To answer the question that occurred to many when the golden-hued trailer for Shark Night 3D was first unveiled — yes, the sun does eventually set on the film’s hapless group of Louisiana college students, leaving them to battle their way through a long, dark shark night of the soul. Everything else about stuntman-turned-director David R. Ellis’s latest effort is similarly as advertised — an ambitiously differentiated array of shark species show up to chomp on the tanned, low-BMI bodies of the cast and, every once in a while, on the camera, darting at the screen with toothy maws open as if to gulp the 3-D glasses off the faces of the audience.

It’s the type of proudly ridiculous B-movie that’s right at home in the dregs of the summer season, when expectations are low, everyone’s had their fill of shiny blockbusters and the serious stuff of the fall has yet to grace theaters. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Shark Night is painless, dumb fun, without the smirking self-awareness that made Ellis’s 2006 Snakes on a Plane so much better to giggle over than to actually sit through.

There are times when the movie’s refusal to wink is downright impressive. Witness the moment star-athlete-from-a-tough-neightborhood Malik (Sinqua Walls) staggers, red-eyed and wounded, to the water to avenge the death of someone dear to him. The sharks took one of them, and he plans to do the same to the sharks, he declares with a quavering depth of emotion that would make Stanislavsky…