Jonathan Zuck’s Chum, starring Alice Eve, drags the creature feature into depressingly synthetic waters.
There was a moment, somewhere around the mid-nineties, when the killer shark film bottomed out so spectacularly that the genre became a punchline for a decade. Michael Caine famously missed collecting his Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters because he was filming Jaws: The Revenge, a movie in which a great white shark apparently holds a grudge against a specific family and follows them to the Bahamas.
That film earned a zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a reputation as one of the worst sequels ever made. Caine, to his eternal credit, never apologised for it. He bought a house with the money. Thirty-eight years later, the shark movie has evolved in ways that make a roaring, revenge-obsessed mechanical fish seem like documentary realism.
Chum, a 2025 release directed by Jonathan Zuck and starring Alice Eve, arrives into a cultural moment where artificial intelligence is being bolted onto every corner of film production with varying degrees of disaster. If Jaws: The Revenge represented the genre’s creative bankruptcy, Chum might signal something worse: a future where the sharks aren’t just bad, they’re not even real enough to be bad in an interesting way.
Zuck, who co-wrote the film and previously directed micro-budget fare including The Unwilling and The Child Remains, has made a career in the margins of independent horror. His films tend toward the workmanlike, low-budget efforts that occasionally find distribution through smaller streaming platforms and VOD channels. With Chum, he appears to have reached for something more ambitious, at least in terms of the creature effects
There’s a particular kind of sadness that settles in when you realise you’re watching a shark movie where even the sandals have continuity errors, and the predators themselves were conjured by algorithms that clearly never watched a single frame of Spielberg.
Chum Review: When Sharks Jump the Shark
by George Wolf
After Chum‘s third or fourth continuity error with Alice Eve’s sandals, you start to wonder why they didn’t just fix that with AI, too. We get AI sharks, and AI victims, so at that point some AI bare feet are hardly going to register.
This is just a terrible movie, so bad you can’t help but imagine what kind of bet Eve must have lost to sign on.
She plays Tina, who gets hitched to Tom (Eric Michael Cole) at a destination wedding in the Mediterranean. Neither bride nor groom is happy on the big day, and only reluctantly agree to join some family and friends (Elle Haymond, Lisa Yaro, Sarah Siadet, Johnny Gaffney) on a daytime yacht excursion.
But after a fire onboard, the gang is rescued by a passing seafaring psycho (Jim Klock), and soon find themselves fighting against being dangled as bait for a predatory Great White.
I know you’re thinking Dangerous Animals right now, but this mess from director/co-writer Jonathan Zuck leans more Jaws: The Revenge – in both story and stupidity.
The premise is laughable, the characters and dialog inane, the wooden support cast make Eve look like Streep, and the eye rolling moments – from battle cries spoiling sneak attacks to Eve’s disappearing/reappearing shoe – come early and often.
And honestly, it’s just depressing to know this is where we’re headed. At least the recent Deep Water didn’t go further than CGI sharks – and even that muted the tension considerably. But after Zuck teases us with a few looks at real man-eaters, he lets loose a succession of attacks that more than justify the branding of “AI slop.”
I know it’s too expensive to shred on the natch (thank you, Doonesbury) with mechanical sharks these days, but if this is what it’s come to, just go over-the-top absurdist and call it a day.
Intentional comedy always has at least a chance of being funny. Chum can’t muster much more than sympathy – for Eve and the audience.
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