Shark Night 3D: “Bad” By Design

Motherfucking sharks eating people in a motherfucking lake?! In motherfucking 3D?! Take my money and hand over the glasses.

The end of summer has arrived and with it another film by David R. Ellis, director of the high-flying, serpentine epic Snakes On A Plane. This time he presents Sharks In A Lake a.k.a. Shark Night 3D. This movie is not going to win any awards for cinematic excellence, but if you want to learn how to write a really terrible script full of ridiculous situations and awful dialogue, then this is the film to watch. However, that's kind of the point of Shark Night 3D, so you can't take it too seriously.

The premise is simple: A weekend getaway turns tragic when a group of college co-eds get trapped at an island lake house in the Louisiana Gulf whose waters are teeming with man-eating sharks. The film opens with the obligatory Jaws tribute where a young woman is attacked in a lake. Unlike the iconic opening scene in Jaws, this scene has absolutely no suspense. We get the cliched reversal when what we think is a shark turns out to be her boyfriend, and from there it's only a matter of time until she gets eaten. Sure there's the shark cam shot of her treading water, but we've seen it all before, so the scares and suspense are gone, not to mention it's daytime and she's swimming in shallow water.

Opening scene complete, it's time to meet our shark bait, a shallow, underdeveloped bunch of the usual suspects. There's slacker Gordon (Joel David Moore), football star Malik (Sinqua Walls), fratboy hunk Blake (Chris Zylka), party girls Beth (Katharine McPhee) and Maya (Alyssa Diaz), pre-med nerd Nick (Dustin Milligan), and troubled blonde Sara (Sara Paxton). Do we care about any of these characters? Of course not. It's hard to imagine Nick as the underdog nerd when he spends most of the movie running around shirtless looking like an Abercrombie model. You can't just throw glasses on someone and call them a nerd, but they do and it fails. Protagonist Sara is the most developed of the group. She has invited them to her parents lake house for the weekend, a place she hasn't visited in three years because of a tragedy that still haunts her. Deep stuff. She now spends most of her time with her golden lab, and the dog is really the only character we care about the entire film. Seriously, every time that poor dog went into the lake, I feared for his life. The people? Hell no. But don't kill the dog!

On the way to the lake house our victims encounter a group of locals who wandered off the set of Deliverance because horror movies are just better with demented hillbillies. One of them happens to be Sara's old boyfriend Dennis (Chris Carmack) who we later learn is at the center of Sara's dark past. Conflict ensues, setting the stage for what is to come, but first we need to get these meatbags out of their clothes and into the water.

As Malik shows off his professional wakeboarding skills, our first shark makes its appearance. Malik is attacked and washes up onshore minus an arm. When they try to get him to the nearest hospital, the shark sends their boat crashing into a conveniently placed gas pump resulting in a huge, gratuitous explosion sending fire and debris shooting towards the audience. Now they're trapped on the island with sharks in the water, no cell phone coverage, and Malik bleeding to death. Let the insanity begin.

Characters are devoured one-by-one, but the movie never achieves the creative death scenes we've come to expect in horror films. It's all very uninspired stuff. Yes, sharks fly off the screen in a fury of jaws and teeth, which is pretty cool, but this film is begging for copious amounts of dismemberment, decapitation, and blood. Minus the gore, it should at least be scary, but like the opening scene, there is no suspense at all; I jumped in my seat once. The poster for Shark Night 3D is scarier than the actual movie, which is too bad because if Jaws taught us anything it's that very real terrors lurk in the water, so swim at your own risk. Ok, I'll admit it. I just wanted to see 3D boobs. Damn you PG-13! Maybe there's an R-rated director's cut on the horizon.

Though the movie lacks suspense, it fully delivers on absurd moments, making it more comedy than horror. The film is at its most ridiculous when it attempts to inject emotion into the characters. I really hope the director wasn't trying to be sincere because the character development fails in every way due to terrible dialogue and horrible acting. When Sarah was pouring her heart out to Nick about her tragic past, a woman in the theater started chuckling. This soon grew to a high-pitched squeal that proved contagious. I missed most of Sara's story because I was laughing so hard, tears streaming down my face, but it had something to do with a diving accident that ended with Sara running over her boyfriend's face with an outboard motor. The other standout moment is when Malik drags himself from his deathbed and wades into the water seeking revenge on the shark that killed his girlfriend. Armed with a spear, he fights a hammerhead, repeatedly punching it in the face before driving the spear through its head. Let that sink in. A gravely wounded, one-armed man, punching a hammerhead shark in the face. The audience was consumed with laughter.

At this point, you're probably wondering how the sharks got into the lake in the first place. Not to spoil it, but the answer involves our redneck antagonists and a money-making scheme inspired by Discovery Channel's annual Shark Week event. Yes, really.

Shark Night 3D is a B movie that would be perfectly at home on SyFy. You can't take it seriously, and it doesn't want you to anyway. You can view this movie as either mindless, popcorn fun or just another piece of pop-culture trash heralding the end of civilization. If you do plunk down your hard earned cash to see it, be sure to stay through the end credits to witness… well, I can't even describe it, but it's more comedy gold.