Ben King/ NetflixIf nothing else, Thrash makes Crawl look like a masterpiece. At the time, many — including this writer — dismissed Alexandre Aja’s 2019 bloodthirsty-gator flick because it takes place in a basement in Florida, and, well, houses don’t really have basements in Florida. In retrospect, however, that’s a minor detail compared to the many, many logical leaps and glaring inconsistencies in Thrash — too many to count, really, but among them are “why are these houses filling up with water at such dramatically different rates?” and “did she really just cut her own umbilical cord with a piece of wet wood?”Of course, expecting logic from a movie with the line, “Mommy’s got to fight some f*cking sharks” — which happens immediately after the umbilical-cord cutting, by the way — is always going to be a losing proposition.

So is expecting much in general from a film that was originally conceived as a theatrical release from Sony Pictures, then quietly shuffled onto Netflix after it was shot. The only really surprising thing here is that it was ever slated for theaters to begin with, as Thrash’s problems begin at the script level. Much like the lifelong residents of the coastal Carolinas who stay home during a Category 5 hurricane without even bothering to board up their windows, these studio executives should have seen what was coming.

It’s kind of hard to feel sorry for these dinguses, honestly. | Ben King/NetflixAlthough it was shot in Australia, Thrash takes place in the fictional town of Annieville, South Carolina, where most people are sensible enough to pack up their cars and leave town when they’re warned to do so. This scenario always poses a challenge for movies like this one: How do they leave enough people behind to populate the film, while absolving them of the fact that that’s a stupid thing to do? Here, our characters’ actions are justified through a combination of agoraphobia, unexplained “work,” and a mean, alcoholic foster dad who keeps insisting that “it’s just a little rain” up until the literal moment he’s being eaten by a tiger shark.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Our agoraphobe is Dakota (Whitney Peak), who’s been unable to leave the house without having a panic attack since her mother’s demise a few years earlier. Her uncle, Dr.

Dale Edwards (Djimon Hounsou), who ever-so-conveniently happens to be a shark scientist, checks in on her at the beginning of the film. But for the most part, Dakota is wholly unprepared for the hurricane that’s coming for her as she holes up in her mom’s house watching Dance Moms (currently streaming on Disney+, another giveaway that this film was sold to Netflix after its completion). One of the benefits of having a marine biologist in the family, I suppose. | Ben King/NetflixThat’s all fair enough — grief makes people do bizarre things, even people who know how to operate spear guns.

Lisa (Phoebe Dynevor), nine months pregnant and driving a little blue Fiat around like the city-girl transplant that she is, has no such excuse: “I’m from New York! We don’t have hurricanes!” she protests at one point, which is just not true at all. Again, this is something that was written into the film’s script, and could easily have been fact-checked long before it was shot, edited, color corrected, test screened, and ultimately sent straight to streaming.

Writer-director Tommy Wirkola is Norwegian, sure, but again — excuses, excuses. The real reason why Lisa is late to evacuate, or why the trio of siblings played by Ayla Browne, Stacy Clausen, and Dante Ulbadi are stuck in a flooded kitchen for most of the movie, is so that Wirkola can set up outrageous bits like Lisa’s water birth (sepsis city, gross) or the scene where the siblings blow up a bunch of sharks with dynamite wrapped in T-bone steaks. Despite being better (or at least more competently) staged and shot, however, these scenes never quite rise to the outrageousness level of something like, say, the Sharknado movies.Mommy’s about to go fight some fucking sharks. | Ben King/Netflix This is the paradox of Thrash.

It’s too goofy and nonsensical to be a good movie, while also being too slick and professionally made to be true B-movie cheese, either. It does have its moments: The scene where the sharks first descend, attracted by the scent of blood from a wrecked meat truck, and eat three would-be Good Samaritans while Lisa sits screaming in her flooded Fiat delivers the giggly excitement that draws people to pulpy creature feature films like this one. But those aren’t the same as big centerpiece moments that were clearly written for their camp value, which all fall weirdly flat.

Even Lisa’s big line flies away like so many roof tiles in the wind, so much so that I had to pause the movie and rewind it because I thought I had misheard it the first time. All shark movies have inherent entertainment value — who doesn’t like seeing hungry sharks tear a person’s arm off, particularly if they deserve it? — which mea