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\n\t\u201cThrash<\/a>,\u201d like just about every shark thriller, has a grade-Z son-of-\u201cJaws\u201d quality. (The one exception: the ingenious \u201cOpen Water.\u201d) Everything in the movie, from the chomping shark attacks that splash up the waves with Hawaiian Punch foam to the way a humongous great white meets her fate at the end, takes an obvious page from Steven Spielberg\u2019s gambits and techniques. But shark movies, because of that derivative quality (and because the directors are not Spielberg), often tend to be dreary and claustrophobic affairs. Whereas \u201cThrash\u201d has a lively competence about it, a touch of fluid originality in the staging.<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s set in the small town of Annieville, S.C., which in the first half hour gets subjected to a hurricane so intense it\u2019s like a tsunami, bolstered by vintage stupido lines like, \u201cIf they ever considered creating a Category 6, this would be it. It\u2019s a monster!\u201d It\u2019s all part of the film\u2019s environmental message (the storm starts off as a Category 2 until it hits record-temperature warm waters off the coast). But once Hurricane Henry floods the town, the film\u2019s writer-director, Tommy Wirkola, turns a submerged neighborhood block into a kind of water-world stage set, like a giant pond with the top halves of houses poking out the top. They\u2019re places of refuge, only they keep shifting and collapsing.<\/p>\n \n\tThe storm has brought with it a school of bull sharks, who are smaller and faster than great whites, but just as ravenous. The movie wastes no time delivering the gory goods, which are served up for our delectation like the killings in a slasher movie. If fear was once the pulse of a shark thriller, now it\u2019s voyeurism \u2014 our chance to feast on what it looks like when a shark feasts. In this case, though, only the unappealing characters get eaten. That\u2019s part of the lip-smacking quality of it all \u2014 the idea that certain movie characters deserve<\/em> to have their limbs bitten off.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tOf the ones in \u201cThrash\u201d who don\u2019t, the most original character is Lisa (played by Phoebe Dynevor<\/a>, from \u201cFair Play\u201d), not because there\u2019s anything complex in how she\u2019s drawn, but because she\u2019s pregnant \u2014 as in not just about to have a baby, but she\u2019s going to have it during the movie<\/em>, as she struggles to wriggle away from the sharks. That sounds precarious, and is, but once her infant son has popped out, talk about providing someone with motivation to take on nature\u2019s predators. She\u2019s assisted by Dakota (Whitney Peak), the film\u2019s other, younger heroine, who at one point makes her way over a floating rooftop and rickety branches, improvising the acrobatics of survival. Dakota, whose mother recently died, is being raised by her marine-biologist uncle, played by Djimon Hounsou<\/a> as the film\u2019s token scientist-philosopher of disaster.<\/p>\n \n\tWirkola, who\u2019s Norwegian, has written a bare-bones script, but he knows how to play with space. He stages an encounter in which Ron (Stacy Clausen), a teenage okie foster child, is swimming around in a basement, with that great white on his tail, and the sequence has a delectably flowing sense of danger.<\/p>\n \n\tMostly, though, we\u2019re watching the kills come right on cue. This is a Netflix and Chomp movie, just 80 minutes long (if you don\u2019t count the closing credits), and the compact run time does more than keep \u201cThrash\u201d from wearing out its welcome. It\u2019s part of the film\u2019s lean-and-mean structural unity \u2014 the way it treats an entire underwater street and its houses like the shark boat in the last act of \u201cJaws,\u201d as a safety zone that\u2019s rapidly disintegrating. Ron and his two siblings have been living with foster parents who are government-sponging creeps (they eat steak in the basement while tossing their meal-ticket kids packages of Wonder Bread), and when Bob (Josh McConville), the loathsome father, gets what\u2019s coming to him, it\u2019s not scary \u2014 it\u2019s closer to mutilation porn. He\u2019s the steak, there to sate our hunger.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n