Book Review: Jaws The Revenge by Hank Searls

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Venganza Media, Inc.

Tv & Film:film Reviews, Film Reviews, Film Interviews, Tv & Film, Film History

4.5 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2011

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This time the review is personal! Books & Nachos is now part of Now Playing Podcast. Before our book reviews were branded as Now Playing Podcast Book Reviews, they were released under a separate show called Books & Nachos. That podcast focused on book discussions, most of which tied directly into films we were covering on Now Playing. We’ve now merged those episodes into the main Now Playing Podcast feed for easier access and a complete archive. But these older episodes still have the original Books & Nachos intro and credits on those older recordings. Novelizations usually deepen a movie’s story. But Jaws: The Revenge is not exactly working from ideal source material. As part of Now Playing Podcast’s Jaws retrospective, Stuart takes a look at Hank Searls’ novelization of the most infamous entry in the franchise. Tasked with turning a screenplay about a vengeance-driven shark into coherent prose, Searls had plenty of narrative gaps to fill. Does the book add logic, character motivation, or even suspense that the film lacked? Join Stuart as he compares page to screen and decides whether this literary take sinks or swims. {Jaws Series} {Book Reviews}

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Books and Nachos, a podcast for those of us who find excitement in the pages of a good book.
0:12.5	Fiction and nonfiction, graphic novels and more.
0:15.5	We are here to help you find something great to read.
0:24.5	Hello. something great to read. Hello and welcome to Books and Nachos, the Vinganza Media podcast about all things in print.
0:29.9	I am your host, Stuart in L.A., and we are talking about Jaws the Revenge, the book.
0:36.1	That's right, the novelization of the horrible 1987 movie. I don't
0:40.9	mind spoiling the now playing review. Jaws the Ridge is horrible, and we are going to be reviewing
0:46.7	the book that's based on this horrible movie. Now, author Peter Benchley went back to the
0:51.6	water for inspiration in several more novels after the mega success of his first book, Jaws.
0:56.7	He wrote about scuba divers plundering sunken treasure in the deep,
1:00.5	modern-day pirates from the Bermuda Triangle in the island, a giant squid and beast,
1:05.3	and even something late in his career called White Shark,
1:08.1	which involved his favorite fish getting a genetic makeover by Nazis
1:11.7	and crawling up on land to eat people. Seriously. But clearly, Benchley had no problem ripping off Jabber Jaws.
1:18.9	Why he never returned to Jaws? Well, that's anyone's guess. I know that he had some hard feelings
1:24.0	about the way it popularized shark murder, and he wrote about that later in his
1:27.5	career, but he never did write a sequel or was never involved in writing the screenplays of his
1:32.8	greatest success. And it's kind of hard to know why. Instead, when it was time to write the
1:38.2	sequel novels, Universal Pictures commissioned pulp author Hank Searleles to pin the tie-ins.
1:45.2	That's Jaws 2 and Jaws the Revenge.
1:47.4	They skipped Jaws 3D.
1:48.6	I don't know why.
	...

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