When 3D first came into theaters in the 1950s, a slew of bad horror movies came out just to try and take advantage of the technology. The concept was to use the theater as some sort of spook alley and give a cheap thrill, so little things like acting and plot were discarded in place of having more monsters jump out. This proud, money grubbing cheap trick of a tradition is being proudly followed by Shark Night 3D. It’s just too bad the film couldn’t follow even this simple formula.
Shark Night 3D starts off with a plot somewhere between Sweet Home Alabama and American Pie. A group of college students decide to go to one of their childhood summer homes in the middle of a swamp. The whole sexy vacation fell apart when they all find out that the swamp is full of man-eating sharks. The film then systematically goes about killing every character with a different type of shark.
The film’s plot isn’t just flimsy. In parts it just doesn’t make sense. One character played by Dustin Milligan (Supernatural) is characterized as a thick-glasses nerd whose massive X-Box score and need to study prevents him from ever getting a woman. Then he takes off his shirt and he’s just as chiseled as the football player jock guy. With him there’s also the tough as nails punk chick, played by Katherine McPhee (Community), who ends up being the first to completely freak out. A little consistency in the murder victims would’ve been nice.
Of course the real main characters of the film are the sharks. It really isn’t hard to make such an incredibly powerful killing machine scary, but Shark Night 3D somehow misses the entire concept and makes sharks not scary. The best thing to compare this to is the classic Jaws, which wrote the book on shark horror. Probably the best thing that Jaws did was not show the shark all the time. Stephen Spielberg knew that the less the audience saw the beast, the more their own imagination would fill in the gaps. Shark Night 3D’s sharks keep jumping from being seen and not being seen to the point that it becomes a visual mess. To make things worse the sharks are so incredibly overpowered, since they constantly do things like outrun motorboats and wave runners to catch the tasty humans on them. In a world where Shark Week is the most popular thing on TV, to make these well-known creatures so ridiculous is insulting. It’d be like a film about dogs where, out of nowhere, the dogs all spontaneously obtained heat vision.
The saddest part of this entire train wreck is that the shark attacks themselves aren’t even that cool. The film sits safely at PG-13, which means the violence is mostly toned down and kept under water. It worked in Jaws but the point of the 3D horror is to throw around the gore. Other 3D gorefests like Saw 3D ditch the pre-teen audience to really get into throwing blood and guts at the audience, which of course is the point of the whole thing. Nobody goes to a romantic comedy for the graphics and nobody goes to a 3D shark movie to see water splash around then fill with red food coloring.
Shark Night 3D is rated PG-13, mostly because it’s lame.
