Review: Hot Spring Shark Attack – “It’s delightfully bonkers, nonsensical, crazy stuff, and yet it’s just so much damned fun!”

Directed by Morihito Inoue
Starring Takuya Fujimura, Masaki Naito, Mio Takaki, Koichi Makigami, Shôichirô Akaboshi, Daniel Aguilar, Yuu Nakanishi

The attractive coastal town of Atsumi is famous for its Onsen – natural hot springs with traditional Japanese guest houses—a perfect place to get away from all the stresses and strains of modern life and simply relax. Well, usually, at least, but not so much here since, as the more eagle-eyed of you will have likely discerned from the title alone, this hot spring resort has a nasty problem with vicious sharks.

Okay, before we go any further, let’s be upfront here – I think most movie fans can pretty much guess what they are getting simply from that title and premise alone. This is insanely silly – ridiculous, even – nonsense, pure schlock, drawing on influences from Jaws to the Sharknado films and its spin-offs, even the Japanese tradition of Kaiju flicks too. And it doesn’t try to pretend to be anything but that – in fact Hot Spring Shark Attack pretty much revels in how damned silly it all is, it glories in the terrible special effects. It knows what it is, and it is happy to be that silly but, if taken the right way, incredibly fun watch.

We have a major (Takuya Fujimura), determined to expand the tourism to his small town, and who initially denies any problems (reminiscent of another mayor in a rather more well-known shark film), a lacklustre local police for lead by a chief more interested in finding a new hobby for his impending retirement, some marine biologists, and an increasing number of people mysteriously disappearing from the hot springs, which coincides with mutilated bodies washing up on the beach. It isn’t long before they connect these two and realise that, somehow, guests in the hot springs are being attacked and dragged off by something into the sea.

This involves some wonderfully bonkers justifications, such as a biologist explaining that because sharks have cartilage instead of bone, they can squeeze down to go through pipes to the springs (yes, really!), including images of pipes trembling as they squeeze through them. Soon, even those crazy explanations are dropped as the sharks start to be able to seemingly go anywhere, with pools opening up on roads, even in playgrounds, where our critters gleefully emerge to chomp someone before vanishing. This even leads to animated sections are various strategies are devised to deal with the growing threat (think the sort of animation Wes Anderson might put into the likes of The Life Aquatic, but much, much cheaper).

How an audience will react to this depends very much on the views. Those of us who actually take a delight in watching schlock, who know that there are Good Movies, there are Bad Movies, but there are also Good Bad Movies – think of those 80s cult flicks like Hell Comes to Frogtown or The Toxic Avenger (now being remade!). Pure schlock, yes, but this film, like those ones, knows what it is and plays with it, and the audience also knows and its partly why we’re there for it. It’s delightfully bonkers, nonsensical, crazy stuff, and yet it’s just so much damned fun! A good, daft, fun flick to watch on a Saturday night with some friends and drinks.

Hot Spring Shark Attack is getting a limited cinema release in the US, and is available on streaming platforms.