Hank Searls' novelization of
Jaws 2 is an oddity. Everyone knows that novelizations are usually based not on the films themselves but on earlier drafts of the script(s), and so they often differ from the films whose names they share, but
Jaws 2 by Hank Searls is one of the very few that differs so vastly that it can be considered its own separate work. Seriously, apart from the opening sequence, a few characters and the general theme of "there's another shark," it has almost nothing in common with the movie it was released to coincide with. In many ways, it actually comes off more as a sequel to Peter Benchley's original novel as opposed to the movie continuity (although it does have a few nods to events from the first film). And unlike Walter Harris'
Creature from the Black Lagoon, Searls' effort here is actually quite damn good.
When I first read it I confess I was disappointed with it because it didn't follow the movie, but rereading it now, it comes across as being definitely worth a
Jaws fan's time in my opinion.
Two men on vacation, a doctor and a lawyer, go scuba diving off the coast of Amity Island in search of clams. Instead, they find the sunken wreck of the
Orca. They're in the midst of photographing it with the lawyer's waterproof camera when suddenly a very large great white shark emerges from the depths. The lawyer quickly gets snacked on, his camera going off at a crucial moment, while the doctor makes a desperate swim for the surface. However the shark gets his leg and he dies from blood loss before he make it. The shark chows down on him.
The shark, we learn (as indeed there are numerous passages told from her P.O.V.) is a heavily pregnant female, and she is being driven to eat more than she really needs to in order to provide nutrients for her babies, lest they end up cannibalizing one another in her womb. Having gobbled up the two divers, she decides to remain in the waters around Amity because the feeding is pretty good there.
Meanwhile, we catch up with Martin Brody and the town of Amity. Brody is still the chief of police and married to Ellen, and his two sons Mike and Sean are older than the last time we saw them. Mike is dating Jackie Angelo, the daughter of one of Brody's subordinate officers, and wants to sign up for local diver Tom Andrews' diving classes. Back during what the townsfolk call "The Trouble," Mike witnessed a man get killed right in front of him, and he's shared his father's discomfort with the water ever since. His friends, particularly Larry Vaughan, Jr. and his chubby asthmatic friend Andy Nicholas, make fun of him and call him "Spitzer," and so Mike wants to take Tom's diving class to overcome his fear of the water.
His father initially forbids it due to his lingering terror of "The Trouble," but after he meets and befriends Tom and sees that he's a professional, he finally allows Mike to take the class.
More trouble has come to Amity, trouble besides the shark. Developer Pete Peterson is attempting to get a casino built in anticipation of an upcoming law that'll make gambling legal. While most people in Amity are excited about the casino, thinking it'll increase revenue, what few suspect is that New York mobster Shuffles Moscotti (so named because of his distinctive walk) is financing it - Peterson ran out of money at a crucial phase in construction and so had to borrow money from Moscotti.
The shark strikes again, eating a water skier. The man driving the speedboat that was pulling her attempts to kill the leviathan using a Very pistol, but somehow manages to discharge the thing into the boat's gas tank and blows himself up. An elderly cat lady, Minnie Eldridge, witnesses the explosion and calls the police. Nobody can quite figure out how the boat blew up the way it did, and from the wreckage by Tom Andrews, Brody correctly concludes that it seems as if the gas tank was shot, although he assumes it was from a conventional firearm.
When the doctor and lawyer's yacht is found adrift, Brody is sent to investigate. Tom Andrews discovers the lawyer's discarded camera. Tom's theory is that the two men drowned while diving drunk (!) and their bodies got swept out to sea, but Brody begins suspecting foul play after Charlie Jepps, a triggerhappy vacationing cop from Flushing with connections to Shuffles Moscotti, is caught attempting to shoot a baby seal outside of his rented beachfront house. Unaware of the shark, Brody gets it into his head that Jepps murdered the two missing men and was even the one who shot out the exploded speedboat's gas tank and arrests him. The seal, named Sammy, is given to Sean to take care of.
