In 1975, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws fundamentally changed mainstream Hollywood. It ushered in the era of the summer blockbuster and consolidated the reputation, already very impressive, of a filmmaker that would go on to dominate American popular cinema for many years to come. Its success demanded a sequel and the inferior but not as bad as you might remember Jaws 2 dutifully surfaced from the depths in 1978. Pushing their luck, Universal decided to go back into the water for a third time. The unexpected success of the 1981 Spanish-American comedy western Comin’ at Ya had revived interest in 3D for the first time, in any meaningful way, for many years and the third Jaws film joined Friday the 13th Part III (1982) (in 3D was added the advertising title) and Amityville 3-D (1983) as another “threequel” that clumsily tried to insert the process into its title (on television and early video releases it was retitled simply Jaws III).

The film is set several years after the events of the first two films and follows Mike Brody (now played by Dennis Quaid), son of police chief Martin Brody of Amity, Massachusetts (Roy Scheider is sensibly nowhere to be seen – he suggested that he took the role in Blue Thunder (1983) so that he wouldn’t be available in case he was asked…). Brody Jr is working as the chief engineer at SeaWorld Orlando, working alongside his biologist girlfriend Kay Morgan (Bess Armstrong). The park’s lagoon gates temporarily jam open and unbeknownst to the staff of the attraction, a great white shark passes through, terrifying the park’s resident dolphins, Cindy and Sandy. Calvin Bouchard (Louis Gossett Jr), the park manager, his visiting friend, the hunter Philip FitzRoyce (Simon MacCorkindale), and Mike’s younger brother Sean (John Putch) all turn up at the park in time for the bodies to start washing up. The shark is captured and put on display at the park and inevitably soon dies, but it’s far from the end of SeaWorld’s problems – the shark was a juvenile and its vengeful mother is still in the park’s waters, terrifying diners in an underwater café and claiming even more lives.

Original producers David Brown and Richard Zanuck originally wanted to lampoon the success of their toothy baby, pitching Jaws 3, People 0 as a spoof. Watching Jaws 3-D you won’t be entirely sure that director Joe Alves, the production designer for the first two films and the second unit director for Jaws 2, didn’t accidentally shoot the proposed script. It’s a ludicrous film, writers Richard Matheson (amazingly, yes, it’s the Richard Matheson…) and Carl Gottlieb having, it seems, little understanding of how sharks actually behave. Its great white antagonist expresses motherly feelings and anger over its offspring’s death (while making ridiculous and impossible growling sounds) which are entirely alien to sharks. This anthropomorphising of the sharks would be a theme continued in the even more lamentable final film (so far) in the series Jaws: The Revenge (1987)) and the script may owe more to British giant monster film Gorgo (1961), another film in which a female monster comes looking for its baby.

Gottlieb had co-written the original and Matheson is a legendary figure in fantasy and horror circles so how they managed to conspire with Guerdon Trueblood (who wrote the original story) to come up with this nonsense beggars belief. Their script forces us to spend an awful long time with paper thin characters that we don’t care about one bit, personality-free voids (compare them to the nuanced characterisations from the first film) who keep us away from what we’ve really come to see – the shark. The characters tend to act like gigging teenagers from one of the slasher films popular at the time instead of the professionals the script expects us to believe them to be (they keep telling each other things they really should know so that the audience is kept up to speed) and the performances are mostly awful, though who can blame the cast for feeling a bit unsure how to deal with all this silliness. Louis Gossett Jr gives a quite extraordinary performance, clearly not buying a word of this claptrap but giving it his all anyway.

Spielberg’s original film had been a masterclass in suspense. You’ll search in vain for anything like that here. Jaws 3-D would prove to be Alves one and only trip to the director’s chair and after the film was mauled by the critics, it was back to production design for him. He compounds the script’s many failings with directorial choices that make little sense (he’s too in thrall of the 3D process, stopping what little action there is to wave something at us again) and has no sense of pace, urgency or suspense whatsoever.

But it’s doubtful that even Spielberg could have made a script as ropey as this work and when Spielberg encountered problems with his special effects shark, he made something out of it, keeping his malfunctioning antagonist mostly hidden but for a fin here and there and a few ill-advised rubbery cameos. The special effects in Jaws 3-D are so abysmal that no-one could have made them work. Even in their native 3D, they’re dreadful, the sight of a largely immobile and poorly matted shark drifting almost serenely and unthreateningly towards the park’s control room and shattering its windows (at which point the film threatens to turn into an Irwin Allen disaster film) being a particularly tragic low point in 80s popular cinema. It looks for all the world like one of the shoddier rip-offs of the original film.

The 3-D photography is of the “wave things in their faces” school rather than enhancing the texture and sense of space or adding depth to the image, so severed limbs float past, sharks pop up out of nowhere and whatever tools, accessories or other objects can be found are unceremoniously poked at the camera. Worse still, it frequently causes strange picture distortions and artefacts, particularly when it’s seen “flat.” And yet there are moments here of pure unintentional comedy gold, possibly funnier than anything a legitimate spoof like Jaws 3, People 0 could have provided. The sight of FitzRoyce’s corpse lodged in the throat of the ravening mother shark and a pair of very badly matted dolphins leaping with joy in the final shot are particularly rib-tickling.

Despite the critical savaging it received, Jaws 3-D did well at the box office, audiences attracted by both the fad for 3D and what little cache the Jaws name still had. But after a robust opening weekend, once word started getting around that the critics were right and this was particularly putrid stinker, box office fell off by over 40% over the following weeks. Despite that, Universal felt that there was still life in the franchise (how wrong they were), roping in Joseph Sargent to deliver the death blow to the franchise with Jaws: The Revenge.