Jaws III: Monster

This was an outstanding fan edit and very professional in it's overall presentation. The extra's on disc two were top draw.

Most of the new footage and shark effects were integrated well. I particularly liked when the squid first surfaces further enhanced with an excellent music cue. The ending is a huge improvement over the original and the same can be said about the rest of the film.

Only thing that didn't work for me was the opening credits montage which featured way too many CGI sharks for my taste and simply went on too long. Personally I prefer the underwater shots as used in the originals where it's left to the music to set the scene and nothing is shown.

The video quality wasn't particularly good however I believe this was mostly a result of the source material. In any case the new footage was downgraded to match perfectly.

Overall this edit is highly recommended and deserves all the accolades it's received!

A definite improvement on a really bad movie. Like the new B movie elements added with the new squid ending. Thank God for the removal of the tacky 3d effects of the original. Excellent soundtrack. Love the extras on the second disk... Love the "Ghost Shark" short. Fun edit!

April 16, 2012

The only problem I see with this edit is that its intention is a little vague – most of the 3D is fixed, and the ending is changed, but it’s still corny and stupid; however, I can’t say it isn’t entertaining.

Technical quality – 9/10 – well, the video quality was very poor, full of grain and blocky solids, but I’m pretty sure this was the fault of the original DVD and not LS.

Editing – 10/10 – the color correction, for the most part, was very nicely done.

Presentation – 10/10 – oh. My. Gosh. The extras. Ghost Shark was BRILLIANT. It didn’t have a real clear story progression, but it was still brilliant. It was entertaining and emotionally engrossing. It may have been better if the end was more ambiguous, and if Ellen had somehow confronted the shark in her own mind and overcome her fear or something. But, man oh man, that build-up of paranoia and what’s-real-what’s-not was incredible. Then there was a set of interesting deleted scenes and a MAGNIFICENT documentary. Cannot recommend that enough, it probably is one of my favorite parts of the edit. LS, you did a splendid job keeping the docu entertaining and informative. I never got bored, I learned a lot, and it was a really fun watch. I wanted to get this review posted soon, so I didn’t listen to the commentaries yet, but I have no doubt that they will be splendid. The cover art left just a tiny bit to be desired, but I won’t go into that in a review of the edit itself. Menus were very nice (great that you had scene selection even for the extras).

Entertainment – 8/10 – I never really finished watching Jaws 3. I watched about half of it and then never really got back to it. This time, I sat down and watched LS’s edit in one sitting without really getting bored at all. The opening flowed nicely, but the fact that it was in Amity and completely unrelated to the rest of the movie seemed kind of weird. Personally, I think the title sequence gave too much shark away – I guess you were trying to capitalize on the B-movie feel, but any and all mystery that could have been retained wasn’t. One of the things LS said was that he was trying to keep the shark’s presence less obvious so early on, and this was completely ruined by showing a huge, over-the-top shark montage during the opening credits. The rest of the film plays like a cheesy Jaws rip-off. I guess my problem with it was that it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be the next Sharksploitation Edit or whether it actually wanted to improve the film. But either way, it was entertaining, and I completely forgot I was watching a fanedit because the cuts were so smooth. The other problem with it is that it could have done with a few more [SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER] Octopus scenes to build up to that incredibly well-edited and corny B-movie climax that was a nice callback to the end of the Sharksploitation Edit [SPOILERS OVER]. I noticed the repeated octopus scenes, but my mind didn’t really register that they were meant to be part of the plot for some reason. The re-edited attack on the scuba divers was cool, though, and I think this edit can’t really be much better – I mean, the editing is completely perfect, and it really does feel like a very entertaining B-movie. I would give Disc One 8/10 and Disc Two 10/10, so that balances out to 9/10.

Overall – 9/10

A bit of a curious missing link between TMBTM's Jaws Sharksploitation Cut and LS' own Jaws 2: Amity Horror, Jaws III: Monster is a fairly faithful trimming-down of the original coked-out theme park horror flick with a few climactic twists thrown in to keep viewers off-balance. Still lots of fun, and impeccably assembled, but it doesn't quite reach the loving fidelity of Amity Horror's fanfix or the wild grindhouse heights of Sharksploitation.

On the other hand, the egregious Jaws IV is turned into a moody short film (on the second disc included here) called Ghost Shark that vastly improves that movie into a rumination on grief and aging... with killer sharks. Between that and the excellent behind-the-scenes commentaries, great cover art and extras galore, it's plenty enough to make you forget about the somewhat murky intentions behind the main feature, this is a wonderfully assembled fan edit package and very highly recommended.