For a movie billed as a horror film, it never builds any tension or suspense and delivers zero scares.
I’m a sucker for shark movies. Although no film is likely to ever top Jaws as the best shark movie of all time, I continue to watch any shark movie that I can get my hands on. Sometimes, the movies are surprisingly good, like Open Water, but usually they’re pretty stupid. Frenzy is one such movie.
Frenzy is a SyFy original movie which is a label that usually means — among other things — that a movie is made on a shoe-string budget, features abysmal CGI effects, and has a story that will make little to no sense. That is a fairly accurate description of this one as well.
We’re introduced to five young people who produce a travel vlog called “The Lit Life.” To attract viewers on the Internet, they travel around the world doing dangerous things so their audience can “see things they might not otherwise get to see.” For this particular adventure, they plan to travel to a protected marine reserve via seaplane. Because the reserve is protected, they turn off the plane’s location transponder before they fly out to sea. Because, you know, what could go wrong? Of course, something does go wrong. The plane loses a poorly-animated CGI wing and crashes into the water. And, what do you know? There are three great white sharks patrolling the area just waiting to gobble everyone up.
Even excusing the fact that the characters are dumb enough to secretly fly to a dangerous location in the middle of the ocean, they make so many more stupid decisions that I began to wonder how they learned to tie their shoes as children. Adding to the inane atmosphere, the great white sharks do not behave in a way that great whites actually behave. (They growl, for one thing. They’re hunting as a coordinated pack, for another.)
I will give the movie credit for having an “anyone can die at any moment” feel, at least initially. The sharks eat the majority of the cast members in the first 30 minutes. The remainder of the movie is mostly Lindsey (Aubrey Reynolds) attempting to survive long enough to get rescued. Thanks to the many flashbacks, we learn about how Lindsey, the newbie of the group, came to be part of the vlog team. In an attempt to keep things from getting too predictable, the script repeatedly uses the “Is this a dream or reality?” tactic. It works once but then is completely overused.
Frenzy has a few interesting ideas but they’re buried under a heap of absolutely ridiculous logic and implausible character behavior. And, sadly, for a movie billed as a horror film, it never builds any tension or suspense and delivers zero scares. This is one to avoid, folks.
1.0 out of 5.0 stars
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