Shark Night


Shark Night is a 2011 American horror film directed by David R. Ellis and written by Will Hayes and Jesse Studenberg. It stars Sara Paxton, Katharine McPhee, Alyssa Diaz, Dustin Milligan, and Joel David Moore. The film, which was negatively received by critics and grossed $40 million worldwide, was released in Real D 3D and Digital 3D. This is Ellis's final film before his death.

Plot

The story revolves around seven college friends from Tulane University who spend a weekend at a lake house near Louisiana's Lake Pontchartrain. Shortly after their arrival, the group experiences terrifying salt-water shark attacks.

Cast

took place in the fall of 2010 in Louisiana around the Ark-La-Tex and at Caddo Lake in Uncertain, Texas.
The sharks featured in the film were animatronic sharks built by Edge Innovations, who previously built sharks for movies such as Deep Blue Sea, Austin Powers in Goldmember, and even the Orca in Free Willy. According to Walt Conti, the head of Edge Innovations, two models for each shark were built. One "attacker" and one "swimmer." Each of which required very different internal mechanisms. "Sharks are this total contrast of stealthy, cruising lurking and these intense bursts of power," Conti says. "We split those two behaviors into two different types of models, and optimized each to do one of those things best."
Although the movie was always going to be titled "Shark Night 3D" overseas Ellis fought for a name change for the North American release, at one point wanting to release the film under the title "Untitled Shark Thriller 3D. Bloody Disgusting would later compare the proposed title of the film to Elis's previous film Snakes on a Plane.

Reception

Shark Night 3D received negative reviews from critics. Rotten Tomatoes reports that the film holds only a 19% approval rating from 70 critics, with an average score of 3.42/10. The critics consensus reads, 'A joyless excursion into the water that doesn't even produce good gore or nudity thanks to the neutered PG-13 rating." The film has a normalized score of 22/100 on Metacritic, indicating generally unfavorable reviews. The positive reviews praised
the film for providing "dumb fun."