Shark Night 3D
Say this for the 3D cheesefest known as “Shark Night”– it beats “Jaws 3D” all to Hell and back creatively speaking, and it doesn’t fare too badly against “Jaws: The Revenge” either. At least it plausibly, if hilariously, tried to explain how 40-plus species of sharks made their way into the swamps of Louisiana so they could feed on horny college students taking a little siesta from their studies (and their common sense, but that’s par for the course for a horror movie); I’m still waiting for a rational explanation as to how a great white shark made its way from Martha’s Vineyard to the Bahamas to terrorize the rest of the Brody family.
Where this piece of late-Summer, early-Fall schlock from director David R. Ellis (no stranger to 3D, with “The Final Destination,” or schlock, with “Snakes on a Plane”) loses me is someone’s bright idea to release this with a PG-13 rating. Seriously, folks; at least last summer’s ridiculous, co-ed munch-fest “Piranha 3D” had the good decency to give us copious amounts of gratuitous nudity and over-the-top gore (not to mention cameos by Elizabeth Shue and Christopher Lloyd), and that film lacked the ingenious hook of a group of rednecks who have populated a salt water lake in Louisiana with sharks so that they could videotape the sharks killing the unlucky teens who decide to vacation there. Their rationale? The longest-running week of programming on cable is Shark Week; imagine how rich they could get if people paid for shark snuff online. I don’t expect much out of a film like this in terms of writing and acting– although my friend Carrie, with whom I saw the film, had some great comments on the medical inaccuracies in the film –and Hell, I can forgive the sometimes less-than-convincing shark effects (although I will give them credit for coming up with some awesome death scenes). But without a moment like Samuel L. Jackson saying that he’s had it with these “motherf!#$in’ snakes on this motherf!#$in’ plane,” or Christopher Lloyd’s scientist going bat-crap crazy over prehistoric piranhas, it’s hard to enjoy B-moviemaking that thinks adding 3D to the equation will be enough to overlook the fact that this film just doesn’t get silly enough to make for deliriously mindless fun.
