FILM

USA 2011 91 mins Dir: David R. Ellis Starring: Sara Paxton, Dustin Milligan, Chris Carmack, Sinqua Walls

With two months to go until brilliantly titled sequel 'Piranha 3DD' is released, opportunistic bottom-feeders are eager to cash in on our natural craving for a 3D aquatic blood'n'boobies fix. Whereas Alexandre Aja's 'Piranha 3D' was a slyly funny take on the genre - or a 'guilty pleasure', if you're a PC wretch afflicted by moral qualms - 'Shark Night' is just a bog-standard piece of hackwork from the director who blessed us with 'Snakes on a Plane'. Yup - 'Sharks in a Lake'.

Hot college minx Sara Paxton invites her buff buddies to spend a weekend back at her folks' luxury Louisiana island abode. Along the way they run into sinister redneck Chris Carmack, with whom she has a history. Should you be interested, this is pretty much the same plot as the upcoming unnecessary 'Straw Dogs' remake. In what we might charitably interpret as a post-ironic twist, Token Brother Sinqua Walls is the first to get chomped in the saltwater lake, losing an arm in the process. Obviously, they have to get him to a hospital quickly. But that doesn't happen, largely because everybody behaves very stupidly indeed.

So what are the sharks doing there? That would be telling. But the explanation, when it comes, is spectacularly dumb. Constrained by the certificate, Ellis doesn't even deliver the gore and nudity we paid for, offering instead some crappy effects straight out of one of those tiresome 'Mega Shark' movies. Walls gets the silliest scene, waving his stump angrily as he wades out to take revenge on the rotten toothy beast that scoffed his limb. But Paxton deserves at least some credit for suffering seemingly endless trauma without ever changing out of her bikini. (Robin Askew)

website www.iamrogue.com/sharknight3d/fullsite/index.html

Opens: September 30

Copyright Robin Askew 2011