This week marks the 30th anniversary of "Michael Caine picks his roles (spoiler: it's the money). But there's something to be said for the movie, which spills over into the realm of the absurd almost immediately and splashes around in the waters of goofy insanity for the full runtime, never once pausing to consider things like logic, character motivation, or plot mechanics.

In a weird way, it was the fulfillment of an earlier promise by the studio to go in a more intentionally comedic direction and serves as the perfect "oh-hey-look-whats-playing-on-TBS" distraction for any low and doggish summer afternoon.

First, a bit of back story: after Jaws 3D" ended up being. ("Jaws 3" was so bad that when Universal issued a press release for "The Revenge" they called it the "third film" in the series. Damn.)

When it came time to make "Jaws: The Revenge," the filmmakers, led by director Mario Van Peebles). In the final sequence (more on that in a minute), the shark again comes out of the water and this time it roars. If that wasn't insane enough, the roar that they used was supposedly recycled from an old "Tom and Jerry" cartoon. Yes, seriously.

If the movie wasn't trippy and odd enough, then let us take a closer look at the finale. There were actually two versions of the climax released by Universal. In the initial theatrical release our heroes pilot a boat into the shark (you know, because it spends more time hovering outside of the water than swimming through it). The dying shark shakes around and tears the boat apart, which puts our humans back in mortal danger. It's stupid as hell, but there are some nice flourishes; I love the blood that fountains out of either side of the shark (conceivably being kicked up by its gills).

Also, it's so incomprehensible that it takes on a kind of dreamlike feeling; "Jaws: The Revenge" as cubist masterwork. Roger Ebert, for his part, couldn't believe that the filmmakers "film this final climactic scene so incompetently that there is not even an establishing shot, so we have to figure out what happened on the basis of empirical evidence." (Occasionally this is the version they'll show on television.)

Universal, unhappy with the way the film originally ended, ordered a new ending for foreign and home video audiences. Now, when they ram the shark with the boat (which is, by the way, interspersed with flashbacks to the "Smile you son of a bitch" moment from the first movie, a flashback to something that Ellen Brody clearly wasn't around for), the editing becomes more chaotic and then the shark explodes. Why it explodes is anybody's guess. But like the rest of the movie, logic doesn't really matter and for much of the film's lifespan this has been the canonical ending that everybody has seen.

Still, it's hard not to get a kick out of "Jaws: The Revenge." Everything about it is so gloriously absurd, you can tell that everyone involved was just kind of going with it. It's the kind of movie that maybe you come across every five years and only see 10 minutes of it at a time and can't believe what you're watching is the actual movie, but it is. The gorgeous photography, filmed in Martha's Vineyard and The Bahamas, only adds to the surreal sensation the movie gives off.

It's so insane, in fact, that it tips into the comically absurd, something that the franchise had toyed with in the previous film. (The entire movie was completed in an astounding nine months.) Michael Caine, for his part, said, "I have never seen it. However, I have seen the house that it built and it's terrific."

Even without the house, it's kind of terrific.