Let me take you on a trip back in time, to when your Rabid Host was just a little tyke of all but 4yrs of age, and as you will soon see, that is a very, very, impressionable age. In a stroke of genius, my father made the decision that it was ok for me to stay up and watch the late night movie with him while my mom was away at work on the night shift. So, with my mom away at work thus sparing my dad her wrath for not putting me to bed at the right time, and me just happy to be up late (only 10:00 but still late to me), we both settled in to watch a movie called Jaws. Now let's flash forward to about midnight, after the movie has just finished and my mom returning home from work, irritated with my dad that I was still up and even worse, I had not had a bath to cleanse my body of my four year old activities of the day. Do you see where this is going faithful readers? As soon as that tub started to fill with water, my young idiotic mind caused me to panic in a fit of survival and my expressing this by kicking and screaming to get out of the tub, which I was sure was a certain deathtrap. Go ahead and start laughing, but I was certain that a shark would appear and have my tiny little body for a midnight snack if I did not get the hell out of there. Now, how I could fathom a shark even fitting into the tub, let alone appear out of thin air and into it still makes me laugh to this very day. However, this just goes to show you what a powerful film like Jaws can do to a 4yr old, and I guess you could also add to it that it's not exactly a good idea to allow a four year old to stay up late and watch a movie about a 25 ft. killer shark.

Jaws in my mind, is an example of the perfect monster movie. The monster is rarely seen at all until the end, and when it is shown it looks quite good and does not lose any of it's shock value whatsoever. However, the scenes where you only get a glimpse of the shark and not the whole thing work best. For example, check out the nicely filmed scene where the shark can be just barely seen as it glides under the water and grabs the guy sitting in his little boat in the pond. Good stuff. Though like I mentioned above, when the shark is finally shown it still seems to work, unlike in the sequels that would follow. The scene of Bruce chowing down on a hapless Quint is classic and very hard to watch. The acting is perfect by all involved, and the viewer really gets to know the characters quite well, making it even harder to see any of them become shark bait. Love the scene where Quint delivers his famous USS Indianapolis speech to Hooper and Brody. Good stuff indeed. Slap in a now legendary soundtrack which has been imitated thousands of times, and you have yourself a film guaranteed to scare the shit out of anyone who goes into the water, be you a surfer from California, a fisherman from Maine, or a four year old little boy going into the bathtub, Jaws is simply a top notch flick.