A wedding party stranded at sea are rescued from a shark by a psychopathic killer.
The dodgy Great White in Chum may be the sad offspring of a low budget and bad AI but it is never sated. Like an impoverished intern faced with trays of Pret a Manger sandwiches at their first office lunch meeting, the shark starts eating and never stops, every crunch and tear magnified by Chum‘s sound team.
With more gristle than a 1970s school dinner, this new shark B movie is worse than Jaws 1-4 but better than Shark Exorcist. It has its moments, but sadly a lot of the acting is so crap when they all fell in the sea I expected to see Feargal Sharkey pop up with a petition.
They aren’t all terrible. Lisa Yaro, playing Britney (RIP), annoyingly the shark’s amuse bouche, delivers her lines with wit, and her character fights back with gumption before succumbing, a tangle of bloodied flesh and bone. And Sadie (Elle Haymond), younger sister of new bride Tina, is like a valley girl plonked into a Kevin and Perry sketch.
Unfortunately Tina (Alice Eve, who also produced) manages to be both dull and annoying. Her marriage to equally po-faced husband Tom (a forgettable Eric Michael Cole) is already crumbling by the wedding reception. Though I suppose after the world’s dreariest wedding you need an eventful honeymoon to make up for it, and Tom and Tina, a non-swimmer, get just that when they are persuaded to go out on a catamaran the next day. Best man Rick (Johnny Gaffney), the impressively rude Sadie, and friends Rachinda (Sarah Siadat) and Britney make up the party.
The Habsburgs of the deep
The catamaran is attacked by that Medium White, the captain gets his leg bitten off and the rest are rescued from the sinking vessel just in time by Roy (Jim Klock), a hoary old fisherman with a boat apparently birthed by a malfunctioning 3D printer stuck on the “dystopia” setting.
Roy turns out to be a bad ‘un but with a tragic backstory, avenging the death of his wife by tracking the shark that ate her, and keen to use Tina and her friends as bait, or chum, to attract the killer creature.
Roy’s Rules of Shark Attraction are to tie people up, stab them and lower them in a shark cage into the sea. Luckily despite being an ol’ sea dog he isn’t very good at knots.
As a story it ticks some horror boxes (for lo, the shark is not the real monster here) – sometimes too obviously. It strongly reminded me of the premise for Dangerous Animals, a similar psycho ‘n’ shark movie that had been on my to-watch list since it came out. So I did watch it (and review it) and I can confirm that if you feel the need to watch both, watch Chum first then Dangerous Animals, in the manner of a tourist* in 1980s Russia advised to visit Moscow before Leningrad so as not to be disappointed in Moscow having first seen the beauties of Leningrad. (*me)
All shark movies post-Jaws need something to make them stand out from the rest, and Chum’s piece de resistance is its hyperfocus on the mastications of the shark. There is indeed a lot of crunching, as legs, arms and sometimes torsos are torn, chewed, and left floating in the reddened sea. The best ideas are around the sound. I enjoyed the diegetic-like way the soundtrack suddenly distorted as characters dived underwater, and there are flashes of dark humour, from the shark’s incessant crunching to a sad little mew in a flashback as Roy reminisces about making chum out of kittens. The filmmakers also let Roy position himself as the misunderstood little guy fighting the system, which raised a chuckle (aren’t we all socialists now?): “It’s not ideal. But a group of entitled rich folks is all I got. It’ll have to do.”
Otherwise the effects are unimpressive. The shark in the opening credits looks dorky. Though as is par for the course these days nothing (harrumph) is the shark’s fault anyway. Instead it is climate change that has brought the big fish as far as the Maltese coast as water temperatures change and its non-human food source relocates. Tina is about to get into bed with oil drillers in Alaska, while Tom wants to save the world with his massive trust fund.
Cheap shark films can be tropey, daft, bloodily disgusting to look at and still, on some level, entertaining. I love a great Great White B movie and an inspired director can conjure up peril from a fin and a dark shadow if they can’t afford a whole fish. Chum does not. It wastes several lines that could be funny by letting them fall flat, and it simply isn’t frightening; and I say that as coward who used my toddler as a human shield when watching Tennant-era Dr Who. I’ve felt in more peril from empty Stella cans and death-wish tweens on polystyrene bodyboards when I’m paddling off Dorset.
If you are not a fan of loose ends you will at least be happy with the ending which does tie them all up, albeit clunkily. The survivors take vicious revenge on Roy, there’s a from-the-watery-grave ode to love, and Tina backtracks on her previous oil drilling cheerleading.
But – spoiler alert – the shark lives, which means I can’t make my Flat White joke.
Read my Chum ending recap and order of deaths here.
Watch the trailer for Chum here: