‘Chum’ Review: Uninspired, Rudimentary, and An Outright Failure
By Dread Central
4 min read‘Chum,’ the latest killer shark flick, lacks identity, taste, tension, and really everything that signals a horror movie as a horror movie.
‘Chum,’ the latest killer shark flick, lacks identity, taste, tension, and really everything that signals a horror movie as a horror movie.
Their friends (literal chum) subsequently bully the pair into taking a booze cruise, unaware of (and really uninterested in) their forthcoming annulment. The shark, aggressive in the Jaws 4: The Revenge sense, targets their boat, leaving them floundering. Luckily, fisherman Roy (Jim Klock) is around to rescue them.
Roy, while not as explicitly evil as Dangerous Animals’ Tucker, is a violent man, and his ludicrous ploy involves using the castaways as live bait to track down and kill the shark that ate his wife several years before. He knows it’s the same shark because he attached a tracker to it, or something, and he’s allegedly been doing this for years (and proximately close to shore) without the Maltese authorities catching on. That becomes the thrust of Chum. Everyone cries and pleads for their lives as Roy, one by one, locks them in a diving cage as bait.
The antics are uninspired. Only Eve conveys the theatrics of a trained thespian. Everyone else, including Klock, emotes as if they’re still in the audition stage, reading lines absent any context. All at once, characters are simultaneously incredulously calm and unfathomably angry. Tina, while not Eve’s fault, is arbitrarily portrayed as a fighter, the only member of the crew to mouth off and make any effort to save everyone.
The shark attacks—the subgenre’s currency—are most egregious. That’s where the bulk of the VFX come in. The crew merges real footage with generated underwater attacks, and while—yes—the sharks are more convincing than most digital sludge, they only work while still. Chum threatens a constant comparison between real footage and aggressively, insultingly unconvincing effects, and I was nauseated by the tenth time a poorly-generated shark thrashed around and stained the surface of the water crimson.
Sharks, to be fair, are notoriously difficult to animate. Underwater physics, the flexibility of their bodies, wetness, and light refraction render them considerably more challenging than, say, a terrestrial Kaiju running amok. But I’ve accepted that. I love The Shallows, recently tolerated both Thrash and Deep Water, and grew up on a cocktail of Sharktopus and Swamp Sharks. Chum reeks of artifice, trading in a lackluster gore quotient that’s incomprehensible where it matters most.
Chum is so uninspired, so rudimentary, so disengaged and uninterested in anything remotely resembling filmic competence, it’s an outright failure. Sharks deserve better. Audiences do, too.
