Shark Night lacks teeth among other things

Just when you thought it was safe to watch a late summer horror movie, along comes Shark Night to prove that it's better to just stay out of the water, and in this case the theatre too.

The first and most obvious warning sign is that the movie wasn't screened for critics. That's practically a death sentence since no one who pays attention to elements of value in film can communicate their thoughts to others.

The second sign is that the opening credit sequence takes a full three minutes. The movie in its entirety is only 91 minutes long. To waste so much screen time means that the director was struggling to put together something watchable. That, and it comes complete with several scenes of sharks that don't actually occur in the movie.

You can tell right away that there will be no education, intelligence or humanity involved in the entire enterprise, only a pointless bloodbath that leaves you wanting a shower and a refund.

The third sign is everything else. Literally, the whole movie stinks so badly that you should know from the stench that there's nothing of any value for the honest ticket buyer. It's not even as good as last year's Piranhas, and that's saying something. Piranhas revelled in how it exploited human suffering while offering a smidgen of artistry with appreciable 3-D moments. None of those last two things here.

Shark Night is like watching someone fish with all the bait in the world and catch only a cold. There’s neither the subtlety of suspense like Jaws nor the slathering of excessive violence and gratuitous degradation like Piranhas. This movie lands somewhere in the low budget ho-hum category of creature feature, and it certainly lands with a dull and odorous thud.

Ellis is famous as the director of Snakes on a Plane, a movie whose title alone drove audiences in by droves but left them feeling duped. Here, he tries to piggyback success based on a resurgence of both the human versus nature and human versus inhuman yokels, all while playing on our natural fears of the unknown and isolation. Maybe this one should have been called Sharks in a Lake.

Here, a group of college friends go to a southern lakeside cottage to hang out. They encounter first an unfriendly former boyfriend and his rather rough-hewn cohort with unkempt facial hair and poor dentistry. Anyone recall Deliverance? Not long afterward, sharks start taking bites out of the visitors like they know that freshmen mean fresh meat. Anyone see Lake Placid? Some sinister deviant has obviously interfered with nature. The story actually has more in common with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre than any of the aforementioned titles but it shares the same bloodline as all of them.

It is completely unrealistic and contains nothing redemptive within a storyline whose plot is as thin as watery gruel. It is awful, boring, pointless and dehumanizing.

This is really just a great example of bad acting, writing, directing, production and even conceptualization. So what if the sharks are animatronic and also computer generated? Playing with puppets in the bathtub would be a lot more believable. The tropes of stock characters and unoriginal situations and plot points only play to the lowest common denominator of modern horror entertainment: the bloodier the better. Whatever happened to leaving the worst for the audience’s own imagination?

This creature feature truly is dead in the water. Worse than that, it also does much to counteract the truth that sharks are not mindless killing machines. Peter Benchley, the original author of Jaws, spent years trying to dispel the myth that he helped propagate. Now, 36 years after the movie, sharks are slaughtered to the point of endangerment and extinction. Go see Sharkwater if you want to see a real horror movie.