From the mind of David E. Ellis, director of “Snakes on a Plane,” comes a film about sharks in a lake entitled “Shark Night”. Mr. Ellis obviously has a thing for animals at locations were they shouldn’t be. Even his first film “Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco” was about 2 dogs and a cat lost in the bay area. I’m thinking of working up a treatment for a movie called “Bears on a Boat” and sending it over to him. Couldn’t hurt.
“Shark Night” (Originally titled “Shark Night 3D”) gets about everything wrong. The who, what and why of the film are all clumsily presented.
The Who: Ripped directly from the “Horror Movie Plot Text Book” we see a group of college kids heading to a lake house in the Bayou of Louisiana for a fun weekend of beer pong and partial nudity. Everyone in the group is a lazy stereotype: The Black Athlete, The Bad Girl, The Nerd etc. Along the way the meet some more cookie cut characters, this time it is blatantly racist and sex depraved rednecks.
The What: Once at the house, the girls strip down to bikinis while the boys put on their board shorts for some quality time in the water. Unfortunately this lake is a salt-water lake and the home to several species of computer generated man-eating sharks. One by one the innocent are torn to bits by the ferocious fish.
“Shark Night” was conceived of and released shortly after a similar film, “Piranha 3D,” and it seems pretty obvious that this is case of the former film trying to emulate the latter. The problem is “Piranha 3D” was a celebration of exploitation films of the past and reveled in the sex and gore to such a heightened point that it made the film highly entertaining. Most importantly, that movie didn’t take itself seriously. “Shark Night” makes the mistake of being a PG-13 rip off; no nudity (all though we see plenty of bare backs), no gore and no sense of humor. In other words, every reason to watch one of these cheesy flicks has been removed. The result is a pointless retread that plays more like a film you would find on the SyFy Channel on a Saturday afternoon right after “Boa vs. Python” or “Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus”.
The Why: The reveal of why the sharks are in the lake in the first place is one of the most ridiculous, eye rolling plot turns I have ever seen. It is impossible to think that they writers couldn’t come up with ANYTHING better. The intent here could have been at humor but it comes across as just plain stupid.