Misplaced self-respect keeps Thrash from the joys of Sharknado

There’s more corny humor than one would expect in the underwhelming shark-hurricane disaster movie Thrash, an emotionally constipated eco-thriller that winks at its audience throughout, but whose bloody violence and pandering laugh lines never goes full-tilt Sharknado. Unlike Sharknado and its sequels, Thrash presents the main threat to its characters’ safety—a Category 5 hurricane that makes landfall in Annieville, South Carolina—with a mostly straight face. But while Thrash resembles a general-audience survival horror drama, its forgettable protagonists also frequently stop to reassure viewers—mostly through profanity-laced dialogue and occasional bursts of gore—that it’s okay to scoff at whatever they’re looking at. 

Thrash often looks like writer-director Tommy Wirkola (Violent Night, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) couldn’t settle on a tone or just one group of characters to focus on, and instead chose to throw in every half-formed mood and subplot that he could think of. Wirkola and his team’s creative indecision is especially counterintuitive given how much time and expository dialogue they waste hyping up the peril facing Annieville residents like Dakota (Whitney Peak), an agoraphobic teenager living alone in her dead parents’ house. Dakota eventually teams up with fellow survivor Lisa (Phoebe Dynevor), a pregnant woman whose car gets dragged to Dakota’s place by tidal flooding right as her water breaks. Lisa’s the subject of some glancing comedy, though it’s especially hard to know why her “perfectly curated birth playlist” is so funny that it comes up multiple times, as if listening to Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” is somehow the funniest thing you could do in the middle of a crisis. 

And as if being stranded in the middle of a flood zone wasn’t bad enough, Lisa and Dakota are also surrounded by flesh-eating bull sharks. You might think that outmaneuvering those sharks would take up most of our heroines’ non-pregnancy related focus while they wait for Dakota’s intrepid shark expert uncle Dr. Dale (Djimon Hounsou) to rescue her. 

Unfortunately for us, the bull sharks are more interested in terrorizing a trio of scrappy orphans—Dee (Alyla Browne), Ron (Stacy Clausen), and Will (Dante Ubaldi)—and their charmless redneck foster parents Billy (Matt Nable) and Rachel (Amy Mathews). This is unfortunate because the kids don’t have personalities, and their guardians mostly cuss at and condescend to them. Will and his siblings only really stand out in a handful of scenes where they have to navigate their foster family’s water-logged home, searching for supplies or an escape route.