Richard Crouse

Didn’t Hollywood learn anything from “Jaws 3D”? Killer sharks in 3D didn’t work then, and they don’t work in “Shark Night 3D,” a movie so awful that charging the extra 3D premium per ticket seems like usury. Quick, somebody call the movie police!

The set up is just as dumb as the movie. A group of good looking college students decide to spend the weekend at school hottie Sara’s (Sara Paxton) family home in the Louisiana Bayou. One by one the friends become shark bait for an inexplicably hungry shark (or sharks!) lurking in the salt water lake.

“Shark Night 3D” could have been a fun homage to the Roger Corman exploitation films of the 1970s. It has all the ingredients—an unlikely premise, scary swamp people with facial scars, hungry creatures and, of course, the holy trinity of these movies, bikinis, babes and finely sculpted abs. There’s even a redneck who lectures one of the students about “moral relativism.”

All the ingredients are there except for a sense of fun. “Piranha 3D” from earlier this year was an unexpected box office hit because it didn’t take itself seriously. It doesn’t have the gory good fun of that movie although it does have some unintentional laughs, one of the dumbest action scenes ever (a motor boat speeds across the bayou, but is later revealed to have only travelled about six feet) and the cascade of bubbles that comes flying off the screen every time the camera submerges has to be one of the most annoying 3D effects EVER. Couple that with characters so uninteresting you hope they get eaten by sharks, and quickly, and a cheesy Littlest Hobo moment and you have the worst fish experience since Uncle Jed ate that rancid sushi.

At one point in the film a character emotes, “Stay out of the water!” I’ll amend that line, “Stay out of the theatre!” You’ll be better off.