Shark Night 3D – Review

Reviews, Theatrical Reviews, Top Story

Stay out of the water…the worst film of the year has arrived.

Movies don’t get much worse than Shark Night 3D. I know what you’re thinking, “Well, it is called Shark Night 3D, what were you expecting?” Well, a fun, mindlessly entertaining film would have sufficed. Instead what audiences are left with is an incredibly dull film with a story that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and one of the worst uses of 3D since its re-emergence into pop culture.

Shark Night 3D sees a group of college students head out to a lake house in the Louisiana Gulf where they hope to spend the weekend drinking, partying, and hooking up — the perfect cliche set-up to any horror film. Unfortunately (or should I say, as per usual) things don’t go as planned as only hours after their arrival one member of the group has an accident and loses an arm while out water-skiing on the lake. Luckily Nick, the film’s hero, is a med student and is able to stop the bleeding before his friend dies. Being the hero that he is, Nick dives back into the water (without knowing the real reason behind the accident) in hopes to find his friend’s arm in enough time to get him to a hospital and have it reattached. He soon learns, however, that this was no normal boating accident and that he and his friends are being hunted by sharks that have somehow found their way into this salt water lake.

The basic premise, while cliché, sounds like it could work. One of the main problems is that this is an absolutely huge lake, so to think that nobody else has had any shark sightings with lake houses and such scattered all over the place is completely unbelievable. I mean, the opening scene seems like it’s trying to replicate the one from Jaws on some level with a young woman being out in the water alone, and yet after her death you’d think there’d be a full scale investigation on the lake as to what happened to her. Not the case here, however, as that’d be far too logical for something like this.

Another glaring problem is just how many sharks this lake contains. One would think that the havoc Jaws wreaked as just a single great white shark would prove that even two sharks would be a scary thought. But why stop at two when you could have dozens and dozens? That’s right, dozens of different species of sharks (from hammerhead, to tiger, all the way down to the little cookie-cutter sharks) are all living in this one lake and yet somehow nobody knows about them. Well, nobody except the one who put them there.

That’s right, this isn’t just a shark movie, it’s a movie about a killer who uses sharks as his weapon! The main problem with this is that the film never explains where this person gets all their different sharks, how they get them into this lake with nobody being the wiser, or how they seem to control them. The fact that these sharks only arrive when it’s convenient and are incredibly aggressive in a completely nonsensical way lead you to question when the killer is going to reveal that they’re actually a shark whisperer. I’m no expert, but I would think sharks aren’t the type to repeatedly chase down boats as if they know they’re filled with yummy food.

When a film has 3D in the title you would hope that if they got anything right in the making of said project that it would be the 3D. That’s definitely not the case with Shark Night 3D. The film is so dark and the underwater sequences so cloudy and muddy that it’s a constant strain to see what’s happening on the screen (not that anything of value is ever happening there). The 3D effects are completely useless with only one or two forced instances of things flying into the screen. It’s an absolute cash grab for a movie that doesn’t even deserve generic ticket prices.

The only pros for Shark Night 3D are the decent acting job by those in the main group and the ways in which the film keeps them on the water. It’d obviously be hard to have a horror film about sharks terrorizing a group of college students if they were able to stay on land the entire time so kudos must be given to the writers for that. Unfortunately that’s all they do right as the rest of the movie bites.


Director: David R. Ellis
Notable Cast: Sara Paxton, Dustin Milligan, Chris Carmack, Katharine McPhee, Sinqua Walls, Joel David Moore, Alyssa Diaz, Chris Zylka, Donal Logue
Writer(s): Will Hayes, Jesse Studenberg

Brendan Campbell was here when Inside Pulse Movies began, and he’ll be here when it finishes - in 2012, when a cataclysmic event wipes out the servers, as well as everyone else on the planet other than John Cusack and those close to him. Brendan’s the #1 supporter of Keanu Reeves, a huge fan of popcorn flicks and a firm believer that sheer entertainment can take a film a long way. He currently resides in Canada, where, for reasons stated above, he’s attempting to get closer to John Cusack.