HOT SPRING SHARK ATTACK - Mark Reviews Movies

Hot Spring Shark Attack, Utopia Distribution

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 10, 2025

It's not often—or ever—that one sees a movie about a prehistoric shark that travels through the narrow water pipes of a city, pops out the other end, and devours anyone on the other side. That's the premise of Hot Spring Shark Attack, which does exactly what the title promises multiple times over.

The charm of and the issue with writer/director Morihito Inoue's debut come from the fact that this is a very cheap and very, very cheap-looking movie. The positive side of the intentional limitations of the filmmaking is that Inoue can and does do anything the director imagines for this story, whether that be the unbelievable setup or any of the countless other physically impossible things that happen throughout the movie.

The concept, in other words, is far more important in the filmmaker's mind than the execution. When we're talking about silly sights such as sharks that shoot electricity from their heads and a muscle-bound man slamming his fists to the ground to launch several sharks into the air, the idea of those visual effects looking convincing feels like an anathema to the spirit of how ridiculous this story is. It looks cheap, because it has to, basically, in order fit both the tone and, well, everything else about the movie.

At its core, then, Inoue's movie is in that increasingly long line of intentionally dumb, financially frugal, and almost self-evidently "bad" movies. You know the ones. They existed on cable television for a while, went straight to home video (or, now, any of the ad-supported streaming platforms), or occasionally, as is the case here, sneak into some number of theaters. The titles are usually the selling point, as well as the sole source of creative inspiration, and it's often difficult to determine if such a movie is trying to be bad as a gag or just wants to make the joke an excuse for the plain fact that it is bad.

There's no mistaking Inoue's intent here, at least. Well, one hopes there's no error in presuming that the whole of this project is meant to be a joke, but that's the problem with this sort of movie. No matter how terrible the special effects and how cheesy the performances and how ludicrous the plot, there is always a little smidgen of doubt that the people who make these things aren't in on what appears to be an obvious gag.

Let's put those doubts aside, though, and assume that Inoue isn't serious or passionate about this story of an ancient, resurrected species of shark that can scrunch up its entire body to fit inside pipes that are about six inches in diameter. Yes, there are multiple sharks here, too, which eventually appear in puddles throughout the city and somehow swim inside asphalt as they realize there's plenty of good eating to be had.

The city in question is called Atsumi, which appears to be a fictional location, lest any of Japan's real spa destinations worry about people believing that a prehistoric shark might emerge from the drain of a tub. As more and more tourists have that fate befall them, police chief Denbei Tsuka (Kiyobumi Kaneko) wants to put out a citywide warning about shark attacks. In the old tradition of shark movies, the city's mayor Mangan Kanichi (Takuya Fujimura), of course, doesn't want to cause a panic and ruin the metropolis' tourism-centric economy. After all, the city is in the middle of building a massive spa facility, in which the mayor has a personal financial investment.

Instead, he calls in a marine biology professor (played by Daniel Aguilar), who is almost immediately eaten by a shark while he relaxes in a hot tub. Thankfully, his back-up Mayumi Kose (Koichi Makigami) is right behind her colleague and very excited to examine her mentor's remains.

The plot, obviously, doesn't matter, because the setup initially exists to show a bunch of people being eaten by sharks. The effects may be cheap, but they're surprisingly diverse, ranging from fakey digital fins cutting through water and city streets, to hand puppets that let allow the lead shark to shout out its battle cry (It's just an elongated enunciation of "Shark!"), and to what generally looks like photos of a shark and an actor being moved by hand.

When the military is called in to stop the sharks, the fleet is made up of carboard cutouts and plastic models, as is the submersible that that mayor, scientist, and the muscly man—named Macho (Sumiya Shiina), naturally—use to attack the school of vicious sharks. Macho, by the way, also has the ability to hold his breath underwater for an inordinate amount of time, perhaps because his first memory and only knowledge of his background is that he grew up near the ocean.

This is goofy stuff—and, at about 70 minutes, fortunately brief, which is a quality that isn't always shared by these intentionally "bad" affairs. The big question, then, is whether the one joke in a one-joke movie like this is good enough to recommend it, especially when the filmmakers don't find or even look for any other gags that might be right there, for example, in its formulaic plot or archetypical characters. Hot Spring Shark Attack comes very close to succeeding on its own weird terms, and that's something, at least.

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