Any movie that can open up with a blonde girl in a white bikini getting eaten by a shark and manage to make that boring deserves special notice as a clunker. A time was you could at least count on Hollywood to deliver the cheap thrills with sharks but Shark Night 3D’s failure to manage even that simple task is a dark day for the industry. No wonder box office receipts have been down the last couple of years.
The plot, (to use the term very loosely) is seven college students having a weekend getaway at a lake house in Louisiana. Some are crushing on the others blah, blah. The token black guy is about to be drafted for the NFL blah, blah. Lo and behold the lake is full of sharks, blah, blah. Cell phones don’t get reception and we can’t just call for help, blah, blah. Sleazy white trash, redneck, yokels, turn out to be the real monsters, blah, blah. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that basically everyone except the main blonde couple and the adorable golden lab gets turned into shark chow by movie’s end.
The basic problem with this film can be summed up in the fact that it is an exploitative trashy B movie monster flick-rated PG-13. What no profanity, nudity, or violence worth the R rating?!? Well where do you get off charging modern ticket prices for that? In all seriousness though, the first rule of making films in the “Creature Eats Annoying Humans” genre is that you have to embrace the genre; heck you have to come running at it in a field of flowers, take it in both arms, and you have to kiss it full on the lips or there is no point in the whole exercise.
There has to be gory goodness and plenty of it; and you have to come up with something creative for it too. Instead of having the eye candy girls just show off in bikinis you need full frontal or at least something exciting in way of a strip sequence.Mere ogling of Katharine McPhee in a black bra isn’t nearly sleazy enough. Couldn’t they have thrown in a wet t-shirt contest or girl on makeout scene?!?
Admittedly we get to see the (very nice) bare backside of artist model Blake (Chris Zylka) but that’s about it. There’s no humor to speak of; (though, there might be 20 years from now when this movie inevitably gets taken down by Mystery Science Theatre 3000).
The inclusion of many different kinds of sharks for snack time admittedly is a good touch and in a better directed film could have made for some visceral fun but David Ellis fails to make proper use of his animal stars the way he did in the far FAR superior Snakes on a Plane. Since a movie like this is going to have nothing in the way of plot or acting to recommend it we in the audience deserve to have our most basest instincts pandered to with a little panache, thank you very much. Rent Piranha 3D if you want to see this thing done right.
