Rating: D+
Dir: Josh Graves
Star: Mouse Cravensworth, Matt Alive, Antonio Samuels, Tim Connolly
Not the last time we’ll be seeing this title in Shark Week 2026. I note the presence of the exclamation point on the IMDb, though it seems to have got bored and wandered off somewhere between there and the Blu-ray sleeve below. Can’t say I blame it. I actually quite liked the idea here, which is having the monsters as “fun-sized” sharks, depicted largely by hand-puppets. Except when the heroine, Kat (Cravensworth) enters “me in the plush toy aisle” mode, as shown above. This is actually decent, in a kinda Gremlins way, with Kat and her friends having to fight them in a variety of reasonably amusing ways. The problem is… Well, everything else, to be honest.
The script is the biggest problem, swinging wildly between showing us things in which we simply aren’t interested, are irrelevant, or repeating basically the same information in multiple ways. Uninteresting, would be Kat’s relationship issues with boyfriend Danny (Alive). Her pregnancy falls into the “irrelevance” category, as are the bites suffered both by her and friend Marcus (Samuels). These are set up as potentially significant, until the film decides not to bother further with them. As for the third group… We open with a scientist carrying out and explaining an experiment on a baby shark. We then get a TV interview with a scientist, saying more or less the same things. And a discussion in the pub between Danny and Marcus, going over the same details.
We. Get. It. A corporation is trying to return the extinct great white shark, somehow by faffing about with human DNA and the Cordyceps fungus (the makers are fans of The Last of Us, it seems). Should take two minutes, tops. Except all these expository scenes occupy the first fifteen minutes, of a movie which barely runs an hour before the slow end-credit crawl. It’s a ratio which tends to apply thereafter. Ninety seconds of content which is entertaining, such as a creature typing “Sharks are cool” on Kat’s laptop (just a shame it didn’t go full Slotherhouse, take a selfie and upload the pic to its Instagram). Ten minutes of bad, angst-ridden discussion on whether or not to keep the baby.
This is short on basic film-making skills too. For example, the early chat between Danny and Marcus, starts with them being served two pints of beer. They barely take a sip, yet at the end, when they leave, we get a close-up on the empty glasses. But the main issue is Graves operating on the wildly incorrect belief that viewers of a film called Chum! want kitchen-sink drama. Guess what? Whether there’s an exclamation point or not, we don’t care. I don’t mind zero-budget effects, as long as they’re executed with some energy and tongue appropriately in-cheek. Which the film, to its credit, does get right. Unfortunately, it’s only for a total of ten minutes, tops.
This review is part of our feature, Shark Week 2026: Gill-ty as charged.