For the sake of humanity, and because Netflix took the time, effort and expense of adding these movies to their library, I’ve watched Jaws, Jaws 2, Jaws 3-D, and Jaws: The Revenge.

Do you know how sometimes your memory of a thing can make that thing seem better than it really was? This seems to happen a lot with things like TV shows, cartoons from my childhood, music and movies. In the case of these Jaws movies I remembered each for being far better than they really are.

Jaws stands out far and away as the best movie of the lot. Spielberg managed to squeeze in enough technique, enough suspense, some incredible characters, and a few great lines into the movie so that it seems to age a bit longer than the others. It isn’t great. If it were made today it’d be laughed at. But for the time period is was well made.

The others, they aren’t worth watching. They are laughably bad. Bad acting (even from good actors like Michael Caine), bad lines, poorly shot, and terrible editing. Notably: Every line uttered by the deputy from Jaws 2 and the “stand off” game from Jaws 3-D, also Michael Caine’s “Perhaps he has indigestion he already ate my plane”. How did any of that make the cut?

If you see these movies in the recently added section of your Netflix app skip them.