PLOT: A group of women on a three-day kayaking and diving trip are menaced by a ravenous shark.
REVIEW: Twelve years ago, writer/director Andrew Traucki brought us a shark thriller called The Reef, about a group of five people who are stranded at sea when the yacht they’re on hits a coral reef and sinks. That’s just the start of their troubles, as then they find themselves being started by a ravenous great white shark that proceeds to eat them one by one. Now Traucki is back with a sequel called The Reef: Stalked – but given that there are no returning characters and no references to the previous film, this is really a sequel in name only. You don’t need to have seen The Reef to get into the shark thrills of The Reef: Stalked.
This time around, Traucki introduces us to a group of women who enjoy getting together to go diving and spearfishing. This group includes Nic (Teressa Liane), Jodie (Ann Truong), Lisa (Kate Lister), and Nic’s sister Cath (Bridget Burt). Cath dreams of accompanying her sister and friends on a trip that will involve three days straight of kayaking, diving, and fishing before ending up at a four star resort. Sadly, Cath doesn’t live to fulfill that dream. She’s drowned in her bathtub by her abusive husband at the start of the movie. Nine months later, Nic and her friends decide to pay tribute to Cath by sticking to their vacation plan. Stepping into Cath’s place on the trip, to Nic’s surprise, is her other sister, Annie (Saskia Archer).
The three days of kayaking has hardly even gotten started when the women decide to stop for some diving…. and almost immediately catch the attention of a shark. A shark that will continue stalking them (thus the title) and trying to attack them for the rest of the film. You want shark thrills? This movie has an hour straight of shark thrills, as Nic and her cohorts try everything they can to get help and/or reach land before they become the shark’s latest meal. And as is usually the case in movies like this, the shark isn’t content to eat just one person and go on its way. This insatiable fish isn’t going to be satisfied until it eats all of these people.
By giving the lead character Nic a tragic back story and a rocky relationship with her surviving sister, Traucki made a commendable attempt to give the movie and its characters emotional depth. Nic has panic attacks while imagining what the final moments of Cath’s life would have been like, and she and Annie have disagreements over how the shark situation should be handled. But this really just comes off as window dressing and it’s not likely that many viewers are going to get invested in what’s going on in the characters’ hearts and minds. There’s a point near the end of the film where Annie lashes out at Nic by saying “You don’t even know me!” and I had to admit that I didn’t really know her, either. Or any of the other characters. They’re just here to struggle and try to escape from a relentless shark, they don’t make much of an impression.
Viewers are here for the shark, and Traucki does handle that element very well. Several moments involving the shark – or the characters thinking the shark is probably swimming close by – are legitimately suspenseful. Shark thrillers often have some dodgy special effects on display, but thankfully there isn’t much of that in The Reef: Stalked. All of the shark footage appears to be of a real shark. Sometimes the image has been digitally manipulated to get the shark in a frame that it wasn’t originally part of, but that’s better than the bad CGI that can be found in other shark thrillers. Only one effects shot that featured the shark moving at super speed stood out as laughable to me.
Although I didn’t connect with the characters as much as Traucki clearly wanted viewers to, I was entertained by The Reef: Stalked. The shark was around plenty, the cast did well with the material they had to work with, and there was some good suspense. As far as shark thrillers go, this is a middle-of-the-road entry. It’s not one of the best I’ve seen, but I’ve also seen a lot worse. If you feel compelled to watch this sort of movie – and a lot of people must be, because we seem to get multiple shark thrillers every year – you’ll probably get some enjoyment out of watching this one.
RLJE Films and Shudder are giving The Reef: Stalked a theatrical, digital, VOD, and streaming release in North America on July 29th.
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