Audiences for a movie called “Shark Night 3-D” probably don’t ask for much: Some gore, a few underwater shots, and maybe a nude scene with uninhibited spring-breakers.
As its PG-13 rating might suggest, the film delivers few of the aforementioned elements and tries to compensate with raw drama.
Between its lazy script and flat-out amateurish performances, the film winds up a laughable spectacle which buoys no more than five minutes before viewers want their money back.
The film opens on a naive college girl named Sara (Sara Paxton) who spends the weekend at her Louisiana lake house with six close friends. After one of them gets his arm bitten off, the group realizes that the water swarms with sharks.
By mere process of everyone-else-gets-eaten, it’s up to the shy academic of the group, Nick (Dustin Milligan) to find and stop whoever placed the creatures into the lake.
The film awkwardly flaps its PG-13 fins. Topless girls turn away from the camera, the shark-attack shots obscure the action and the most lascivious dialogue references “going downtown.”
While R-rated fare is certainly not commendable in its own right, admittedly distasteful gimmicks can add interest that teen-horror films lack.
They’re sorely missed here, mainly because the story is ludicrous. The villains have implanted sharks with cameras, hoping to sell videos to God knows who. At the same time, Sara’s old diving coach seeks revenge on her because of an accident which left a literal scratch on his face.
These two script wrongs don’t make a right, just an extraordinarily stupid story.
To add insult to injury, the actors bring contrivance to a contrived script. The bigger the emotion, the more their eyes bulge. You can call that a performance method, but it only works for cartoon characters.
