Shark 3D

Sara (Sara Paxton) and her college friends travel to her lake house on the Louisiana Gulf for a wild weekend of beer pong, sunbathing, and death by shark. Be mindful of the PG-13 rating because, if you go into this expecting the finned version of Aja's silicon laden Piranha 3D, you'll be sorely disappointed. The most you're going to get to feast your eyes on is a brief shot of Katharine McPhee's and Alyssa Diaz's side boobs.

It's light on the carnage and heavy on the sentimental and often over-dramatic monologues. The gore is pretty watered down for the teen/tween audience. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing - it's a boring thing. While there are quite a few deaths, the attacks are short cut scenes that end with the camera lingering over pools of red coloring dye to signify, yep, they're dead.

What's missing from this humdinger is good ol' fashioned fun. Most of its ilk celebrate the B-movie campiness with richly funny dialog, revel in the opportunity to mock its genre, or totally go off the deep end with exaggerated kills and/or gratuitous nudity. I realize Shark Night 3D wasn't made to be an in-your-face exploitation film but it's not Open Water either. It falls to the wayside because it has no guts, literally and figuratively.

Seven young and pretty undergraduates head to a secluded lakeside cottage in Louisiana to take a load off and enjoy a wild and crazy weekend away. But things take a turn for the worst when a member of the group is attacked by a shark. Isolated with no cell service and no help in sight, the group quickly realizes they are on their own, but the water around them is not safe.

I wanted Shark Night 3D to be as fun as Piranha 3D was last year. Despite the PG-13 rating, I held onto a desperate hope that it would somehow manage to live up to that level of gleeful insanity and absolutely ridiculous trashiness. I knew deep down it would never be anywhere near comparable, but everything about the film suggested it would be an enjoyable ride.

Sadly, this is not the case.

Instead of getting a ridiculous movie about sharks mauling pretty 20- somethings that embraces the sheer silliness of the very idea, we get a deadly serious, high-concept slasher film that seems to have no concept of what fun is. Sure we get the typical horror movie wise ass quips sprinkled here and there, and some rather intriguing reasoning as to why the attacks are occurring. But in-between these moments, we get stilted dialogue, wooden performances, characters with next to no dimensionality whatsoever, and just about nothing else. Despite it being 2011, the film feels like it belongs to a different era – one where it has not realized how outrageous and frivolous the genre has become. It offers nothing new by way of ideas or story, and somehow thinks an ode to Jaws at the beginning of the film is appropriate. I initially wanted to criticize Shark Night for cribbing from Piranha. But in watching the film, it is obvious they learned absolutely nothing from Alexandre Aja and his crew.

But while the bad story and worse acting are to be expected, what is really disappointing is just how much of a grand tease the whole movie is. The rating may be a contributing factor, but the only thing it seems to cut out is gratuitous nudity. The T and A is still plentiful, and the film is actually surprisingly graphic in some instances. But the majority of deaths, the best part of any slasher film, are merely hinted at. We see characters get pulled underwater, and just when you think we will see their grisly end, the film inexplicably cuts to the next scene. Hell, we do not even get the obligatory shot confirming that a character did indeed die. How do we know they did not manage to fight off the shark and survive to fight another day? And since there are about ten people in the entire cast, most of which meet an untimely end, that is a whole lot of teasing and not a lot of pay off. I can only think of one that is explicitly shown, and even that seemed like it was pushing it based on what happens during the rest of the film. It is all very arbitrary, but it seems like a rather obscene faux pas on the part of the filmmakers.

Remember how comically bad and exaggerated the piranha looked in Piranha 3D? Somehow, the sharks in Shark Night 3D look even worse. There is nothing realistic about them. They look more cartoonish than anything, standing out as not even attempting to look like they belong in any of the scenes. They make memories of the shark from Jaws appear more frighteningly authentic than I thought possible. But this is only when the sharks are swimming around underwater, looking menacing and hungry . When they actually interact with the characters, they look absolutely absurd and preposterous. A shot involving a shark leaping out of the water to attack one of the characters as he zips by on a jet-ski looks even worse than those ludicrously awful effects you may have seen from Shark Attack 3: Megalodon. They may actually qualify for some of the worst effects in the past decade. Surely the special effects team realized they were working on an actual movie with a budget, and not some straight-to-DVD Asylum knockoff. So what could possibly be there excuse for such a terrible job?

I think the only thing I remotely enjoyed was how impressive the underwater shots looked in 3D. They were clearly shot with the format in mind, and look absolutely stunning even with a fake shark in the background. They frequently took me entirely out of the film, as they look like they belong in a significantly better project. The shots are just so tranquil and so beautiful that they may make you forget what an awful movie you are sitting through. With the exception of an over-the- top explosion, this is just about the only thing that sizzles in 3D. There are no other elements that even attempt to take advantage of the format.

When I tell you that Shark Night 3D is one of the worst films of the year, with next to no redeeming qualities, you better believe I am not lying. I was hoping it would be somewhat fun, but instead it was one of the most annoying and agonizing films I have ever put myself through. The film is too serious to be enjoyable, and fails to deliver in almost every respect. The filmmakers and cast should be ashamed of themselves. When the credits rolled, I could not leave the theatre fast enough because I was ashamed to have actually watched it. Apparently there is a rap music video after the credits conclude, featuring the entire cast. Somehow, I still do not think this could make up for the travesty you have to put yourself through to get to it.

