Director: Jadon Cal
Year: 2022
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: Shark Frenzy
Genre: Sharks
Plot:
Taking a special fishing charter, a woman joins a group of friends on a boat offering a pleasure fishing experience, but when they encounter a rogue swarm of sharks that strand them in the ocean to take them out one by one forces her to rely on long-forgotten survival skills to survive the situation.
Review:
This was a pretty decent and enjoyable killer shark film. One of the better elements present here is the film's decision to include multiple sharks in a typical storyline usually featuring just a solitary species. The main setup of this one isn't that original, where a group of individuals are stranded in the middle of the ocean after an accident and must try to make it back to shore while being stalked by a man-eating shark, serves as nothing more than a means to get the victims out into the water to be hunted down due to the overuse of the trope in recent times. This time, there’s a whole school of sharks instead of just a single rogue species which makes for a fun enough diversion to everything that keeps this one interesting enough.
That lets the film’s incredibly fun and graphic attack scenes have a highly enjoyable cheese factor to them. Starting with the opening attack on the swimmers on their jetski where the creatures rip them to pieces in spectacular fashion, it’s a fantastic way to start things which is the kind of enjoyably cheesy energy that carries over into the other attacks here. The big sequence of them swarming the boat during their innocent fishing excursion and taking out the victims the way they do is a fun enough sequence where it not only features the cheesy swarming sequences but also demonstrates the creatures are smart enough to form a game-plan for attacking the boat. This is repeated several times over the course of the film to great effect each time to help build some tension each time they get knocked into the water so it all adds together into a generally fun and cheesy effort.
There isn’t much that holds it back but it does have some minor flaws. One of the biggest drawbacks here is the film’s middle segment where the group tries to survive the elements and their wounds rather than deal with the sharks. Since the creatures are known early on, it gives this a fine pace with them being stranded by the attack quite early on which causes some underwhelming factors here in the middle where it focuses more on the effects of previous attacks than generating new ones. As none of this really serves much with the group going through the various means of trying to survive rather than horror attacks, it can sputter at times even if not slowing down completely, and with the usual issues with its CGI work also popping up are the film’s main drawbacks.
Overview: ***.5/5
A highly enjoyable genre effort let down by a few minor drawbacks, this one manages to bring about a rather fun time for this type of cheesy killer shark film it’s clearly trying to be. Those that are fans of this style or prefer the genre overall will have a lot to like here while only those that don’t enjoy this particular approach should heed caution.
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