Into the Deep is another entry in the direct-to-streaming cheap shark movie club… but a little different and a touch better. It’s about a woman who had a traumatic incident with a shark as a child who is now on a trip to an old ship wreck. Which is, of course, where the sharks attack… but then they run afoul of some baddies looking for their sunken drugs.

For one of these low budget shark flicks, it wants to treat the fish realistically (even if I’m pretty sure that one shark growled). They look pretty good as a combination of stock footage and visual effects… until they randomly look like trash. But they generally look better than your average bad shark movie sharks.

The flick also wants to be a crime thriller and its okish at being one. It at least gives the characters something to do when they aren’t being attacked by sharks.

The acting is… weird though. I’m not sure I’d say bad, but the actors are just a little off almost all the time. Maybe it’s the writing or maybe it’s just general confusion over what the movie’s about. The good guys and the bad guys and the Richard Dreyfusses are off their game.

Oh yes… Richard Dreyfuss has an extended cameo. It’s stunt casting and he’s real old and maybe not so good with the memorizing his lines bit. I felt a little bad for him. But the legacy of Jaws has bothered the folks who made that movie so this seems like his effort to make amends. It ends with Dreyfuss addressing the audience as the credits roll. He gives a speech about shark preservation and how man is more dangerous to sharks than they are to us. Which is a message I 100% agree with. Too bad the writing is clunky… but at least it’s a unique way to end a bad shark flick.

Overall, this is a good bad shark movie… but it’s still a bad movie. I like its scatterbrained attempt at shark redemption even if the sharks eat a few people along the way. The crime story is ok and elicits a bigger body count than the sharks… because the real monster is man… or something <waves hands wildly>.

Score: 73