3/10.

(An extended review also appeared on http://www.geekspeakmagazine.com).

I went into this movie thinking I was going to be bored to death. The only reason why we saw this was because it was a holiday, hardly anything was open and we were going stir crazy at home. I've said this before and I will say this again… I love my gore, I love my violence and I love my crazy horror movies. Once you put a PG rating on something I instantly loose my interest.

After all that being said it turned out that I really enjoyed this movie. Of course I should have known this. For one I LOVE shark movies, I love teen screams, I love those goofy Sci-Fi channel horror movies with the cheese graphics. My Fiancée on the other hand did not like this movie but he never did like these sort of teeny bop things.

This movie is extremely teeny boppy, the lingo, the acting, the drama. The characters are the same hollow but hot bunch of college kids we see in all of these types of movies. So I wouldn't go in expecting anything deep from the characters or script. There was a lot of blood but it was mostly just someone being pulled under the water and buckets of blood being shown floating around them. You never actually see any gore or any attack close up.

The sharks for the most part were silly. I thought it was cool but it was very unrealistic which sort of killed it for me as well. We kept thinking the storyline would explain why these sharks were super ninja sharks. They were ridiculously fast, jumped way too high and there teeth were almost like metal'ish spikes. Apparently it was only part of the movie as they never explain anything as to why they were super sharks.

This movie was not bad IF you like this sort of thing. It wasn't particularly funny, or deep, the graphics sucked, it was rated PG… but if like me you love the things I listed in the second paragraph, you may enjoy this.

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This movie is just as irresponsible as the horrible "torture porn" seen in recent years. In this movie, we are still subjected to the most malevolent of human behavior, but they use sharks instead of saws, cages and bondage. And make damn sure we mutilate young adults while they are barely dressed so we can become aroused by the beauty of the human body and then become horrified at the dismemberment. It never ceases to amaze me what incredibly horrific visions today's young filmmakers can dream up. Even more pathetic, someone is paying them to do it. When the audience finally says "no I won't watch this tasteless, senseless waste of talent and money," perhaps they will stop making it.

Not likely, unfortunately.

¨Terror runs deep¨

Shark Night is a terrible movie, I have to admit it, but somehow I ended up having a fun time with it. The performances are low key, the script borderlines in the ridiculous, and the story is really predictable, but in the mist of all the disaster I found myself having an enjoyable experience. Shark Night is a movie that takes its subject matter very lightly, it doesn't try to be a serious horror film, or even try to show a lot of gore or being scary. It's a movie that recognizes its limitations and plays along with it. What makes this bad movie stand out from the rest is that it ends up being bad in a good way, in other words it makes you laugh because it's so bad. The plot is so bad that it seems that director David R. Ellis decided to just play along with the audience and let us have a good time without having to make the film gory or extremely violent. He gives us a lot of sharks, a lot of kills, and if taken lightly like the producers want you to you might end up having a good time like I did. If you are expecting a scary movie with a lot of gore than I warn you stay away from Shark Night because it's just a light comedy with some bad acting and bad special effects. If you go into this movie expecting nothing else than that, just like I did, then you might end up having a decent time. One thing is for sure: screenwriters Will Hayes and Jesse Studenberg won't be winning any awards for their dumbed down script.

It's time to explain my least favorite part of the film: the plot. Shark Night takes place in a lake near the Louisiana Gulf coast (yes you read right, there are sharks in a lake and there is a perfectly good reason for that). A group of teenagers decide to go to Sara's (Sara Paxton) lake house to celebrate Malik's (Sinqua Walls) recent success in an exam that will allow him to enter college. His friends Nick (Dustin Milligan) and Gordon (Joel David Morse) were the ones who helped him study so in order to thank them he brings them along although they aren't part of the cool group. At the house Malik plans to propose to his girlfriend Maya (Alyssa Diaz). Beth (Katharine McPhee) and Blake (Chris Zylka) also decide to go along with the rest of the gang and have some fun at the lake. Before arriving to the house however they have a small quarrel with a pair of local hillbillies Red (Joshua Leonard) and Dennis (Chris Carmack) with whom Sara is acquainted with, but everything goes on as normal. At the lake they meet the Sheriff, Sabin (Donal Logue), who greets them warmly and even has a couple of drinks with them. The kids are ready to have a great time and begin enjoying the lake, but what they don't know is that the lake is infested with sharks. What begins as innocent fun, ends up being a nightmare for Sara and her friends.

The actors are all relatively unknown and there is a good reason for that (they aren't exactly great actors), but you can't have a shark film without hot young teens. The movie really works better as a comedy than as a horror film because the plot is just ridiculous, but I did have a fun time with how the shark attacks were exaggerated. There was one scene were a shark jumps several feet over the water and eats one of the kids that is riding a motorbike. These sharks were just so exaggerated that you couldn't help but laugh at the silliness of each scene. There are several more death scenes like this which are hugely exaggerated and I found quite funny. There is no gore because Shark Attack had a PG-13 rating so don't expect much of the death scenes from the Final Destination producers. I haven't seen the Piranhas film so I can't make comparisons with it, but I heard this is nothing like the gore that film had, so if you want a stronger film or expect something like Piranhas then skip this film because you will be disappointed. Shark Night has nothing memorable to it, but I did have a surprisingly good time with it so I got to give it a passing grade, although the lowest possible one.

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