Shark Night (Blu-ray)
Kristy Sturdivant
January 24th, 2012
A fun, relaxing weekend on a lake in Louisiana turns deadly for a group of seven college students in SHARK NIGHT. When one of the gang is suddenly attacked by a shark, the remaining friends must search for a way to save him and themselves while stranded on an island with enemies lurking above and below the surface.
When a film is this bad it’s tough to even pinpoint an exact reason why the failure occurred. Most of the time there is a specific ingredient in the movie that throws the entire project into a tailspin of destruction. Usually it’s either bad dialogue, terrible directing or subpar acting. In the case of SHARK NIGHT, all of these things occurred and it makes one wonder how a film like this ever received the green light.
We’ll start with the story which in itself is absolutely ridiculous. Do not read any further if you don’t want details, this is your official SPOILER ALERT. The story revolves around a group of friends hanging out at a lake house, on an island, with sharks in the surrounding waters. This is probably a concept that could have been overlooked if the writer gave the audience a good reason, but here’s where it gets a little ridiculous. Apparently a couple of rednecks were able to acquire various species of man-eating sharks, attach cameras and homing devices on the animals and then guide the killing machines to their victims. Why would they do this? Two reasons, one to exact revenge on an ex-girlfriend and her friends, and second, to put the footage of the attacks online to presumably make money (though that was never really specified). Those are some pretty smart hillbillies.
If one could get past the silly story (which this writer usually can for these types of movies), the audience would still have to contend with the horrible directing and terrible CGI/anamatronic sharks. The entire film has a very grainy, yellowish tinge which was probably to signify the swampy surrounding, but really just gave the feeling of a bad B-movie. And the sharks, oh how sad they were. Forget the fact that they could jump about ten feet out of the water to attack their prey, but they just looked so fake and quite honestly weren’t even in the film enough. If you are going to call a film SHARK NIGHT, it would be nice if at least fifty percent of your film had some kind of shark footage instead of maybe twenty minutes. The only semi-redeemable part of the movie would be the acting. Although it was still average, at least the actors did the best they could with what they had to work with.
So should you bother with this film? Personally, if I wanted to watch a cheesy shark movie I would reach for the remote and try to catch a rerun of that film MEGASHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS or just pop DEEP BLUE SEA in the Blu-ray player. I’ll get less gore with these two movies (which I prefer) but definitely more sharks and I won’t have that hint of nausea from watching people jump into a greenish tinged lake.
BLU-RAY REVIEW
Video: The original film was released in 3D, but this Blu-ray version is in 2D only. Most of the video transfer is clear, but it does get a bit unrealistic when objects that are clearly supposed to be utilizing the 3D technology was transferred to the 2D release.
Audio: There are several instances where the background noise overpowers the dialogue, but most of the time the audio was satisfactory.
Shark Attack! Kill Machine! (5:43): This is all the attacks in the film compressed into a small featurette. I can’t believe they would do this because no one will ever watch the film again.
Shark Night’s Survival Guide (4:08): This is shark attack trivia with clips from the film thrown in.
Fake Sharks, Real Scares (5:24): This is a featurette about the sharks in the film, both CGI and animatronic.
Ellis’ Island (4:22): A making-of featurette, with the obligatory interviews and set footage.
Theatrical Trailer
Sneak Peeks
[fbcomments]
