Thrash: Netflix's New Shark Movie Has An Explosive Kill That's The Perfect Sam Raimi Homage

This article contains spoilers for "Thrash."

You know within a few minutes of starting Netflix's "Thrash" what you're getting into. If you weren't already tipped off by the involvement of writer/director Tommy Wirkola (the Norwegian filmmaker who gave us the zombie satire of the "Dead Snow" franchise and the "'Die Hard,' but with Santa Claus" riff that is "Violent Night"), the movie's clunky first-act exposition is a surefire giveaway. And that's not a deal-breaker! After getting the needed table-setting out of the way, "Thrash" proves to be exactly the no-frills B-movie you want it to be (as /Film's Chris Evangelista notes in his review).

It helps that Wirkola respects the classics. The film follows several residents of a South Carolina town as they try to survive a Category 5 hurricane after it destroys the nearby storm wall, flooding the area with ever-rising seawater and, you guessed it, hungry sharks. Among the movie's leads are the foster siblings Ron (Stacy Clausen) and his sister Dee (Alyla Brown) and brother Will (Dante Ubaldi). When their abusive, neglectful foster parents deservedly find themselves on the wrong end of some bull sharks, it falls to the trio to rescue themselves.

And so they do. After Ron braves their home's now-flooded basement to retrieve some steaks and dynamite (like I said: Their foster parents are not responsible people), he, Dee, and Will assemble a steak-baited, explosive shark trap in a rapid-fire montage. It's a nifty little sequence that works perfectly as an homage to the equally zestful montage in which Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) attaches his chainsaw arm as he gets ready to kick some demonic butt in the 1987 Sam Raimi-directed sequel "Evil Dead II" (aka arguably the best "Evil Dead" movie), complete with a blood-splattering payoff that Raimi would surely sign off on.

While the constructing-a-shark-bomb sequence is the only unmistakable "Evil Dead" nod in "Thrash," there are other moments that bring that horror property to mind. Take, for instance, when Phoebe Dynevor's very pregnant character Lisa finds herself trapped in her car after the storm sends it crashing into a tree. It's not a huge stretch to say the sight of gnarled branches threatening to strangle and stab her recalls the even more horrifying scene from 1981's original "The Evil Dead" where Ash's sister Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss) is attacked and sexually assaulted by a demonically-possessed tree.

There's one Sam Raimi project that "Thrash" brings to mind above all others, though, and that's the Raimi-produced "Crawl." Helmed by French filmmaker Alexandre Aja, the 2019 survival horror/thriller flick also takes place in the U.S. South in the middle of a Category 5 hurricane and pits its heroes against some creatures that are much better suited to the extreme weather than us weakling humans (in that case, alligators). Aja, however, executes the same premise with more finesse by limiting the action to the increasingly sea-soaked crawl space and floors of a single house. Plus, writers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen are a bit less in-your-face about having the movie's supporting characters tell its protagonists stuff they already know to get viewers up to speed.

Still, while "Crawl" is a better natural disaster/creature feature mashup overall, "Thrash" makes for an otherwise agreeable Raimi-lite, gory flick about people being put through absolute hell by the forces of nature in their struggle to stay alive. And with a runtime that's well under 90 minutes, the movie flies by plenty quick enough to avoid wearing out its welcome.

"Thrash" is now streaming on Netflix.