We're now arriving at that point in Shark Week where the good films are getting a little thin on the ground, and we're mostly left with the films that would be right at home on the SyFy Channel or alongside, say, Sharknado (please note that I resisted the urge to use any of the Sharknado movies for this, because it felt like they were just too obvious). As if to emphasize this today's film, Shark Night, was given a 3D version for extra clickbaitability (although because I prefer a life without migraines and eye strain I'm watching the 2D version).
Seven college students of varying stereotypes and degrees of obnoxiousness (ranging from "just a bit" to "counting the minutes until they die") and a dog head out for a weekend of fun at an isolated lakehouse on the Louisiana Bayou. Unfortunately for them, several sharks of various types have found their way into the lake and it's soon feeding time for them. This rapidly-dwindling number of friends have to find a way to survive and escape the lake, the sharks, and the sinister intentions of the people behind the sharks being in the lake in the first place...
Shark Night (3D) is a PG-13 horror film. Now, you might be thinking that doesn't have to be a bad thing - after all, Jaws was only a PG and it terrified audiences worldwide. To which I will counter that Jaws was not only the film that started "sharksploitation" off and got to set all the rules, but it got its PG rating because it was clever with what it did and didn't show (and also because the PG-13 rating didn't come into being until 1984). Shark Night, on the other hand, was made very specifically for a teen audience, and thus was shot and edited with a PG-13 rating in mind to maximise the potential audience share it could get. there's much more evidence on the pretty main characters/future shark food then there is on the sharks or their kills - except for one particular case which I'll get to in a moment. Even the main antagonist, supposedly "horribly scarred" from a boat propeller accident, is still quite ridiculously pretty. Shark Night is also very much a movie for the new MTV generation (and not mine, as I'm of the generation that can - only just - remember when we didn't even have an MTV), something made all the more obvious by things like a lake house montage set to hip music and played partially in fast-forward.
There are two scenes that particularly stood out to me in Shark Night, albeit for very different and not exactly positive reasons. The first was a scene in which the "jock" character, having already lost an arm to one shark, arms himself with a spear he made himself to go hunting for revenge, because apparently that's how they do it where he comes from. This might sound darkly humourous... except that this character is black, and so suddenly the whole scene takes on some slightly awkward racial implications. The other standout scene is even more problematic. One of the female characters, who would be labelled the "slut" in typecast Hollywood horror movie casting, is forced by the antagonists to strip to her underwear and then thrown to sharks who messily eat her alive, all while the antagonists make comments about how hot she looks. This is the film's only real gore scene, and it strikes me as both exploitative and maybe a bit misogynistic, especially with the comments made by the antagonists throughout.
Beyond those two scenes though, there really isn't very much else notable about Shark Night. There are a couple of moments where you can tell where the 3D would have been if I had been watching that version of the film - mainly sharks leaping out of the water at the screen. Harvey Bullock also turns up as a local sheriff so friendly with the teens that you just know he's going to be either affably useless and end up dead, or part of the whole scheme somehow. But overall the movie is just so boringly generic that it goes way beyond dull and into just plain bad. Which is a shame, as it turned out to be director David R Ellis' last film before his death in 2013. Some of Ellis' previous films included The Final Destination and Snakes on a Plane (and he actually wanted to continue with the naming convention here, suggesting Untitled 3D Shark Thriller as an alternate title) so we know that he wasn't one to normally shy away from showing gore, which means I have to assume that the film's anaemic presence was down to studio interference. A shame, because even just the wide variation of sharks used in this movie shows that someone cared about this film being more than just a vehicle to part teens with their money.
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