I almost had to turn this movie off right away; not because it was so bad but because there was a dog. When one of the main characters is a dog, and it’s a shark movie, it doesn’t look good for the dog. I’m one of those people who can watch humans get sliced and diced all day long, but as soon as an animal is in danger – I’m out. (Yes, I’m one of those people.)
Shark Night 3D is a creature feature about a group of college students who head to an island home in Louisiana. Little do they know, the lake and bayoo that completely surround the house are filled with man eating sharks. I’m not sure how this is possible being that half the shark spieces in Shark Night 3D are salt water sharks. It was justified in the film that a violent storm must have driven the sharks into rivers and upstream. And while you would say, “Ok, just don’t go in the water and you’re safe,” severl predicaments pop up that force the group to make several ventures into the sharks new territory.
Shark Night 3D is fronted by fledgling scream queen Sara Paxton (Return to Halloweentown, The Last House on the Left remake, and The Innkeeper). Sara Paxton ironically plays a girl named Sara who is really dull at first, but ends up being kind of cool by the film’s end. Sara is joined on screen by Dustin Milligan (Final Destination 3, Slither, The Butterfly Effect 2, and The Messengers); Chris Carmack (The Butterfly Effect 3); Joel David Moore (Hatchet and Chillerama); Donal Logue; Joshua Leonard (The Blair Witch Project); Alyssa Diaz; and Chris Zylka (My Super Psycho Sweet 16 franchise and Piranha 3DD). American Idol’s Katharine McPhee also appears in a supporting role as the token paniced girl who gets stripped naked and…yeah, you’ll find out. Sinqua Walls plays the token black guy who gets attacked first yet walks around a portion of the movie as if nothing is wrong (while he’s missing an arm…).
I don’t know what to say about Shark Night 3D besides that you get exactly what you expect. With a name like Shark Night 3D about salt water sharks attacking college kids on an island, you can’t expect too much. It’s almost like a SyFy channel film, only a liiiiittle better. It contains one good scare that you don’t expect, and several tries at scares that you do expect. It contains your stereotypical backwoods hicks that only add to the problem at hand…or problem at…fin. Katharine McPhee stabs [something] at one point, but only once (even though [something] is trying to kill her) and this stupidity leads to her death. In another scene someone tries to outrun a shark on a jet skii instead of just going up on land where it’s safe. Some of the sharks are easily killed by pointy sticks even though sharks skin is very, very thick.
So, all in all, this movie was just really silly. I’ll write it off as nothing more than a “check film” for the actors and director David Ellis. Everything was done so poorly and it was all just really…silly. Shark Night 3D had a budget of $28,000,000 and Jaws had a budget of $9,000,000; yet the team behind Jaws was able to create a much more believable and interesting shark movie. And the shark in Jaws looked like gold compared to the CGI sharks in Shark Night 3D. I’m not sure why I even bothered buying this film On Demand…
