Chris Carmack | Through the Shattered Lens

I’m continuing my efforts to clean out my DVR. I just finished watching the 2009 film, The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations. I recorded this film off of Cinemax way back in June. To be honest, I was surprised when I came across it because I have absolutely no memory of having recorded it. I can only hope that it wasn’t recorded by a time traveler because, after seeing enough Butterfly Effects, you know that nothing good comes from time travel!

The Butterfly Effect 3 starts in medias res. Sam Reide (Chris Carmack) already knows how to jump back and forth in time and, even more importantly, he already knows all of the dangers. He knows that he can’t change the past. He can’t try to help people. He can’t do anything but stay hidden and observe because the least little alteration to the past could totally screw up the present. And, as we all know, studying the past is the present that we give to the future. (GAG! Seriously, though, I’ve been looking for a excuse to say that for like 10 years now.) So, the good thing here is that we don’t have to sit through a lot of pointless scenes of Sam learning what we already know.

Sam actually has a pretty good scam going. He goes back into the past, observes a murder taking place, and then tells the police who committed the crime. He’s convinced that cops that he’s a psychic, which I guess cops would be more likely to believe than that he’s a time traveler. I don’t know. Whatever. We’ll go with it. Helping Sam out is his sister, Jenna (Rachel Miner). Jenna, we’re told, would be dead if not for the fact that Sam jumped into the past and saved her from a house fire. Of course, by doing that, he also accidentally killed off his parents! That’s how Sam learned not to mess with the past! As a result, despite his ability to time travel, Sam leads a pretty squalid existence. He drinks at the local bar. He hangs out in the worst sections of Detroit. He visits Jenna in her run-down apartment. And yet, he doesn’t use time travel to invest in Facebook or anything like that because he knows that it’ll change the present. That’s dedication!

Sam is also still mourning the murder of his girlfriend. (Has anything ever gone right in Sam’s life?) The man convicted of her murder is due to be executed but Sam has reason to believe that the man might be innocent. When Sam visits the man and lets him know that he’s going to go to the past to prove the man’s innocence, the man is not impressed. According to the man, Sam is the murderer!

Anyway, Sam starts jumping into the past to see what really happened but, of course, he can’t help himself and he ends up changing stuff. As a result, the presents gets messed up though not as dramatically as it did in some of the previous Butterfly Effect films. For instance, the slutty bartender is suddenly engaged. At one point, Sam wakes up to find out that he no longer has an apartment. It’s kind of weak. (To be honest, this film might have worked better if it had just been a time traveling mystery as opposed to a Butterfly Effect film.) The mystery, however, is intriguing and the film ends with a somewhat satisfying twist. As far as third entries in bad franchises are concerned, The Butterfly Effect 3 is actually better than you would probably expect it to be.

If nothing else, the new film Shark Night 3D has an appropriate title. The movie takes place over the course of one night, there are a few sharks, and it’s all presented in 3D. If only the rest of the film worked as well.

Basically, the film is about this college student named Sara (played by Sara Paxton) who invites all of her college friends to Louisiana for the weekend and basically gets them all killed. Among Sara’s friends are geeky-but-cute Nick (Dustin Milligan), geeky-but-not-so-cute Gordon (Joel David Moore, who was also in Avatar), token black guy Malik (Sinqua Walls), Malik’s girlfriend Maya (Alyssa Diaz), Beth (American Idol runner-up Katherine McPhee) who we know is doomed because she has both tattoos and big boobs, and Blake (Chris Zylka), who possesses no personality but he does have a really nice ass. Seriously. Unfortunately, Sara forgets to tell them that her psycho ex-boyfriend Dennis (Chris Carmack) is waiting for her, along with his redneck buddy Red (Josh Leonard).

There’s also a lot of sharks swimming around this lake and, since this is a 3D movie, these sharks are capable of jumping out of the water like dolphins and snatching people out of boats and off of docks. Seriously, these are some talented sharks. Malik gets his arm bitten off and it’s pretty much all downhill from there. Malik is talented too because, even after he gets his arm bitten off, he’s still capable of grabbing a harpoon and standing out in the middle of the lake, bleeding as he taunts the sharks. Now, as ludicrous as this sounds, it’s probably the film’s best moment. It’s certainly one of the only truly grindhouse moments in this film. At the very least, it suggests a self-awareness that is lacking from the rest of the film.

Shark Night 3D sucks. There, I said it. I feel a little bad about saying that because, obviously, you can’t judge Shark Night 3D by the same standard that you would judge a film like 8 1/2 or The Rules of the Game. As I watched the end credits roll, I wondered if maybe I was being too hard on this film. After all, a lot of the dialogue was so bad that the intention behind it had to have been satiric? Right? Was I just being unfair? So, mentally, I compared Shark Night 3D to last year’s Piranha 3D and I quickly realized that I wasn’t being unfair. Shark Night 3D sucks.

The cast is uniformly bland, the plot is silly without ever being enjoyable, and — worst of all — the sharks are boring. Remember how the killer fish in Piranha 3D managed to be both ludicrous and scary? Remember how they each seemed to have their own little diabolic personality? It made you root for the piranhas and, as a result, you didn’t mind the fact that they were eating cardboard characters. However, the sharks in Shark Night just look like CGI sharks. Remember how the piranhas were literally everywhere in Piranha 3D? In Shark Night, the sharks just pop up randomly whenever the film’s engine starts to run out of gas.

I think the ultimate verdict I can pass on Shark Night is this: I am usually a total aquaphobe. Seriously, I can’t swim. I don’t do boats. I don’t do water parks. When my family went to Hawaii, I spent a lot of time walking on the beach in my bikini but you better believe I ran like the wind whenever I saw the tide coming for me. Over Labor Day weekend, I spent a while wading in the shallow end of my uncle’s pool and my family was literally amazed that I didn’t freak out. So was I, for that matter. (Yay me!)

And yet, as I watched Shark Night — which was all about people going into the water and dying terrible deaths — not once did I cover my eyes.

Not once.