What happened to the shark movies we were expecting in 2022?
A shiver of shark films continued to invade our screens - big and small - in 2022 with varying degrees of success.
The Requin
The poster, like many aping the classic rising shark strike of JAWS, promised plenty but failed to deliver and The Requin (also known as From Below in the UK) was shark-lite for a film that made much of its titular beast. The shark may not have been seen in JAWS but at least it was an ever-present threat.
The film finds a couple, played by Alicia Silverstone (Clueless, Batman and Robin) and James Tupper (Big Little Lies), stranded at sea off the coast of Vietnam, although it never looks anything more than something shot in a water tank in a studio.
The Requin surfaced in the US in January and in the UK in February.
Beneath the Surface
Perhaps 2022 is the year of not actually featuring sharks very much in shark films? Beneath the um surface of billing itself as a shark film, this is much more a murder mystery that featured a shark at the very start. And that is it.
This is not a shark movie and judging by reviews it sounds more of a mundane mystery masquerading as a shark film.
The Bad Guys
This was a fun animated caper from Dreamworks that was released in April and saw several reformed yet misunderstood criminal animals - including a shark (hence it being included on this list), a wolf, a tarantula and snake - attempt to become good, with some disastrous results along the way. The animation, story and voice-acting were all really engaging and kept you interested throughout.
Deep Fear
Although Variety reported Deep Fear shooting for six weeks in early 2022, the Brilliant Pictures website declares the film is set to surface sometime in 2023.
Set in the Caribbean, Deep Fear is described as an intense and visceral survival thriller with furious action throughout that promises a mix of storms, drug traffickers and tiger sharks. Actions speak louder than words, so let’s see if this lives up to the self-propelled hype.
Madalina Gheneait plays Naomi, a round-the-world yachtswoman, who responds to a distress signal to aid a sinking boat, where she finds three survivors. Turns out they drug traffickers who force Naomi to dive into the sunken wreck to find their cocaine, and now she is trapped between the tiger sharks attracted by the dead crew and the drug runners.
Sounds like Dead Calm meets The Shallows by way of The Deep.
The Reef: Stalked
The Reef (2010) is up there as one of the very best shark films since JAWS, so expectations were high for this unrelated follow up, sadly they were dashed on the rocks as it is more a case of The Reef: Stalled as it lacks either the excitement or thrills of the far superior original.
What makes that even more disappointing is that the original film’s director - Andrew Traucki – was back at the helm and also on script duties.
After seeing her sister be murdered in front of her, Nic, her sister Annie and two friends travel to a remote Pacific island for kayaking and diving…but all they get is danger, after being attacked by a huge great white shark.
Blood in the Water
Lots of single star reviews abound on IMDB for this wannabe JAWS meets Saw film; on both scores it seems to be rather a blunt instrument as one review declared the poster as the best part of “the entire ordeal.” Sounds torturous for those that dare to view.
Yet again, it seems to be a film where (not a very good shark) doesn’t appear very often. This Saw point of a film was released digitally in the US in June and the UK in September.
Below
As several of the shark attacks from Jersey Shore in 1916 have shown us, sharks don’t just attack in the sea.
Below follows a group of teens who are fighting for survival when a hungry bull shark decides they are next on the menu in a remote reservoir.
Sadly, this sounds another shark film that should be classed as below par, as it was described as a “train wreck” in the only review I could find, which was released digitally in the US in October.
At the time writing the original article that this is recapping the likes of Shark Bait weren’t on our radar, but that film – for my money – was by far the best original shark film of 2022.
We say best original shark film, as the top of the shark film food chain came back in ways we had never expected JAWS in both IMAX and Real D 3D.
Even writing that sentence is still exciting as both are formats that the Steven Spielberg film had never been released in before, and both in their own ways were amazing ways of experiencing the king of all shark movies.
Universal really did push the bigger boat out for JAWS in both these formats, which was a real thrill for old and new JAWS fans alike.
So, that was the shark films of 2022, but what about the shark films heading our way in 2023?
Words by Dean Newman
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