Shark Night / Requins (Bilingual) [DVD]

Features

• Type: DVD
• Studio: Seville Pictures
• Language(s): english, french
• Subtitle(s): english, spanish
• Actor(s): Sara Paxton, Dustin Milligan, Alyssa Diaz

Arriving by boat at her family's Louisiana lake island cabin, Sara (Sara Paxton) and her friends quickly strip down to their swimsuits for a weekend of fun in the sun. But when star football player Malik (Sinqua Walls) stumbles from the salt-water lake with his arm torn off, the party mood quickly evaporates. Assuming the injury was caused by a freak wake-boarding accident, the group realizes they have to get Malik to a hospital on the other side of the lake, and fast. But as they set out in a tiny speedboat, the college friends discover the lake has been stocked with hundreds of massive, flesh-eating sharks! As they face one grisly death after another, Sara and the others struggle desperately to fend off the sharks, get help and stay alive long enough to reach the safety of dry land. ----- Un groupe de sept personnes s'installe pour des vacances dans une résidence de Louisiane, près d'un lac. Le paradis devient cauchemardesque lorsqu'ils découvrent que le lac est infesté de requins. Shark Night 3D is one of those movies whose reputation has actually been enhanced in some quarters because it was near universally savaged by critics. Plus, many forays into schlock don't stride so boldly and unapologetically as Shark Night 3D does, proudly shouting the B-movie axiom that one person's "bad" is another person's "awesome!" There's another level of schlocky credibility built in to Shark Night 3D thanks to director David R. Ellis, the man responsible for Snakes on a Plane, which not everyone thought was "bad" by a long shot. (He also helmed Cellular, Final Destination 2, and The Final Destination, among others, which all had plenty of legitimate fans.) Ellis clearly had fun with the material and probably instructed all his actors and technicians to keep their tongues planted firmly in cheek, an attitude that greatly enhances the viewing experience too. Taking its derivative cue straight from the playbook of teen slasher films, Shark Night 3D follows a gang of college buds into a backcountry bayou for some sex 'n' booze-fueled R & R and then picks them off in cleverly gruesome ways. And with the title serving as fiendish giveaway, the blood-and-guts cues exploit the combination of a favorite cinematic monster and technology fad with mischievous glee. The Louisiana lake house owned by one of the kids is home base for vacation water sports and becomes a refuge after the sharks start making their mysterious appearances. Part of the fun of Shark Night 3D comes from the fact that there isn't just one creature doing the biting, there's a whole fleet, including a great white, a hammerhead, and several other species only sharkologists and creative 3D special effects technicians could identify. A detached arm signals the start of the bloodshed, killing the fun of a waterskiing excursion, but making way for an amusing search-and-rescue mission. Within the confines of its PG-13 rating, Shark Night 3D continues to up the blood-frenzied teeth-in-flesh ante, throwing in exploding boats, shark-pursued jet skis, repulsive redneck townies, and a local sheriff whose friendly-guy act is just a little too suspicious. An explanation for the sharks' presence at the placid lake is finally offered as the body count and cleverly designed 3D "boos!" add up in very short order (what better use of 3D than to have a shark breaching right up into your face?). Another inspired detail of Shark Night 3D's otherwise insipid script is citing the Discovery Channel's Shark Week and the underground Faces of Death series as motives for stocking a lake with killer beasts. For simple entertainment value even a Shark Week rerun would be a hands-down winner over Shark Night 3D. But for schlock and awe--or maybe awe of schlock--the fake killer creatures of Shark Night 3D make an amusing diversion for those who appreciate bad for bad's sake. -- Ted Fry