Blades (1989)

When people bring up the most influential movies of all time, one of the movies they continuously return to is Jaws. It is widely considered the start of blockbuster movies. It kicked off Steven Spielberg’s career. It also led to a wide variety of rip-offs featuring sharks, bears, orcas, and other assorted animals. Jaws paved the way for many movies that followed. It paved the way for the movie industry that followed.

I want to go back to the rip-offs for this post. Particularly one of them. It might not be considered a rip-off in the traditional sense. It was more of a parody. You’ll see what I mean as I get deeper into it. Blades came out in 1989. It took the story of Jaws and transplanted it into a new setting with a new villain. It wasn’t like Piranha in the sense that it was an attack movie that came in the wake of Jaws. This one was different. It wasn’t even one of those movies that took footage from Jaws and its sequels to put together as a new movie. Blades was practically the entire Jaws story, reshot in a different context.

What was Blades, exactly? Roy Kent (Robert North) was a golf pro hired to work at a New Jersey golf course. The course’s owner, Norman Osgood (William Towner), scheduled a golf tournament for that weekend and Roy was set to participate. There was only one problem. Mangled bodies were being found around the course grounds. As more people were killed, the employees of the golf course discovered the culprit was a possessed lawnmower, out for blood. They had to hunt it down and destroy it before it killed more people.

As you can see, the story of Blades was similar to that of Jaws. There was some sort of bloodthirsty creature, in this case a lawnmower, killing people while a big event was looming. Someone had to hunt down that bloodthirsty creature and get rid of it before there was a catastrophe. You might not realize just how similar the two stories were, and why this might be considered more of a parody than a rip-off. I’m going to get into more detail right now.

Let’s start with the opening scene of Blades. It very much played out like the beginning of Jaws, only maybe a little more violent. Jaws opened with a couple heading into the ocean to fool around. The young woman dove into the water. The guy passed out in the sand. She would be attacked by a shark and he wouldn’t. The attack would kick off the events of the movie. Blades changed things up a bit because it wasn’t set in an ocean town. A young couple wanted to fool around. They looked for a quiet place on the golf course, finding a nice patch of rough. A lawnmower came around and attacked them, mangling their bodies. The discovery of the bodies kickstarted the events of the movie.

The biggest difference between the openings of the two movies were the level of violence. The attacks happened off screen, so it wasn’t like there was a whole lot of blood flying around. But there was an added death in Blades that wasn’t in Jaws. The couple was killed instead of just the gal. Yes, I used the word “gal.” This was one more death than the movie that inspired it. That added death made sense. Blades was a Troma release. Troma was a continuation of the grindhouse aesthetic after the rise of blockbuster cinema. It only made sense that their parody of Jaws would have slightly more death because of its grindhouse background. This added violence could also be seen through the added blood and gore during other attacks in Blades. I’ll get to some of those later. I should introduce the characters first.

Blades had four main characters who were based on four of the central Jaws characters. The first, and most obvious, was Roy. He was based on Chief Brody. He was the new golf pro for the golf course, much like Brody was the fairly new police chief in Amity. Chief Brody was played by Roy Scheider, hence the main character of Blades being named Roy. And, much like his Jaws counterpart, Roy had a somewhat debilitating trait when it came to doing his job properly. Roy was an alcoholic whose game was falling off. He was afraid he would never regain his skill and had become accustomed to his own mediocrity. It was similar to Chief Brody being afraid of the water. Roy had to overcome his golfer’s block to take down the lawnmower, like Chief Brody had to overcome his fear of water to hunt and kill the shark. They essentially had the same emotional arcs.

The second character in Blades was Kelly Lange (Victoria Scott). She was the Hooper of Blades, though not the scientist that Hooper was in Jaws. Kelly was Roy’s assistant golf pro. At first, she was against Roy. She thought he had taken the golf pro position from her grasp. However, she soon came to be on Roy’s side as more people were attacked by the lawnmower. They became the team that Brody and Hooper were in Jaws. Kelly even shared a similarity in character arc. She proved herself as capable as the men who looked down on her through the entire movie, in the same vein as Hooper proving that he wasn’t just a spoiled rich kid, but actually a capable boater while hunting the shark.

