The Most Underrated Shark Movies Every Fan Should Watch

Jaws did a number on all of us, and if it’s ever on TV, you can be sure I’ll let it play and be engrossed within a minute. It’s the perfect summer movie and one of the greatest creature features ever. I can’t resist it.

But it also spawned a whole genre, and there are times I’m more in the mood for hard action or straight-up chum, meaning bad movies that still entertain. We've already ranked every Jaws movie, so think of this as the other side of that universe.

These are five shark movies you may have missed. A couple are excellent. One is gloriously stupid. Leap in, if you're brave.

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The Reef

Andrew Traucki refused to build a mechanical shark, and he refused to animate a digital one. He went and filmed real great whites. A fake shark "would have taken away from the movie," Traucki told Dread Central, so he ran a separate unit just to capture shark footage.

Of course, sharks don't hit marks. His caged cinematographer kept missing them while he geared up, so Traucki leaned over the side of the boat with a small rig and caught footage himself.

If you're weighing your own approach, we've mapped the three ways to shoot a shark (real, practical, or digital), and Traucki chose the punishing one.

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Bait

A tsunami traps shoppers in a flooded supermarket with a pair of great whites cruising the aisles in this one.

A second-unit veteran from the Matrix sequels and I, Robot, director Kimble Rendall wanted "as much in camera as possible," he told Dread Central, so he built three animatronic sharks.

“We used three animatronic sharks for Bait. There’s the full-length rubber shark that was stuck on a metal subframe, which was really cool. Then we had a half-shark, which was just mostly the shark’s head, which we would use for close-ups; and then we had what we called the ‘glove puppet,’ which was what we would use if we needed a shark in the distant background. But yeah, trying to do as much in camera as possible was really important to me.”

Bait barely made a ripple in Australia but cleared more than $24 million in China and scored a midnight berth at the Venice Film Festival. Careful planning travels well, and you'd be surprised how much a practical shark still holds up decades after Jaws.

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The Shallows

Jaume Collet-Serra shot The Shallows almost entirely on a single rock, telling a story about Blake Lively versus a fully digital great white. (Unlike Open Water and its real sharks.)

However, when Lively's character stitches her own leg wound, that's a real prosthetic with no digital cleanup.

"Water destroys makeup," Collet-Serra told We Got This Covered, so the effect had to work on camera, in the surf, in one take. “There’s no VFX there at all. Everything is [Blake]. She stitched her prosthetic, and everything worked in camera. This is classic, no CG.”

Even the scene-stealing seagull was real. It was an injured bird that had lived in captivity and, according to IndieWire, beat out two other gulls for the role.

You can do a lot with very little. Two filmmakers with no formal training shot a micro-budget shark short on a pocket cinema camera to prove this point.

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The Meg

The Meg grossed more than half a billion dollars, so calling it underrated sounds kind of odd until you think about how quickly people wave it off as dumb. And, okay, maybe it is a silly one, but most shark movies, underneath the teeth, are kind of silly.

Jon Turteltaub knew exactly what he was doing. He set out to make "the second best shark movie of all time," he joked in a Hollywood Reporter interview. He said:

“I get asked the shark-movie question a lot. I’m not totally sure there is such a thing as a ‘shark movie.’ After Jaws, the shark movie became a thing, but it also became a pretty pointless thing compared to Jaws. So how do you exploit what Jaws got everyone interested in, knowing you’ll never be that good? I remember when I was making Cool Runnings and someone saw an early cut and they said, ‘It’s pretty good.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean pretty good? Isn’t it awesome?’—as a joke. And they said, ‘Well, it’s not like you set out to make the greatest movie ever.’ And I realized, yes, actually, I did. Every director on every movie sets out to make the greatest movie of all time. And along the way, you have realizations that that’s not going to happen and you’re just trying to make the best movie you can. I probably wanted to be a moviemaker because of Jaws, so truthfully, I set out to make the second best shark movie of all time. And I hope we did it.”

So that’s what The Meg is all about, committing to the premise and taking it seriously enough. He treated the megalodon like a leading lady who deserves a real entrance, and he fought constantly over when to reveal her. It’s the same question Jaws answered by hiding its shark for most of the runtime.

Jason Statham handled his own water work, too, drawing on a real diving career that took him to the 1990 Commonwealth Games.

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Sharkansas Women's Prison Massacre

Sometimes you need something that's so bad, it's... well, still bad, but at least it's interesting. Which brings us to probably our wildest pick, one we owe to Horror with an Accent on TikTok. Yes, it is about prehistoric sharks swimming through Arkansas mud after a fracking accident. Yes, Traci Lords is in it. Yes, the victims are incarcerated women on the run.

Director Jim Wynorski of Chopping Mall fame came up through Roger Corman's fast, cheap, and profitable school, and every frame reveals this. Culture Crypt's review points out that the film's Kickstarter drew just 17 backers and $598 total, which tells you the budget bracket the film falls in.

Wynorski shot it anyway down in Florida, using caves he liked enough to reuse in a later creature feature. Crowdfunding sucks; being told your idea isn’t good enough sucks. Your limitations don't have to sink a finished film. Corman built a whole production philosophy on that idea, and his students keep proving it, even the ones making movies about… land sharks.

If this one isn’t your bag, there are plenty of others in the same vein to try, like any of the Sharknado films, Ouija Shark, Santa Jaws, etc. Go wild.