On August 17, a fisher in the Bay of Fundy found a great white shark trapped in one of his nets. It was the first confirmed sighting of a great white in Atlantic Canada in nearly a decade.

If nothing else, this serves as proof that the premise of Shark Night 3D — which involves killer sharks attacking a group of sexy 20-somethings at a cottage — isn’t nearly as ridiculous as I had initially thought. Sharks aren’t just biting surfers in tropical paradise anymore. They’re everywhere, and presumably, they’re hungry. So pay attention to Shark Night 3D, because it’s a cautionary tale. Next time you and your ridiculously attractive group of horny-as-hell friends decide to head to the cottage for a weekend of boozing and sexing, it’s probably best that you prepare for a bloodbath.

Since Jaws, making movies about killer sharks has mostly been a losing proposition. That film ushered in the modern-blockbuster era, established Steven Spielberg as a person-of-influence in Hollywood and is rightly perceived as one of the high points in pop-filmmaking. It’s the definitive shark movie — hell, it’s probably the definitive summer movie — and every shark movie that’s come since has inevitably been judged in comparison.

And yet, despite the implausibility of another man-eating shark movie ever equaling Jaws, filmmakers have kept on trying. Generally, it’s involved giving sharks superpowers (think Great Blue Sea) or taking them out of their natural element (Sharks in Venice, or Shark Night 3D). And even more generally, it’s almost always failed.

Upping the killer shark stakes has the potential to be a hell of a lot of fun, and to be fair, Great Blue Sea was pretty awesome. But no shark film has matched Jaws when it comes to the pure shit-your-pants factor. A radioactive giant shark stalking your midwestern island getaway would be scary, but would it be any scarier than being stuck on your own on the open seas while one of the most terrifying beasts known to man swims somewhere beneath you?

Jaws kept it simple and manipulated the most primal fear most of us have when we’re swimming in the ocean and don’t know what’s lurking in the depths beneath us. Whatever bells and whistles Shark Night 3D pulls out won’t make that fear any more real. If anything, they’ll only make it more goofy.

With all that said, Shark Night 3D looks like it’ll provide a good dose of stupid late-summer fun, and if it can deliver that much, I’m glad it exists. At least it’ll be better than Lake Placid.

But while shark movies may have peaked almost 40 years ago, the Mossad has mostly managed to stay off movie screens. Now, this is probably because sharks aren’t central to one of the most long running geopolitical conflicts of our time and are therefore much less volatile, but it’s a crying shame if you ask me. My opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict doesn’t matter here. What matters is that the Mossad are badass as all hell, and I’m a big fan of hell-raising badasses. Particularly if they have dark secrets. So give me more Mossad, Hollywood, I’m begging you.

Everything about The Debt suggests that the characters played by Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson and Ciarán Hinds are mysterios with a dark secret. The secret involves the hunt for a Nazi war criminal, which suggests the material won’t be taken lightly and we could be in for a genuinely suspenseful action-thriller. As a segue into what promises to be a dark fall movie season, it’s the best we could ask for.

Also, Sam Worthington has a starring role, and it’ll be interesting to see whether he can actually act. For a guy who’s starred in three gigantic-budget blockbusters (Clash of the Titans, Avatar and Terminator Salvation) it’s weird that we still don’t know if he’s got any talent.

I try to keep things light around here, but I’m so sick of the found-footage genre that I don’t even want to write about Apollo 18. And that’s the first time this column has ever said that. The whole movie centres around a paranormal attack that happened during a moon landing. Wasn’t that what the first teaser for the latest Transformers was about? When your movie’s premise is basically nothing more than a Michael Bay movie trailer, you should probably make another movie. Last year, Moon proved there was still plenty that was scary about space. This year, Apollo 18 will hopefully prove that the kitschy appeal of home-video footage that pretends to be real stopped being fun 15 years ago when we all agreed that The Blair Witch Project didn’t live up to the hype.