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Despite being a less well-regarded virtual remake of the original film, Jaws 2 earned a tidy sum at the box office by combining its predecessor’s winning formula with the popular teen horror craze, helping to spawn the era of blockbuster sequels. Roy Scheider returns as Sheriff Martin Brody, whose small resort town of Amity is poised to bounce back from the economic hardship it encountered after becoming widely known as the site of vicious shark attacks. But at the same time that Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) is welcoming a real estate developer to Amity, two divers disappear and a party of waterskiers is consumed by a shark. The incidents are explained away as accidents, but Brody knows better, tipping his bullets with cyanide and forbidding his sons Mike (Mark Gruner) and Sean (Marc Gilpin) to participate in a teen sailing regatta. Everyone foolishly chalks up Brody’s fears to trauma-induced paranoia, and the regatta goes forward, with a hungry great white trailing the youthful contestants and hungrily picking them off one by one. Director Jeannot Szwarc would later helm another sequel, Supergirl (1984).
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