Shark 3D

I admit I never expected this creature feature to be a masterpiece; it's really just popcorn entertainment. This is for people who plan on leaving the real, critical world and just enjoy a nice, wild, bloody flick...with sharks. For me, I found it surprising that this flick made it to theaters so there has to be some value to the movie and, to some degree, there is.

Interestingly, the plot is rather creative: college teens go to one of their homes in a salt water lake, unknown to them that several different species of sharks are put there by some locals with sick intentions. We have some typical teen stereotypes, some of which are at least interesting while others not so much. A few of the characters are either stupid or just plain creepy (suitable for a movie like this).

What I like here is that the filmmakers use different kinds of sharks besides the usual great white. Species include hammerhead, bull, and even cookie cutter (which was a real surprise). I'm glad that they were getting creative with the use of differing creatures. The sharks are pretty scary and there are some moments that will shock you.

Unlike "Piranha 3D", Shark Night actually has a good enough plot, some amount of character development, decent back story, and some good creature moments. I guess this movie literally has a bigger bite than "Piranha 3D." While far from great, Shark Night is at least an entertaining flick, worth the watch once or twice. Wanna see some good old killer shark fun? Then check this action out. Just make sure you're not bleeding when you enter the water.

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.

I was not expecting something as enjoyable or over the top as last year's Piranha 3D but I was at least expecting some time killing shark attack fun. It seems however that they couldn't even pull that off.

The script is horrific and the plot is ho-hum but more importantly, takes way too long to get going. Every character is dull and hollow and the stale acting doesn't help. But in all honesty this could be forgiven had the film actually delivered on what was expected. There's surprisingly very little in the way of shark carnage. The PG13 rating means death scenes mostly consist of some flailing in red water. Other death scenes are almost completely off-screen. I'm not a gore fanatic but when the film has nothing else going for it, this could have easily saved it to a degree. They don't even capitalize on the 3D. There were a few genuinely creepy moments in the film that actually made me want to cover my eyes (something I haven't wanted to do in over 15 years)but these are so few and far between. I longed for more of these but the film seems to be too interested in silly melodramatic plot. The film also just takes itself way too seriously to the point where it just isn't fun to watch... which is all you'd be wanting going into a 3D horror movie about sharks.

It's a cheap attempt to cash in on the success of 'Piranha 3D' but without the tongue-in-cheek self-awareness or over the top gory thrills, there's very little to recommend in 'Shark Night 3D'. It could have worked as a campy throwback or It could have even worked as a more serious horror movie because I did feel uneasy at times but it really doesn't do either any justice.

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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About this time last year, I saw a movie called "Piranha." It was a loose remake of a 1978 cult favorite produced by Roger Corman; the sort of cheesy B-movie that was so laughably bad that it ascended to being good fun. That was, of course, the original film, not the remake, which made it onto my list of the worst movies of 2010. Now, exactly one year later, my hopes for seeing a good creature-feature on the silver screen have once again been crushed by what was, essentially, the exact same picture I saw last fall. The only difference is, now the obnoxious, hard-to-endure stick-figure characters are being munched on by big fake CGI sharks instead of big fake CGI piranhas.

But it's really the same scenario. Some brainless young adults are frolicking about on a big, freshwater lake when all of a sudden, people are being tossed about and pulled under by unseen attackers. About thirty minutes in, it's revealed (as if we didn't already know) that the lake has been infested by sharks. And not just great whites, either. No, there are hammerheads, tiger sharks, bulls, and even cookie-cutters. How are all of these oceanic species ending up in a freshwater lake? Well, the movie gives an explanation, but it's one of the most outrageously bad plot twists in recent years. And remember, I'm an aficionado on the junk monster movies that pop up on the SyFy Channel every weekend. Now, I do not go to a monster movie looking for great character study or plot logistics. I go there looking for good old-fashioned, escapist fun. Only when a B-movie becomes so incredibly empty and devoid of joy do I start nitpicking on things I might otherwise overlook until after the credits have rolled. But the writing and directing of "Shark Night" (which by the way, mostly takes place under a bright sunny sky) is so bland, so unenthusiastic, so absent-minded that it left me looking at my watch after about twenty minutes. After the first attack sequence, which starts with a predictable twist and then becomes a practical shot-for-shot knock-off from the all-more-effective opening scene in "Jaws," the only thing that ran through my mind was wondering how long it would be before Steven Spielberg and Universal decided to pitch out a lawsuit for copyright infringement.

The whole movie looks and feels very much like it was made directly for a television release, giving it a sort of schizophrenic, out-of-place feeling. The fact that the performances are beneath comment does not help any, since they are on screen far more often than the cartoony, computer-generated sharks who can twist their necks as flexibly as a human arm and snarl like lions. In addition, there is the other big problem that I also had with "Piranha": dopey exploitation. The movie's far more interested in ogling at the hindquarters and torsos of partially-naked models-turned-'actors' than it is in developing plausible attack scenarios or engaging the audience in the way only a good B-movie can.

Well, at least there weren't any underwater lesbian scenes this time. No chewed up, sex organs either. Thank heaven.

If the writers had realized that they were making a movie for the big screen and not for television, "Shark Night" might have proved to be a solid, lighthearted matinée. Instead, it fails to recognize what it ought to have been and pretends to be a grade-A exploitation flick, falling flat from the beginning. In regards to its 3D: it's thoroughly unimpressive. Granted, I am not the biggest fan of 3D; I think it's a cheap, unengaging gimmick. But half the time, you wouldn't know this were a 3D movie if it weren't for the bulky glasses sitting on your nose. It's still murky and nothing jumps out from the screen except for a few pieces from a motorboat and some seaweeds. Not scary, not entertaining, not even remotely interesting, "Shark Night" was one of the more unhappy times I've had at the movies.

It seems like the only folks who can still produce good monster flicks are the Japanese. Their contemporary rubber monsters smashing miniature Tokyos and Osakas are far more interesting than any monster mayhem I've seen on the big screen in a long while.