Movie review: Shark Night 3D

Shark Night 3D
Starring: Sara Paxton, Dustin Milligan and Chris Carmack
Dir. David R. Ellis

There are two schools of thought when it comes to the use of 3D in film. The first is it’s an important step for the development of film. The other is that 3D is a worthless addition to film.

But here’s the thing: 3D is great for making trash even trashier.

This year has been a banner year for that school of filmmaking, and I wish I could add Shark Night 3D to my list of favourite movies, but it was unfortunately beaten to the punch by Piranha 3D, another trashy 3D movie,

That movie understood the hilarity of Jerry O’Connell’s dismembered, uh, member, floating in the water after being eaten off by a pack of piranhas. Shark Night 3D lacks that sort of deranged brilliance and, despite its incidental ridiculousness, ends up as an attempt at straight 2000s horror, which means it’s mostly really boring.

The setup is about as cliched as it gets: five or six racially diverse friends go on vacation at a beach house in Louisiana. After they have sexy fun times with each other, they each die in increasingly outlandish ways by the sharks living in the lake there.

The deaths are unexciting, and the use of 3D is generally either uninspired or nauseating. But let’s talk for a moment about the plot that underpins this whole exercise. Apparently, the ex-boyfriend of one of our hapless teens has a bone to pick, and has seen fit to put 49 different breeds of sharks into the lake. His purpose? To sell tapes of the sharks murdering people to fans of Discovery Channel’s Shark Week.

How did he transport and find all those sharks or attach the cameras to their bodies? How is he going to distribute the videos? Wouldn’t someone notice somebody dumping dozens of sharks into a lake? And how did he make them so bloodthirsty, considering sharks rarely attack humans? That’s the movie I want to see!

Matthew Blackwell
Tech. Coordinator