Shark Night

Shark Night, handled with impersonality by Snakes on a Plane pilot David R. Ellis, aspires to nothing more or less than carrying along an audience through a string of unremarkable kills, often involving high-jumping fish.

A second round is out of the question. Unless, of course, they called it "Gladys Knight 3D.'' Then all is forgiven.

The sharks are rubber and the performances are wooden and that's just about all you need to know.

The result is a movie that isn't crummy, exactly, just blah: when the freakiest teeth on screen belong not to one of Walt Conti's animatronically realized sharks but to a good-ol'-boy called Red, you know you have a problem.

Sharks have it bad enough as endangered, misunderstood predators with a terrible public relations image without seeing their serial-killing stardom drowned out by hammy acting and torture-porn villainy.

It doesn't even live up to the minimal promises of the title: There isn't enough shark action, it mostly takes place during the day, and the 3-D only asserts itself in a couple of shots.

When I wasn't laughing at the scenes of sharks leaping out of the water to attack their prey (in trees! on jetskis!) I was questioning the happy coincidence of a runaway motorboat heading directly towards a pier littered with flammable gas tanks.

An atrocious waste of time, this "Night" is one you'll quickly forget.

Predictable. Disposable. Listless. Boring. This is not how you make great horror films.

The most disturbing sequence comes after the end credits, actually, when the actors are shown performing together on a really bad rap video.

This clearly isn't a film that wants to win awards for logic, so it dives head first in to just pure idiocy, and never comes back up for air.

Never mind that the film is never scary; it also is never much *fun*.