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Get Ready for a Hot Gill-Summer in HOT SPRING SHARK ATTACK

                When I was in the third grade, one of my teachers told me that when she was a teenager, she saw Jaws when it first came out and afterward she became terrified of using the bathroom. Why? Because she was convinced a shark would swim up through the toilet and bite her butt. I remember thinking at just eight years old, “That’s not how sharks work.” But now, in the year 2025, a new Japanese film would like to argue, “Actually, that’s exactly how sharks work.” HOT SPRING SHARK ATTACK, the deliriously over-the-top debut from director Morihito Inoue, happily tosses out everything we think we know about sharks. These aren’t just any aquatic predators. They’re elastic, methane-filled, plumbing-surfing nightmares that lurk in the geothermal depths of a sleepy Japanese hot spring resort town. Imagine if Jaws was remade by someone raised on kaiju films, anime, and Sharknado, and you might begin to understand the sheer nonsense of this movie.

                                                          

The film proudly wears its Spielbergian inspiration on its gilled sleeve. Like Jaws, HOT SPRING SHARK ATTACK centers on a seaside town plagued by mysterious shark attacks. Bodies begin turning up at the resort town of Atsumi, just as its bumbling mayor, Mangan (Takuya Fujimura), is preparing to unveil a luxurious new multi-story spa. When he's warned to close the hot springs, he not only refuses, but he also doubles down and invites shark-themed influencers (fin-fluencers?) to splash around in the very waters that are turning red with blood.  From there, things escalate at an exponential rate. Dr. Kose (Yuu Nakanishi), a marine biologist soon arrives determined to get to the bottom of the strange attacks. Her discovery? These aren't ordinary sharks, but they’re actually ancient creatures known as Carcharodon fons callidus, who were awakened by the resort's construction on their sacred bone-burial ground. Thanks to their collapsible skeletons, they’re able to travel through plumbing pipes, emerge from puddles, and, yes, even attack from toilets.

                                                            

If that premise doesn’t sell you, allow me to tell you about the character Macho (Sumiya Shiina), an oiled-up, slow-motion-strutting, impossibly muscular Onsen Guardian who appears out of nowhere to battle the sharks with a steely glare and a mysterious past. Macho is a cinematic enigma because he is part superhero, part fever dream, and all biceps. Teaming up with Dr. Kose and Mayor Mangan, the three of them must defeat all the sharks to save the resort.

                                                             

The sharks themselves are a technical marvel (not in the traditional sense, of course) but in the profoundly bad way that makes low-budget genre films so deeply lovable. They’re created with a mix of puppetry, claymation, and some of the most gloriously awful CGI this side of Birdemic. Their gills are stylized like the Japanese onsen symbol, and they often shout “Shaaaaaaaaark!” in moments of triumph or terror like they were some kind of Pokémon. And the overall sequence of events in the movie is oddly hypnotizing because every time you think the film can’t get unhinged any more, it does.

                                                               

What makes HOT SPRING SHARK ATTACK so unexpectedly great is how committed it is to its own ridiculousness. It knows it’s dumb. It knows the sharks are rubbery and the plot makes no scientific sense. But it leans into every absurd twist with total sincerity and creates a movie that’s not just “so bad it’s good”…it’s genuinely brilliant in its embrace of nonsense. Fifty years after Jaws taught us to fear the ocean, HOT SPRING SHARK ATTACK proves that terror (and hilarity) can now come from anywhere: your spa, your plumbing, your foot bath. This isn’t just a sharksploitation movie. It’s a celebration of the weird, the wild, and the wonderfully low-budget. You won’t believe what you’re watching…and you’ll be all the happier for it.