Jaws 2 was on TV last night. I think I’d seen it before, about 20-25 years ago but I had no recollection of the movie. The original Jaws came out in 1975 and I was too small to see it, i.e. my parents wouldn’t have let me even if I had been interested which I think I wasn’t.

Anyway, I have seen Jaws since, one Christmas about twenty years ago, when the movie was about ten years old, and I remember being surprised at how good it was. Richard Dreyfuss was amazing, and the suspense? Man, that was something.

And I must have seen Jaws 2, too, before yesterday.

The producers lost Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw and the screenwriter, Peter Benchley, whose novel the movie was based on. They managed to hold on to Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gray and the shark.

That wasn’t enough. Jaws 2 has turned into a camp comedy.

We sat here, my wife, a friend and I, and laughed out loud at the dialogue – “Chief, you’re not Chief anymore” – and bad acting, creating our own commentary on the side and on top of the movie’s sounds. Maybe that could be an event, like Sound of Music singalong or Rocky Horror Show?

Jaws was a huge success, and while Peter Benchley (who died in February) said on his Website that he wouldn’t have written Jaws the same way 30 years later – because “[s]harks consider humans, for the most part, too bony and lean to make a good meal. Fatty seals are much better. That’s why 75 percent of humans attacked by Great Whites are spit out” – it’s not that he regretted it.

He doesn’t regret “Jaws,” or the more than 20 million copies of the book that were sold. It gave a struggling free-lance writer a successful and comfortable career.

That’s what we talk about at the Struggling Freelance Writers’ Club. And laugh at bad movies.