It’s one thing to watch a bad movie.  It’s quite another to watch a bad movie that knows it’s a bad movie. Those can sometimes be enjoyable.  But when you have a complete cinematic failure like ‘Shark Night’, a film that knows its bad but commits the unforgivable crime of not being any fun, you end up with one of the very worst films of the year.  This is literally a shark attack thriller with no teeth (not to mention no thrills or anything to actually smile about).  It’s poorly acted, cheesy, boring, and full of more plot holes than you can possibly imagine.  It’s PG-13 rated exploitation, which pretty much takes away the entire point of the genre.  Director David R. Ellis sucks all the fun out of things, which is something he normally doesn’t do.  It doesn’t help that he’s been given perhaps the worst script of the year, but still…jeez. This flick is so many kinds of terrible it’s actually hard to believe.  It’s easily going to be seen again on my Bottom 10 of 2011 list later on in the year.  Yes, it’s that bad.

For a group of horny (though somewhat less than expected) college students, a weekend at one of their lake houses in Louisiana sounds like a perfect time.  For Nick (Dustin Milligan), it’s a chance to finally try and get with his longtime crush Sara (Sara Paxton), whose family owns the house.  Along for the ride are their friends, including Malik (Sinqua Walls), Maya (Alyssa Diaz), Beth (Katharine McPhee), and Gordon (Joel David Moore).  It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt, namely Malik losing his arm in what seems to be a boating accident.  Soon however, it’s revealed that somehow there are sharks in this lake.  How did they get there, you ask?  Well, we’re never actually told (since it’s more or less impossible in this flick), but they were deliberately put there by a few bad eggs to then capture the feeding frenzy on the internet for paying viewers.  Yes, the plot is that freaking bad.  As the coeds dwindle down, things get sillier and sillier, but never enjoyable.  The sharks aren’t even that vicious.  It’s just utter crap all around with this one.

The acting is as forgettable and cartoonish as you’d expect.  Most of the cast stare off into space like idiots, or overact like mad.  The main group of Paxton, Milligan, McPhee, Diaz, Walls, and Moore sometimes have decent chemistry, but more often than not just make you roll your eyes and sigh.  The rest of the victims/morons/villains/who cares consists of Chris Carmack, Chris Zylka, Donal Logue, and Joshua Leonard.  Logue and Leonard seem to know they’re part of a disaster and at least go sufficiently over the top.  The rest just drift along.  I guess the CGI sharks are the best actors in the film, but even they leave more than a little to be desired.

Ellis is not an untalented director, and after having a long career as a stunt man and second unit director (which he still does from time to time, recently on the underrated ‘Cop Out’), he’s managed to make a few guilty pleasures, but here he utterly fails.  There’s no environment, tension, or any style.  It’s just plain boring, and he seems bored.  Perhaps with an R rating he might have been able to do some weird stuff, but they just play it safe, which is a huge mistake here (they should have taken some cues from the fun B movie last year ‘Piranha 3D’).  The scribes for this, if you can call them that, are Will Hayes and Jesse Studenberg, and they do a godawful job writing the film.  It just fails on every level, making it incredibly annoying to sit through.

I hated ‘Shark Night’ with a passion, mainly because it completely lacks that.  This is so bland, you can’t even believe it.  I don’t need gore fests every single time a shark movie comes out, but when you can’t come close to the low standards set by those Syfy channel movies like ‘Dinoshark’ and ‘Sharktopus’, then what are you trying to do here?  It’s just abysmally bad.  I can’t even say it’s worth seeing to laugh at, since you’ll just end up crying…

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