A villain in James Bond movies The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker, played by Richard Kiel.

Has metal teeth, and enough jaw power to bite through everything. Tall and tough. Doesn't talk much. Not an entirely bad character (as seen in Moonraker).

Dr. Holly Goodhead: You know him?
James Bond: Not socially. His name's Jaws, he kills people.

(Moonraker)

Jaws - 1975 (Anniversary Collector's Edition DVD) - Directed by Steven Spielberg

Running Time: 125 minutes. Rated PG by the MPAA.

Special Features:

Technical Features:

"Shark's in the water, our shark!" Awesome, awesome, awesome!

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Before it was a movie, Jaws was a novel, written by Peter Benchley, and published in 1974. It's a really good read, if you ask me. Pretty suspenseful, even without the creepy theme music.

This is the quotation at the beginning of the book:

"Carcharodon carcharias, the White Death Shark, is the fiercest and more fearsome predator on earth. Growing to a length of more than thirty feet, always on the prowl and always hungry, it will attack anything that appears even remotely edible. The stomach contents of one such shark, caught off the coast of Australia, included a pair of gum boots, a keg of roofing nails, and half a horse."

-Robert F. Jones, Washington Post

Jaws

There was also a video game made for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) that was based on the movie. The game was made by LJN Toys, Ltd. and released in 1987. It is ridicuously simple to beat, from the first time that you get it it, it isn't difficult to beat it in only about 30 - 40 minutes. Nevertheless, it is entertaining.

You start with three lives, and you lose one when you touch ANY of the sea creatures.

You drive around a fairly small map in a boat, occasionally hitting objects, and sometimes even hitting Jaws. Once you have hit an object (but not Jaws), a message is displayed telling you that you have, and you are placed in the water as a diver. The water can be either shallow or deep (depending on where you were on the map). While in the water, you swim around shooting at the various undersea creatures, which are limited to manta rays, jellyfish, and small sharks. From senselessly killing these creatures, you usually earn one of three things: a conch shell which is used to upgrade your ship, a starfish which upgrades your points, or a crab, which also upgrades your points. And, sometimes if you kill a small shark, you get to play a bonus scene. Sharks always give shells, and jellyfish rarely do. You leave the water after a few minutes. But you never get a better driver so that you stop hitting stuff.

In the bonus scene, you are in an airplane, making passes back and forth across the screen. You are trying to hit the groups of 5 jellyfish that appear on the screen. You have unlimited ammo, but you can only shoot about three at a time. There are several groups of jellyfish that pass, and after they are all gone, you get 1 shell for every three jellyfish that you hit.

After collecting a certain amount of shells, you can head to one of the two ports (you can't visit the same one twice in a row), where you can get either a Jaws Tracker (necessary to kill Jaws), or increase your power (as it increases, the power of your shots when attacking Jaws goes up, so his power decreases more quickly). You start at power level one (imagine that), at which it takes forever to decrease Jaws' Power even a little bit. And he gets his power back as soon as you leave the water and get back in the boat. So, you keep killing innocent sea creatures until you have enough shells to increase your power several times. The cost of doing this increases by 5 shells each time and starts at 5. As soon as you think you have enough power, you go out looking for Jaws.

While in the water with Jaws, it is very easy to avoid death, since Jaws cannot go to the very top of the water. So, you shoot him as he approaches you, and then when he gets close, you go to the top. Using this process, you will wear down his health until he is killed. After he is killed, you are in the boat, and Jaws is swimming around you, much like the scene from the end of the movie. You wait until he is close, hit your strobe to cause him to jump out of the water, and then shoot him. And that is the end of the game.

And, as if it wasn't already easy enough, you sometimes can find a yellow submarine on the map. You obtain it by moving over it with your boat. The sub allows you to shoot faster while underwater, move faster, and also stop faster.

Overall, not a bad game.

"You're going to need a bigger boat."

American thriller/horror movie from 1975, directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, based on Benchley's novel. It starred Roy Scheider as Chief Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper, Robert Shaw as Quint, Lorraine Gary as Ellen Brody, Murray Hamilton as Mayor Larry Vaughn, and Bruce as the shark. The famous and very, very menacing musical score was composed by John Williams.

The plot is familiar to most: a Great White Shark moves into the waters outside Amity Island and starts munching on a number of swimmers. The mayor wants the crisis hushed up so the summer's tourist trade isn't threatened, but as the shark attacks increase, the police chief, a marine biologist, and grizzled sea captain set out to try to end the shark's rampage.

By now, you probably know that this was the first Summer Blockbuster, that the mechanical shark rarely worked right and was replaced by spooky first-person cinematography and ominous music, that Shaw wrote his own monologue about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. You probably know that Benchley objected to some elements of the script (particularly the ending), that Spielberg delivered the movie late and over budget, and that it still made the studio a ton of money. I like to fool myself that the character interaction is my favorite thing in the movie (Show me a better or more rousing rendition of "Show Me the Way to Go Home" and I'll punch you in the teeth, you sneaky little bastard), but I can't deny that the scene with Scheider pitching chum into the water gives me chills every time I watch it. I have no idea whether Alfred Hitchcock ever watched this movie, but if he did, I reckon he liked it. It's one of the most suspenseful movies in decades. If you haven't watched it yet, you're denying yourself one of the great pleasures of cinema.

Some research from the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com)

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