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.

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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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.

This movie started out so great, it had that whole "Jaws"-theme going on, and it really looked like it was going to be a movie that would pay homage to the classic "Jaws" movies, then it all came crashing down hard and went downhill.

"Shark Night" is without a doubt one of the stupidest story lines I have ever seen in a shark movie. The whole plot was just so far-fetched that it didn't even come off remotely plausible. That whole "oh-you-hurt-me-years-ago-and-now-it-is-payback-time" plot didn't work at all! It was ludicrous and it really made the movie bad.

Another thing that the movie had working against it was the darkness. Most of the movie was shot at night with little or no lighting at all, and you couldn't really see what was going on at times. That was so lame. When you sit down to watch movies you don't want to be kept in the dark and have little chance to see what's going on. Had they kept the movie in daylight it would have worked so much better.

As for the characters in the movie, well you hardly got to immerse yourself in any of the characters, aside from Sara (played by Sara Paxton) and to some extend Dennis (played by Chris Carmack). The rest of the characters were nothing more than bystanders with shallow stories to contribute to the plot.

The cast themselves were good, though. The people they had cast for the various roles actually did good jobs, and that was the main thing that "Shark Night" had working for it.

Having seen "Shark Night" now I feel very disappointed and cheated out of my time, because this movie was disappointing on so many levels. It is only once in awhile that there is a really nice shark movie to hit the market, "Shark Night" however, wasn't one of them.

And the ending of the movie, are you kidding me? Come on! I am not going to spoil it here by revealing it, but wow, that was an ending you saw coming a mile away, and it was just so anti-climatic.