Shark Waters surprises by not being completely terrible

Maybe it’s the saltwater in my veins or the nitrogen bubbles in my blood, but after wading through the stinking cinematic fish guts of the likes of Virus Shark and Sharks Of The Corn, when I got to Shark Waters (aka Shark Frenzy), I actually had an okay time. There’s an economy to its set-up and execution, and while it won’t be troubling any award shows anytime soon, it does enough right to balance out the usual bad shark movie tropes and ends up in the rarified region of actually not too bad.

When a private fishing charter, skippered by Captain Banning (Mike Rae Anderson), encounters a ravenous swarm of great white sharks, it’s not long before the group is in trouble. Adrift and at the mercy of the tides, the crew must fend off the crazed sharks while dealing with an epidemic of falling off the boat that has to be seen to be believed.

Our heroine, Sarah (Meghan Carrasquillo), does a decent job as the lead, certainly out-acting her father, Jose (Jim Fitzpatrick), whose performance is so wooden he would have made a more serviceable rescue vessel than the rubber dinghy he eventually turns up in.

The narrative, though familiar, is executed with a straightforwardness that is oddly refreshing in a genre known for its convoluted absurdity. When the boat gets marooned on a sandbar due to inexplicable flooding, the tension builds effectively, even if the physics occasionally take a holiday. The crew’s attempt to free their vessel using a tiny life raft with an outboard motor may strain credibility, but it also provides an unexpected moment of levity.

The special effects, while not groundbreaking, are serviceable and occasionally even impressive for a film of this budget. Compared to the majority of The Asylum’s output, they’re downright award-worthy. The sharks, though rendered with a certain generic CGI-ness, are good enough to pull off most of the shots they’re used in. The attacks and digital blood-in-the-water effects, though not wholly convincing, are far from the worst seen in the genre and don’t detract from the overall atmosphere of adequacy.

Shark Waters possesses a certain workmanlike charm. It’s still a bad shark movie, but the kind of bad shark movie that’s actually okay. It’s certainly not bad enough to be bad nor bad enough to be so-bad-it’s-good, but with Meghan Carrasquillo delivering a kind of Sidney Sweeney-lite vibe and some likable if slightly self-conscious performances from the rest of the cast, it’s a film that consistently surprises with its lack of ineptitude – a rare thing indeed in this genre.