Review: THRASH

 by Rob DiCristino

It’s Crawl, but with sharks.

Longtime readers will recall my passion for Redboxing. You remember Redboxes, don’t you? Those red kiosks stationed along the outer walls of your finer convenience stores? No, not the Amazon lockers. The things next to the Amazon lockers. They had those touchscreens with the little sunshades over them? Yes! Now you remember! Redboxes were great, right? I mean, how else were you supposed to get a copy of In the Heights on DVD? You remember DVDs? Of course you do! Anyway, my Redboxing journey was all about scouring those late lamented magenta monoliths for the best in low-budget splendor, titles that fell so far under the radar that not even streaming carousels had room for them. The goal wasn’t mockery, of course. Far from it. In an age of algorithm-driven Content, Redbox movies were all about earnestness: They weren’t the best. They were often quite bad! But at the very least, they were idiosyncratic enough to feel crafted by human hands. Quivering, clumsy hands, perhaps, but human hands nonetheless.

Why am I bringing up Redboxes in a review of a Netflix movie? Because I miss them! Kidding. No, it’s because Tommy Wirkola’s Thrash — previously titled Beneath the Storm and Shiver — is perhaps the most Redboxy movie that never got a chance to sit in an actual Redbox. Produced with the spare change in Adam McKay’s pocket and headlined by a largely anonymous cast — the great Djimon Hounsou excepted — Thrash is the most endearing kind of JV exploitation cinema: It’s not cynical, cloying, or opportunistic. It’s not brand-forward engagement bait. It’s not second-screen background-core. It’s just a cheaply-made, deeply stupid B-movie. How refreshing is that? It’s not even original content. It’s a discard from Sony’s theatrical slate that was probably pawned off to Netflix to mitigate tax obligations. By today’s standards, that’s true artistic integrity. Someone ring the folks at TCM and tell them that cinema lives on! In short, Thrash is too trashy for theaters but too well-meaning to spend eternity trapped on Netflix. It’s a Redbox movie.

I digress. Here we go. Thrash begins as a category five hurricane makes landfall in the seaside hamlet of Annieville, North Carolina. Teenage foster siblings Dee, Ron, and Will (Alyla Browne, Stacy Clausen, and Dante Ubaldi) urge their foster father (Matt Nable) to move the family to higher ground, but his cartoonish skepticism of science has convinced him that “it’s just a bit of weather.” Meanwhile, a fallen tree has trapped the pregnant Lisa (Phoebe Dynevor) — whose fiancee recently abandoned her to become a DJ — in her car. Lucky for her, she’s stuck just outside the home of a savvy young woman named Dakota (Whitney Peak). Unlucky for her, Dakota is an agoraphobic who’s still recovering after the untimely death of her mother. With both of her parents gone, Dakota’s uncle Dale (Hounsou) has done his best to fill in the gaps. He’s a local marine biologist specializing in sharks, and — wouldn’t you know it — it seems Hurricane Henry has brought some of his more flesh-hungry research subjects ashore. Well, a-what-used-to-be-the-shore.

Thrash is a movie about stupid people doing nonsensical things. MAGA dad — I forgot his name, and I’m not scrolling back through my screener link to find it — sits with his back to a gigantic glass window as shark-infested waters rise on the other side (guess what happens to the window?). Dakota exercises a thoroughly baffling disregard for knife safety as she cuts Lisa out of her car seat (remember, kids: Always cut with your knife aimed at the pregnant woman’s belly). Speaking of Lisa, do you want to see the fastest water birth in the history of cinema? It’s just one of Thrash’s many charms! And Thrash is charming. I mean, scroll up for a second and look at that poster. I’ll wait here. Read the tagline and the title, in that order. “If the flood doesn’t kill you…THRASH!” That’s terrible advice! There are sharks in the water! But I’m not mad at Thrash. Thrash doesn’t know any better. It’s an honest movie for honest folk. No one at Netflix forced Thrash to add extra expository dialogue for the people looking at their phones. No one at Netflix has even seen Thrash.

So while Thrash may be a deeply unremarkable genre exercise that owes whatever virtues it can claim to far better movies — Having Dakota Peak point and shout, “Sha…shark!” like the beach girl from Jaws was a nice touch, there, Mr. Wirkola — it’s a far less painful watch than Red Notice, Happy Gilmore 2, and whatever other poorly-lit content Netflix is rolling out this year. Wirkola (Violent Night, Dead Snow) may not be a vulgar auteur like Abel Ferrara or even a schlock virtuoso like Paul W. S. Anderson, but he’s at least craftsman enough to optimize his strengths (giving Djimon Hounsou an extended speech about a hippopotamus, for example) and downplay his weaknesses (anything and everything related to the film’s z-grade CGI sharks). It’s faint praise, to be sure, and I wouldn’t recommend that anyone actually watch Thrash with, you know, their eyeballs, but I’m much quicker to stand up for something this guileless than something that feels calculated and inhuman. There’s absolutely no calculation to Thrash. Somehow, that’s a compliment.

Thrash hits U.S. Netflix on Friday, April 10th.