By Drew Dietsch
| Published
Jaws is the best movie ever made. No debate. Since Jaws is the best movie ever made, it’s unsurprising that it’s also one of the most widely parodied movies of all time. Plenty of flicks ripped off Jaws but very few ever decided to be direct spoofs of Steven Spielberg’s classic. Sure, you’d see Jaws gags pop up in movies but it was rare to see a flick act as an outright goof on the flick. Well, we aren’t to talk about Gums on a site like this.
Instead, I want to give the spotlight to a movie released thirteen years after Jaws. And it somehow decided to be one of the strangest approaches to a spoof movie I’ve ever seen.
This is the killer lawnmower movie, Blades.
Blades Turns Jaws Loose On 18 Holes
The story of Blades is a beat-for-beat riff on Jaws, but all the action is transplanted to the Tall Grass Country Club. Instead of a killer shark, we have a raging lawnmower that’s dicing up folks on the fairway. Instead of new police chief Brody, we have new club pro Roy Kent (Robert North). Instead of grizzled fisherman Quint, we’ve got greasy former groundskeeper Deke Slade (Jeremy Whelan). You get the idea.
But, what makes Blades such an anomaly of a movie is that its using the structure of Jaws as its Bible, and it’s selling the ludicrous idea of a sentient killer lawnmower as serious as that movie did with its shark. Granted, there are plenty of clear attempts at jokes and gags, but Blades seems to believe that part of its sense of humor is in how serious it gets.
That Lawnmower Killed My Pa
Take our Quint character, Deke Slade. Jeremy Whelan commits to Slade as a no-nonsense, hard-edged curmudgeon who nobody believes about the killer lawnmower. Blades doesn’t treat the material like it’s a Naked Gun movie; Slade’s emotional investment is total truth to the character as if he really existed in a world with a killer lawnmower.
And not just any killer lawnmower, but the one that killed his father! Slade gets his USS Indianapolis speech towards the movie’s end and nobody told Whelan to play it funny. He delivers a chilling backstory about his family’s history with the lawnmower and how his father was found dead under its blades. Watching the movie go all in on its goofball premise seems to be the bigger joke, but does that make it funny?
Jaws Fans Should Watch Blades
There are some fun shifts to the Jaws template in Blades. The Matt Hooper character is instead a fellow employee at the golf course, Kelly Lange (Victoria Scott), and her professional rivalry and eventual romance with Roy is an inspired if uneventful twist instead of just copy-and-pasting a Hooper equivalent.
That’s what fascinates me so much about Blades. Here is a movie that could go full Zucker brothers with a Jaws spoof, being as directly referential as it wanted to be, but it instead tries to tell its own earnest version of that story template.
…But, with a giant killer lawnmower. Like, that’s weird, right? Making a clear spoof but overlaying a strangely serious tone is such an odd decision. It makes Blades a movie I don’t find particularly funny, but bizarrely necessary for fans of Jaws. I don’t mind watching it as a study in tone and intent that’s in conversation with its source material more than one would expect.
Heck, Blades might technically be better than some official Jaws sequels. If that piques your interest, track it down and give it a spin.
