Shudder Day: Beast of War (2025)

 As a fan of Sharks in Movies and an avid avoider of them in real life, these kinds of Movies speak to me.

Plus Netflix has a Shark Movie out, so why not finally get around to covering...

It is 1942 in Austalia.

A young man is training to be a Soldier in WW2, but is haunted by some past trauma.

Even so, he manages to bond with the group during the training.

This is going to be the best part of their...

...and their boat was sunk, many were killed and the survivors are stranded in the ocean on a makeshift raft.

Man, War really is hell, eh?

Oh and there's a shark hanging around too.

Yes, this is 'inspired' by real events.
That's a nice, catch-all term that somehow implies that Movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre happened for real.

Can the stranded soldiers work together to take out the beast?

Will the rigors of simply trying to survive be the end of them?

Did I seriously make it through this whole summary without mentioning Vegemite?

To find out the answer to 2 of those questions, stream it now.

A Film that aims to be one thing and it does it pretty darn well!

This one is not epic in scope.
This one is not about big battles.

Instead, the Film (80% of it really) is about how these guys survive (or not) together in this insanely trying time!

The whole thing was shot in a giant water tank and lit so that you never see the edges.  Good, simple stuff.

The Shark appears minimally in the grand scheme of things, but that also means that you never get used to it.  As opposed to one of the 705 Syfy Channel Shark Films where it pops up every few minutes in all of its (usually bad) CGI glory.

It is funny how things go in circles though.  This Film is clearly inspired in many (good) ways by Jaws and also claims to be 'inspired by' the events retold by Quint in Jaws.

Beast of War is an engaging and pretty tight 80ish minute Film.  Watch it for its own merits and don't expect, say, what this Fake AI Trailer Image implies...

That's just Mega Shark, guys!

A Film that makes great use of a simple premise and limited locations.  A worthy homage to Jaws and other Films like that.