Chum (2026) by Jonathan Zuck

Director: Jonathan Zuck

Year: 2026

Country: USA/Malta

Alternate Titles: N/A

Genre: Sharks

Plot:

After taking a trip to Malta, a woman and her friends head out on a boating trip to celebrate her sister’s wedding, but when they get into trouble with their boat, they are forced to take shelter with a fisherman hunting a vicious Great White Shark as the human bait in his mission.

Review:

Overall, this was an absolutely pitiful effort without much interesting about it. The storyline to this is a major culprit, failing to make anything all that interesting as the main storylines are highly underwhelming, with the main group being immensely underwhelming, keeping everyone from being relatable or even enjoyable to be around, taking the point where it’s sometimes hard to understand why they’re even friends with the group when they spend a lot of the running time complaining about what they’re interests are after marriage or deliberately hitting on others despite being involved in relationships. This all makes it incredibly difficult to care about these vapid and utterly bland characters that are thrust into this utterly moronic revenge angle that the fisherman is carrying out against this shark who killed his wife years earlier. This makes for one of the most laughable and utterly cringe-worthy motivations in the entire genre.

To top it off, there’s also the immensely troublesome creature action that bogs this down considerably. While the theory and concept of the action isn’t bad, especially the shark attacks themselves, which are quite brutal and graphic, with the shark visibly swallowing and crunching on victims as they’re dumped into the water or just falling overboard, the execution is immensely distressing in how they play out. With the effects created through egregious and generally awful AI that leaves everything with an unnatural, silky sheen that never once makes this so generally tough to get into that there’s an immediate disconnect in how everything is handled. The visual look is the problem with how they’re handled, as the concept of the scene being performed in more realistic and acceptable methods would’ve gone a long way to redeeming this, but when all of this is added together with moronic decision-making in how the group handles being stuck there watching their crewmates die without fighting back, it lowers this one overall.

Overview: 0.5/5

Generally awful on every account, there’s little need to watch this one, as almost every area that this one could suffer from, it does, and it has so many problematic issues that it can’t overcome anything. Only the most curious or die-hard fans of killer shark films will want to give this a chance, as pretty much everyone else should outright avoid this one.