Shark Night 3D Review

Here’s a quick math question: What do you get when you have a cheesy horror movie about killer sharks, plus the director of Snakes on a Plane, plus 3D? The answer may surprise you. I it was a fun, cheesy, wink-at-the-camera horror movie with some awesome gimmicky 3D scares. It turns out I was wrong. The correct answer is a boring, cliché, tired horror retread with limited 3D and cringe worthy dialogue and characters. Who knew?

This is about as 3D as the movie gets

In Shark Night, a group of teenage horror movie clichés decide to spend summer break at the island home of one of their friends. But, unbeknownst to everyone, the lake that surrounds this island is infested with sharks. That’s about all you get a for a plot, other than a needless, tacked on twist ending which isn’t even worth spoiling because really, they could have left it on the cutting room floor and it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference. Actually, scratch that, it would have made it better. Coming from the director of Snakes on a Plane, the plot seems fitting. Sharks in a Lake would have made a great sequel, but one thing this movie does not do is play up the simplicity for laughs. In fact, the film seems to be taking the whole killer shark island thing rather seriously. Even scenes that could easily be played completely for laughs are taken with a rather serious tone. An example being when the character Malik (played by who fucking cares) has his arm bitten off and his girlfriend killed by the sharks, grabs a harpoon and goes back into the lake to take revenge. At first I wasn’t quite sure whether they were making a joke or doing it with a straight face, I’m still not exactly sure, but since it’s the only goofy, lighthearted moment in the whole film, I have to believe that that isn’t what they were going for. The original planned title of the movie was going to be Untitled 3D Shark Thriller, but apparently someone higher up than director David Ellis made him change the name to Shark Night 3D. Maybe that’s what the movie was originally going for, but all of that has been cut from the finished product.

As far as characters go, there isn’t any. Donal Logue has a couple funny moments as the laid-back, small town sheriff, and there’s a couple laughs between the hillbilly boaters that attempt to rescue the stranded 90210 rejects from the island, but every member of the gang of soon-to-be-chum are completely bland and uninteresting. This tends to be a standard for movie characters in the killer animal/slasher genre, since they are basically set up as meat puppets to be killed off in gruesome ways, but the gore and horror elements of this flop are not good enough to endure their generic stock dialogue and cut and paste character traits.

Also, for a movie about killer sharks, you’d think there would be some pretty gory stuff going on, but you’d be wrong. Most of the gore takes place underwater or after the camera cuts away. This is likely due to the fact that this is a PG-13 movie, a big mistake for a movie that’s trying to do violence and gore and actually be serious about it. This also means that there is very little foul language and absolutely no nudity, two important staples of the genre. The cgi sharks all look lifeless and bland and despite the fact that there are supposed to be multiple breeds of shark on display, it looks like the animators only bothered to render 3 different models and change the size to suit the situation. There are some decent looking aerial shots of boats speeding along swampy waterways and some of the camera views from underwater look alright, but it’s even a stretch to say that these are that good. I think I’m just desperate to find something good here.

Not as bad as this, but close.

For a movie with 3D in its title, and especially one using it as a complete gimmick, you would assume that the 3D is going to be done well right? Wrong again. There are two types of 3D typically in movies these days: post-production “layer” 3D where the movie is digitally altered after being filmed to give the impression of 3D layers, and “real” 3D where special cameras are used to film in 3D from the very beginning. Shark Night 3D is the former. This can be noticed when things are coming at the camera, which happens pretty infrequently. In a proper 3D movie, if a shark is swimming towards you, it will appear to come out of the screen and close to your face, in the movie the shark faces bulge out a little bit, but there is nothing even close to a shocking 3D shark attack to be seen. There is one or two times when things appear to come out of the screen and actually make you react, and they’re both near the end of the movie, and only elicit a slight shutter. This is not good enough! When you have a lame, boring, cliché and uninteresting movie, 3D can actually make it good if it’s done right. My Bloody Valentine 3D is a great example of this. Bad plot, bad characters, warmed over 80s slasher schlock; great 3d, great movie. This movie is a cake without the icing, a vegetable without the dip, a massage without a happy ending.

I wasn’t going into this movie expecting anything deep or interesting, but what I was expecting was to have some fun, like the fun you have watching a Friday the 13^th or Nightmare on Elm Street, or if you want to scrape the bottom of the barrel, maybe even a Saw movie, but there is absolutely nothing to grab onto in this film that’s even remotely entertaining. Shark Night 3D is the biggest disappointment I’ve had at a movie theater in a very long time. I went into this movie expecting one thing, and got the old bait (pun intended) and switch. Maybe it’s my fault for not reading reviews, maybe it’s my fault for not paying more attention to the internet and its endless stream of spoiler-laden info, but I guess that’s what I get for wanting to see a movie and be surprised and have fun.