremely difficult… back in the day of analog effects.” It was rewritten into the faceoff between him and Jeryline featuring the dancing, the crotch fire, Zane’s attempts at saying “love,” and his eventual demise from her bloody spit.
31. They both agree that a direct sequel to Demon Knight could be a lot of fun, but Dickerson says he’s unaware of any talk on the possibility.
32. Dickerson was super excited about this new Scream Factory Blu-ray in 2015, and he mentions that before its release, he had imported a Blu-ray from Germany presumably to enjoy the film in HD. He’s just like us! (Or am I the only one here who’s imported a German Blu-ray of the much maligned werewolf flick Big Bad Wolf…)
Quotes Without Context
“I was so happy to get Dick Miller for this movie.”
“There was a time when guys used to put ketchup on everything.”
“I’m a big student of Hitchcock, and the best way to make a moment of horror work is to lull the audience into a false sense of security.”
“A villain should always be the most interesting person in a movie.”
“They were a really great bunch of performers who were performing on these little leg-extension stilts wearing a diaper that had a radio-controlled tail that was being manipulated by a special effects tech right out of the frame.”
“It’s hard to direct air; it doesn’t do what you want.”
“The only censorship problem came from the producer’s wife, who didn’t want the vagina dentalis [sic] in the movie.”
“One of the executives wanted to know why the devil didn’t try to have sex with Jada.”
“It always starts with the script.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.
You must be logged in to post a comment.