When I stumbled across the trailer for a new Netflix original film with a premise straight out of nightmares I haven’t even considered before, I knew I needed to watch it. What I found was an odd blend of overstressed tropes in a film that never managed to exceed my expectations, but made for an interesting watch nonetheless.

“Thrash” follows a small coastal town in South Carolina that gets hit by a Category 5 hurricane, completely submerging it in a flood of water. The situation the town has found itself in is very reminiscent of the damage to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, which the film obviously drew inspiration from with the flooding and levees breaking.

Disaster films have been made hundreds of times before, so obviously “Thrash” needed a solution to set itself apart from the crowd. The answer: add a pack of ravenous bull sharks to hunt the hurricane survivors in the now-submerged town.

As someone who grew up living on an island and still manages to be utterly petrified of sharks, I can confidently say that I wouldn’t have lasted seconds in this scenario and would have had a heart attack within moments. However, this did make for a terrifyingly addictive watch experience, as I was both cringing from the bad decisions each character made and jumping in fright every time a shark fin emerged from the murky water.

Despite my clear emotional distraught at the film, “Thrash” was nothing extraordinary. In fact, I think several aspects of the film were executed pretty poorly, with characters I never fully connected with.

Right from the start of the film, the audience is introduced to a whole cast of characters, each with their own complicated backstories and relationships. I thought this was going to be an interesting blend, but the cast remained stagnantly separate, with little interaction between them.

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“Thrash” primarily follows three groups of individuals: a protective uncle trying to save his niece, the niece herself that rescues a woman in active labor, and a group of foster kids. While there was a connection between the uncle and his niece, I felt like I was waiting for the trio of foster kids to find their place in an overarching story that never came to fruition.

Even though all of the individual storylines were interesting, the audience was never left with any of them long enough. I felt like the film kept jumping back and forth between the characters too much, almost like the writers had two ideas when creating the film and decided to do both of them instead of just sticking with one.

Due to this, I feel like there was some lack in character development as well, which could have been resolved if we’d spent more time with them instead of all over the place. Personally, as much as I found the foster kids’ adventure compelling, I think that cutting their story entirely and focusing instead primarily on the niece and her adventures could have made for a more complete storyline with some actual fleshed-out characters.

I will say, however, that one of my favorite parts of the film was when the trio of foster kids found a case of dynamite and used it to blow up the sharks hunting them. That was a pretty sick, albeit very unrealistic, scene that I thoroughly enjoyed. Also, the random insertion of a clip from “Dance Moms” was a jumpscare more frightening than any of the sharks.

Even though the cast of “Thrash” had to tackle both a hurricane and sharks, I will say that everything in this film was entirely avoidable. Several times during the opening scene news and radio stations were playing messages about a mandated evacuation due to the weather conditions, and yet none of the characters took that threat seriously.

One man even switched the radio from the weather to a music station, so I couldn’t exactly feel bad for him when he was eaten by the group of sharks. I guess the real message here was to listen to the weather forecasters, and maybe don’t ignore the mandated evacuations.

Overall, to say “Thrash” was a good movie would be a bit of an overstatement. It was fine, but nothing extraordinary or that far out of the box. Nevertheless, I was entertained, and sometimes that’s all you can hope for in a film.