Moving onto character number three, Norman Osgood was the owner of the golf course. He was clearly a substitute for the mayor of Amity. If you know anything about Jaws, you know that the mayor was as much a villain as the shark, maybe even more so. The shark was doing what came natural to it. The mayor was knowingly putting people in harm’s way to make a few dollars. Well, that was the same with Norman Osgood. There was a big golf tournament coming up at his golf course and nothing was going to stop that tournament from happening. As the attacks stacked up, he kept bringing in the police chief to sweep them under the rug. Tragedy struck during the tournament, though.

Finally, there was the Quint substitute, Deke Slade (Jeremy Whelan). Deke’s family were the former groundskeepers of the golf course. When the attacks began, he knew what was up. He knew what had to be done. Nobody believed him at first. He was the kooky guy who had always been there, but nobody took what he said seriously. They soon would, though, as the wrong lawnmower was captured. He told them it was the wrong lawnmower. Nobody believed him until another attack happened. Then they turned to Deke for help capturing and getting rid of the lawnmower.

All the pieces were in place when it came to the main characters. The story simply had to bring them through to the same conclusion as Jaws. Along the way, there were many familiar scenes. There were many familiar details. They had been changed to fit the new setting and new “animal” that was attacking, but they were the same details that drove Jaws forward. Blades did a good job reimagining them while staying true to what made Jaws work.

Now, before I get into the story details, I must admit that I haven’t seen Jaws in a few years. I think I saw it at the drive-in either a year or two or maybe even three ago. I think that was the last time I saw it. I’ve seen it a few other times, so I’m confident enough in my knowledge of the story. But I might get a few smaller details wrong as I compare elements of Jaws with Blades. For the most part, though, this should be fine.

In Jaws, one of the most important deaths was that of Alex Kintner. He was a young boy who was killed by the shark when the mayor ordered the beaches to stay open. The shark attacked him in front of hundreds of people who were relaxing on the beach. It was in that moment the mayor could no longer deny that shark attacks were happening. The same sort of scene was in Blades. Kelly was teaching a golf class with a young boy on the green collecting the balls she hit. The kid went into the long grass to get one of the balls and never came out. Blood erupted from the grass, scaring the bejeebers out of the entire class and causing an uproar on the course. Same scene, new context. Much like most of Blades.

I’m going to quickly summarize the next bit. The attack in each film led to a bunch of people going out on the course or water to hunt down the creature attacking people. Someone captured a lawnmower or tiger shark. The course owner or mayor declared the course or beach safe once again. The main characters had their doubts. They thought the wrong lawnmower or shark was captured. They cut open the lawnmower’s bag or shark’s stomach and discovered there were no human remains. It was the proof they needed to know the attacks weren’t going to stop.

That was when I knew I loved Blades. I already liked the idea of watching a Jaws parody set on a golf course. That was funny enough. But to be so tied to its source that it would include a dissection scene, changing the shark’s stomach to the bag of a lawnmower… That was a stroke of genius. It made sure that Blades was going to be one of the “bad” movies that I went back to time and time again.

Moving on, Roy and Kelly went on a search of the grounds at night so see if they could find anything else that was suspicious. They stumbled upon an abandoned golf cart in a ditch. While investigating the golf cart, they were frightened by the sound of a lawnmower nearby. They got back into their own cart and fled. If this doesn’t seem too important to you, maybe think back to Jaws for a moment. When Brody and Hooper realized that the tiger shark wasn’t the shark attacking people, they investigated the waters. They came upon a half-sunken vessel. They found a large tooth, but dropped it when they were scared by a corpse. It was the same scene used to show that the real culprit was still out there.

Now for another quick summary. Okay, so the owner or mayor decided to reopen the golf course or beaches because they wanted to believe that the lawnmower or shark had been taken care of. The tournament or fourth of July celebrations were underway. During the height of the tournament or fourth of July celebrations, the real lawnmower or shark showed up and attacked again. The owner or mayor had been wrong. They paid the price for it.

That makes it sound a little like the bad guy was killed in the attack. He wasn’t. In Blades, the attack happened at the final hole in a match between Kelly and some guy who was cheating. When I say he was cheating, I mean that he noticed that nobody was looking and moved his ball illegally. It counted, and he beat Kelly. In a nice karmic beat, however, the lawnmower showed up and killed the cheater. It tried to kill a child, but Roy saved the kid. He couldn’t save the cheater in time.

