Shark Night

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.

Despite the sheer diversity in species that inhabit this world, Hollywood seems to have an obsession with making movies about hungry, killer sharks. Ever since Jaws debuted nearly 40 years ago, the flood gates for shark movies seemed to have been permanently forced open, allowing countless films to be made, most of which fail to come even close to Spielberg's classic. Today the latest shark disaster, Shark Night, hits the screens in all of its gore filled glory.

For those who haven't seen the overplayed trailer, Shark Night revolves around a group of Jersey Shore like teenagers taking a vacation out to an island mansion for a weekend getaway from their college studies. What starts out as a fun filled trip soon turns into chaos as Malik (Sinqua Walls) has a rough encounter with a bull shark. However this first attack is only a mild beginning as the sharks become more aggressive and fear begins to take its toll on the teenagers.

I'm going to come right out and say it, this movie is essentially Jaw meeting a teenage slasher film. Unlike Jaws, Shark night has traded plot for gore filled, teenager devouring, and CGI shark action. The acting of the victims is pretty weak for the most part, essentially focusing on incredibly shallow characters that have no morals and eventually evolved into hyperventilating chickens, with the exception of a few characters willing to tread the waters. Despite their best intentions, a majority of the scenes in this movie amounted to nothing more than a predictable sequence of chases, pointless swimming, and eventually scream filled death that is classic of a Scy-Fy original movie.

Although the plot had a little more character than what I had gotten from the trailers, it still wasn't enough to save the movie. One major weakness to the plot was how predictable the series of events was. From the moment we were introduced to the characters, I was able to predict who was going to die, and essentially how each one was going to meet their end, that is how each one was going to get eaten. You may be asking, "Well was the explanation for why the sharks were there in the first place good?" The answer to that question is no. In fact I believe the explanation to the sharks was one of the worst plot twists I have ever seen, more laughable than respectable. Again I wasn't expecting much of a plot, but to throw in such a twist was just pathetic to me.

Now there are some positive aspects to this movie, but I'll admit now that they are incredibly shallow positives. One positive is that the CGI work, albeit not the even close to being the greatest captures the shark movement quite well. The facts that the characters spout out about the sharks are also accurate as well and can teach the audience a few things about sharks, if they actually care. The soundtrack for this film had some catchy beats that are sure to please most modern audiences today, mainly fans of rap and hip-hop. Fans of blood will also be happy with this film as the bayou waters become stained in red by the various attacks. Finally, although the acting is weak, both male and female audience members will be happy with the eye candy most of the cast provides, as they parade around in their bikinis bathing suits. Yeah I told you these positives were pretty shallow.

To wrap this review up, Shark Night is a movie meant to kill time and provide some very cheap entertainment. Fans of constant shark attack violence will not be disappointed by this generic film, but those looking for a seemingly decent plot and suspense filled survival should avoid this film at all costs. Shark attack films may be getting old, but surely the modern movie industry can do better than this. Overall I give Shark Night, which should not be seen in 3D, a 2.0-2.5, and recommend waiting for it to come out on the Scy-Fy channel. As always provide me with some feedback and let me know your opinions and criticism for becoming a better writer.

The college friends Nick (Dustin Milligan), Beth (Katharine McPhee), Malik (Sinqua Walls), Maya (Alyssa Diaz), Blake (Chris Zylka) and Gordon (Joel David Moore) are invited by their friend Sara Palski (Sara Paxton) to spend the weekend at her saltwater lake house in Louisiana. They stop at a bar to buy supplies and Malik has a friction with the rednecks Red (Joshua Leonard) and Dennis Crim (Chris Carmack), but Sara resolves the situation since Dennis is her ex-boyfriend. Then the group meets another friend of Sara, Sheriff Greg Sabin (Donal Logue).

When Malik is skiing in the lake, he has a severed arm by a shark and his friends seek for help. But sooner they learn that the lake is infested of different species of sharks and they have a more dangerous problem threatening them.

"Shark Night 3D" is a silly and absurd rip-off "Jaws" with the storyline that recalls "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", with a group of youngsters that travels to the countryside and are slaughtered by sharks. They are actually victims of a gang of psychopaths that make money in a website with snuff movies showing the sharks attacking and killing people. Chris Carmack is scary with his psychotic behavior but the film is dull, ridiculous and the special effects are very poor. But maybe the greatest problem is that "Shark Night 3D" is a B-movie with the pretension of being a serious movie. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "Terror na Água 3D" ("Terror in the Water 3D")

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.

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).