YMMV / Shark Night

• Best Known for the Fanservice: Sara and Beth spending most of the movie in tight bikinis and Blake, Malik, and Nick being shirtless are two of the better known aspects of the film.
• Complete Monster:
  • Dennis Crimm is the de facto head of the Snuff Film operation involving setting sharks loose in lake to get tourists killed, having made at least 46 snuff films to make money. When his ex-girlfriend Sara and her friends arrive at her hometown, Dennis targets her for leaving him, and his accidental scarring. After the first attack, Dennis offers to take a couple in the group back to the mainland, but reveals he's behind the attacks before shooting the boy into the water, and forcing the girl to strip before she herself is pushed in with the sharks. When Sara and her boyfriend Nick learn the truth, Dennis leaves Nick to be killed by the corrupt sheriff and kidnaps Sara, before he and his friend Red throw her dog overboard. Dennis places Sara into a shark cage with a great white on the hunt, and kills his own henchman Red just to catch Nick off guard, even diving into the water with Nick and trying to strangle him as he tries to get the cage open.
  • Sheriff Greg Sabin presents himself as a very friendly small-town sheriff but he is in fact in on Dennis's snuff scheme. When Sara and Nick's friends are picked off by the sharks, Sabin arrives at their vacation house and tries to poison them. When that plan fails, he simply hands Sara over to Dennis. Sabin then tries to torture Nick by dunking him into the lake with a tiger shark, and joyfully telling him about their operations. His motive is he hates teenagers for looking and talking down to him, even though none of the main characters or their friends ever treat Sabin as anything but a friend beforehand, making it likely that any such slights exist only in Sabin's head, or that he is projecting onto the characters what other teenagers have done.
• Funny Moments: Malik's first scene, where he pretends to be a Scary Black Man and menaces Nick for a moment, pretending that Nick failed to tutor him properly. Nick's nervousness just sells it.
• He's Just Hiding:
  • Beth's death is slightly ambiguous due to her body not being devoured, unlike most of the others.
  • Maya's death is questionable, given that she could simply have slipped off the life preserver instead of being snagged by the shark.
• Moral Event Horizon: Once the villains throw Sherman (the dog) into the water, it's okay to completely hate them.
• So Bad, It's Good: It's pretty much a theatrically released, larger budget Syfy Channel Original movie. And even then, it isn't classically bad so much as rather cheesy. Still enjoyably cheesy though.
  • The credits and attention paid to girls getting naked and/or swimming around "bouncily" openly evoke an Exploitation Film.
• Spiritual Successor: To the Piranha films and perhaps Snakes on a Plane. It has a cheesy plot and features lampshaded misplacing of predatory animals just like its spiritual predecessors.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The presence of the human villains isn't strictly necessary, and it might have been interesting to see Dennis, Red and Sabin actually helping combat the sharks (maybe in a way that kept more people alive) based on scenes we see of them before The Reveal. The sharks starving, given the limited amount of food in the lake, might have also made for a good, deeper reason for the attacks than simply being sent out by crazed rednecks.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: All of the leads do a relatively decent job given the nature of the film. Their acting and camraderie make their characters genuinely likeable, even if they're not given much to work with.

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