WISE Score
Avg. Tomatometer
A shark movie that somehow makes being eaten by a Great White look boring and miserable.
15%
Skip it. Chum is a textbook example of a movie that sounds like a fun B-movie romp on paper but ends up being a joyless, poorly made slog. With a 15% on Rotten Tomatoes and a dismal 2.9 on IMDb, it's not even worth a 'hate-watch.'
There are dozens of better shark movies and hundreds of better slashers. Don't waste your family's movie night on something that critics and audiences alike have collectively rejected as bottom-tier trash.
This is strictly 15+ territory. Between the shark attacks and the psychopathic killer, it’s designed to be disturbing and it largely succeeds at being unpleasant.
It's a mean-spirited horror flick about a psychopathic killer picking off friends on a yacht. Not exactly the 'kindness and cooperation' vibe we look for.
Combining a shark movie with a slasher is a decent elevator pitch, but the execution—judging by the abysmal 15% critic score—is completely derivative.
High levels of gore, psychological terror, and 'chum' related violence. Definitely not for younger audiences or anyone sensitive to animal/human carnage.
With a 2.9 IMDb rating, this isn't even a 'good' bad movie. There's no artistic or ethical value to be found in this Mediterranean mess.
On paper, Chum looks like it's trying to do for the Mediterranean what Jaws did for Amity Island, but with a Scream twist. You’ve got the newlyweds, the 'perfect' friends, the luxury yacht—all the ingredients for a slick, high-stakes thriller. But the reality is a movie that doesn't know if it wants to be a creature feature or a character study of a serial killer, and it fails at both.
The problem with Chum isn't just that it's scary; it's that it's boring and mean. In a good horror movie, you care about the survival of the characters. Here, the writing is so thin and the 'psychopath' trope is so overplayed that you're mostly just waiting for the credits to roll. The 1.5 rating on Letterboxd is the real red flag here—that's the community of people who love movies telling you to stay away.
If your teen is itching for high-seas tension, you're much better off with The Shallows for pure shark survival or even a classic like Dead Calm for the 'stranger on a boat' psychodrama. Chum is just cinematic landfill. It doesn't respect your time, and it definitely doesn't offer anything beyond cheap, poorly executed shocks.
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