With the recent waves of 3D films hitting the multiplexes these days, I'm glad that the horror genre--particularly the monster movie subgenre--hasn't been left out. Last summer, we had the Piranha remake in 3D
; this September, we'll be getting Shark Night 3D. The teaser poster (as seen above) was just released the week, and you can see the first official trailer here on YouTube.It's been almost 30 years since Jaws 3D
, so I think that it's about time that we got another 3D monster shark movie that uses the latest 3D technology. It would've been nice if someone at Universal took the initiative to convert Jaws 3D from anaglyph 3D to high definition field sequential 3D for distribution on Blu-ray but that will probably never happen, so Shark Night 3D is the next best thing. Read on for more thoughts about this upcoming 3D deep water fright flick.Shark Night 3D will be using a combination of animatronic and CGI sharks, much like Deep Blue Sea
. (In fact, Walt Conti, the effects wizard who built the animatronic sharks in Deep Blue Sea, also built the sharks for Shark Night 3D. Sweet!) The movie will take place in a salt water lake in the Louisiana Gulf, although I'm not sure how many sharks will be in the movie. Another good thing is that Shark Night 3D does not have to deal with the same obstacles that Jaws 3D did, such as the following:* Monster sharks trapped in a man-made enclosure. Maybe it's just me, but there's something less scary about a monster shark that's stuck inside of an artificial environment. It dulled the shocks in Jaws 3D, as it also did in Deep Blue Sea. What scared me about the sharks in Jaws
and Jaws 2
is that the sharks were out in the open water, so you could never be sure of exactly where and when they would appear next and thus added to the suspense. You don't have that kind of unpredictability in a man-made lagoon or a sinking research facility.* Sea World. This one still irks me the most after all these years. A movie about a big, voracious monster running loose in a popular theme park should be an instant cult classic. Unfortunately, no one who owns a popular theme park would ever run the risk of allowing his/her park to be portrayed as being unsafe and fatal, even if the threat in the portrayal is a complete fiction. This is what makes Jaws 3D such an oddity: The owners of Sea World wanted to profit off of the publicity that would come with being associated with the Jaws franchise (they even put Jaws 3D's 35 foot long animatronic shark on display in their park as part of the movie's promotion), but they obviously refused to allow the filmmakers to shoot any scenes involving the deaths of its tourists and costumed water skiers. In other words, Sea World wanted to have its cake and eat it too--and Universal was willing to let them, of course--and the end result was a very tepid 3D creature feature.
I can only imagine what the first pre-production discussion of Jaws 3D must have been like between the suits at Sea World and Universal: "You want to shoot a Jaws movie here at Sea World? With TWO killer sharks, not just one? Absolutely, go right ahead! The kids will love it. But you can't have the sharks eating the tourists. I don't care if it's a shark movie, you can't kill any tourists--not one. It would be bad publicity for the park. You can't have the sharks eating any of our water skiers, either. Yes, I know that you had a skier eaten in the last Jaws movie, but you can't eat OUR skiers. They're performers who entertain our customers, and that other skier was just a nobody. Behind-the-scenes staff, such as technicians and divers? Sure, nobody goes to our park to see them. You can have your sharks eat as many of those employees as you want ...."
* Alan Landsburg. From what I've read over the years, Universal's agreement to let Alan Landsburg produce the third Jaws movie was a horrible idea, because many of his decisions and demands ultimately undermined the production and final cut of Jaws 3D. Read more about Landsburg's wacky Jaws antics over at the very informative Jaws 3D fan site.
Without having to face problems like these, Shark Night 3D should be a blood-soaked blast of sharksploitation fun. Yet if this film turns out to be a bust, don't worry. There's also the Piranha 3DD sequel, which is coming out in November. Bon appetit!
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