This scene was a perfect example of the Troma grindhouse sensibilities getting into Blades. Jaws avoided showing the shark unless it was completely necessary. Any blood was mixed with water in a way that made it less jarring to see. The shark was rarely shown before the final third and the severed limbs of victims were never shown. If I’m remembering right, there was maybe one shot of the shark basically swallowing someone. That was it, though. Blades went further. Yeah, it didn’t show the actual attack of the couple. It didn’t show the child being mangled in the tall grass. The old man who died in between those two attacks wasn’t shown either. This one, however, was shown almost in full. We didn’t see the final death of the character. What we did see was his legs being mowed. The bloody stumps thrashing back and forth as he screamed. The lawnmower dragging him away in agony by the bloody stumps. It was showing more than Jaws ever did. Well, more than Jaws did before the final human death, which I’ll bring up in a bit.

I’m just going to stick with Blades for a bit. After the big attack at the tournament, Roy and Kelly convinced Norman Osgood that he should hire Deke to take down the lawnmower. Roy, Kelly, and Deke teamed up and hit the course in Deke’s van. This was their equivalent of going out in the Orca in Jaws. Now, in something completely unrelated to Jaws, there was one scene in Blades that truly highlighted the parody. When Kelly and Roy approached Deke to ask for his help, Deke’s coworker was dressed like Jason Voorhees. The coworker was even named Jason. For some reason, in the middle of a faithful reinterpretation of Jaws, there was a Friday the 13^th joke.

Roy, Kelly, and Deke went out in the van. From this point on, Blades followed Jaws very accurately. They had bails of hay with balloons on them to track where the lawnmower was. Deke shared a story about what happened to his father, which was very much a substitution for the USS Indianapolis story. Deke was eaten by the lawnmower in a very bloody fashion while trying to climb his way back into the van. The lawnmower knocked over and destroyed the van. The kicker was how Roy defeated the lawnmower. He threw an old explosive onto it and knocked a golf ball into the explosive, causing the machine to blow up. All it was missing was a “smile, you son of a bitch.”

That entire end section of Blades with the hunt for the lawnmower was largely the same as the hunt for the shark in Jaws. Things were simply changed to fit the golf course setting instead of the oceanside setting. That was kind of the thing for the whole movie. It was a retelling of Jaws at a golf course. There were the same characters, the same story beats, and the same concept. It was a simple setting swap with some comedy thrown in. It was a parody in the truest sense, taking what people loved about the original and poking fun at it through a slightly different lens.

It is said that parody is the sincerest form of flattery. You must truly love something to be able to parody it well. Blades parodied Jaws well. The people behind Blades surely loved Jaws, especially because of how faithful they were to the story. They followed the story, inserting some heightened gore and some jokes. It didn’t take the modern parody approach of referencing as many pop culture things as possible, only really going for that in the Jason scene. It stuck to the story of Jaws and just played around with it.

How close they stuck to the story was impressive because of the way home media worked at the time. Yes, there were releases of Jaws on VHS and Laserdisc through the 1980s, but they were still quite expensive. Maybe the people got a hold of one and rewatched it. Maybe they saw it a bunch in theaters. Maybe they caught it a few times on television. Whatever the case, they saw Jaws enough that they could write Blades to tell the same story in a different setting.

When Jaws came out in 1975, it changed the way people saw movies. It was the first true blockbuster. A lot of studios and independent filmmakers wanted to cash in on its success. Most of that was done in the first five or ten years following Jaws’s release. Different animals attacked different places. Few went as close as Blades to capturing the magic of Jaws. Because Jaws was a magical film. It was something special that will always hold a place in film history. And, I guess, will always inspire people to make more movies. That’s all you can ask of a movie.

Now let’s get some notes in here:

• The only actor from Blades who was previously featured in Sunday “Bad” Movies was Richard Gross, who was in Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (week 350).
• I covered Jaws 3-D (week 240) and Jaws: The Revenge (week 240) for Sunday “Bad” Movies.
• Have you seen Blades? What did you think of it? Let me know your thoughts on Twitter or in the comments section.
• If there’s a movie you think would make a good fit for Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know. You can find me on Twitter. You can also leave a comment suggesting the movie.
• Make sure to check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram, too.
• Next week, I’m hopping off the horror train and onto the kids animation train. I’ll be visiting the mid-90s for an almost forgotten kids movie that is really only remembered because it’s not good. I’ll be checking out A Troll in Central Park and you can be sure I’ll have words about it. See you next week for that one!