Brody gives the film from the lawyer's camera to Nate Starbuck, the owner of the local drug store, to develop. Nate, a very bitter man, is shocked to discover photographs of the shark. He thinks it's the same one from before, and believes Brody lied when he said he'd killed it. So he and his wife Lena hatch a scheme to get out of Amity while the getting's good and screw Brody and the Mayor over in the process. Nate locks the photos of the shark in his private safe and develops blank film which he passes off as the film from the lawyer's camera. Then he goes to see Mayor Vaughan and tries to sell his drug store to him for far more than it's worth, threatening to blackmail him with a dirty secret it. However he refuses to show his hand, and so doesn't actually
tell Vaughan what he's blackmailing him
with, leading Vaughan to assume Nate knows about Moscotti's involvement with the casino, whereupon Vaughan turns him down.
Jepps' arrest causes quite a stir. His crooked copper buddies in Flushing send in a powerful mob lawyer who accuses Brody of attempting to slander Jepps to save his own job - in his view, because Jepps is set to retire and might want to retire to the Amity police force, a jealous Brody is attempting to get him out of the way. A ballistics test proves Jepps' rifle didn't puncture the speedboat's gas tank, but Brody, more out of principle than anything, refuses to let Jepps off the hook for trying to shoot the seal. This despite everyone from Mayor Larry Vaughan and newspaper editor Harry Meadows worriedly advising him to drop it, Jepps being connected to Shuffles Moscotti and all.
In the end, none of them need have worried, for Moscotti has taken a liking to Ellen Brody because she let his son join the Cub Scout troupe she leads when nobody else would touch a mobster's kid, and so he solves the Jepps v. Amity problem by sending his deaf mute nephew to blow Jepps' head off with a shotgun, whereupon he falls into the ocean and (of course) gets eaten by the shark.
Meanwhile, Mike is making out with Jackie on the beach when he realizes that Mayor Vaughan's son Larry Jr. and his friend Andy are spying on him. Angrily, he attacks them. Andy runs off while Larry attempts to elude his pursuer by seeking refuge in the ocean. Alas, Mike has since conquered his fear of the water, and gives his peeping tom pal a good pounding.
Nearby, a US Navy helicopter is doing a sonar test by dipping a sensor ball into the water. Hearing yelling, the pilot and his sonarman fly over to see what's happening, but decide to leave after seeing it's just Mike and Larry roughhousing. Mike very nearly drowns Larry, for what it's worth, but holds back and lets him go. On their way back to their duties, the two Navy men run into a spot of trouble when the shark grabs the sensor ball and rips it clean away from the copter. The pilot experiences a malfunction as a result and the copter ends up crashing into the ocean. The sonarman survives, but gets eaten by the shark while bobbing helplessly in his life jacket.
Navy pilot Commander Chip Chaffey is brought in to find out what befell the copter. He takes the crash very personally because the pilot was a friend of his from Vietnam. The Navy attempts to use a trained dolphin to locate the valuable sensor from the helicopter, but he gets eaten by the shark. Chaffey just assumes he "went AWOL," and offers a $1,000 reward for the recovery of the sensor in the hopes that someone from Amity will find it.
After making up with Larry, he, Mike and Andy go diving with Tom Andrews, hoping to find the sensor. Mike feels partially responsible for the crash, reasoning that if he hadn't been beating Larry up, the pilot wouldn't have flown over to investigate the noise, and so he aims to recover the sensor for Chaffey as a way of making amends. But it's Andy who finds the sensor... and the shark. Panicking as it swims past him attempting to catch a seal (Sammy's mother, in fact), he swims rapidly to the surface and winds up with a brain embolism. He survives and is rushed to the hospital, but can do no more than gasp out "s... awk." Brody quickly realizes what he is trying to say, but refuses to accept it. The shark is dead!
Meanwhile, Lena Starbuck, feeling guilty because of her and Nate's refusal to show the photos to anyone, begins attempting to persuade her husband to go to the Mayor with the pictures so nobody else will get killed by the shark.
Will she succeed? How much more different from the film can Hank Searls' book
get? Stay tuned! We'll see!
