Right now, we’re in the middle of SyFy’s Sharknado week.  On Sunday night, SyFy will premiering what they say is going to be The Last Sharknado.  In the days leading up to that moment, they’ve been reshowing all of their classic shark films and premiering a new shark film each night!

Wednesday night’s premiere was Frenzy.

Frenzy‘s a bit different from some of the other shark films that SyFy’s been showing this week.  Make no mistake, the film did feature sharks.  In fact, there were three very big sharks who swam through the ocean and ate just about anyone or anything that they could sink their teeth into.  Not only did they eat people who were unfortunate enough to be floating out in the water but they also bumped up against boats, the better to knock poachers overboard.  These were some mean sharks!

That said, they weren’t ghost sharks.  They weren’t zombie sharks.  None of them wore a little Santa cap on their fin, like Santa Jaws did.  They weren’t mutated by radiation or a Big Evil Corporation.  And certainly, they weren’t dropped into the ocean by a tornado.  No, these were just normal, very big sharks.

And while the sharks were undoubtedly important to the story that Frenzy was telling, the film really wasn’t about them.  Instead, at its heart, Frenzy is the story of two sisters, Paige (Gina Vitori) and Lindsey (Aubrey Reynolds).  Paige has always been the adventurous one while Lindsey has always been the one who rarely takes risks and who tries to play it safe.  Paige has found fame as a travel vlogger.  Along with Evan (Michael S. New), Kahia (Lanett Tachel) and Seb (Taylor Jorgensen), she travels around the world and she films herself doing dangerous things and having new experiences.  When Lindsey joins Paige for her latest adventure, it seems like a chance for Lindsey to not only break out for her shell but to also find romance with Seb as well…

Of course, things never go quite as smoothly as they’re supposed to.  In this case, things go downhill as soon as Paige, Lindsey, and everyone else gets aboard a less-than-reliable seaplane so that they can go scuba diving.  When the plane crashes into the middle of the ocean, Lindsey and a few survivors are left floating in the water.  There’s an island in the distance but can they reach it before the sharks reach them?

Frenzy was definitely a change-of-pace, as far as SyFy shark movies are concerned.  While I wouldn’t say that you necessarily have to have a sister to truly appreciate Frenzy‘s story, it undoubtedly helps.  The relationship between Paige and Lindsey — made up of equal parts love and rivalry — is at the heart of Frenzy and fortunately, both Aubrey Reynolds and Gina Vitori were totally believable as sisters.  Their relationship, with all of its complications, felt real and, on a personal level, there were many lines of dialogue and little actions to which I related.  For me, as I watched, this film could have just as easily been called “Lisa And Erin Go On Vacation And Try Not To Die.”

I also liked the way that the film used its flashback structure.  With Lindsey continually flashing back between the past and the present, we were kept off-balance as far as Lindsey’s current mental state was concerned.  It’s a structure that required us to consider what was real, what was dreamed, and what was just a hallucination.

Frenzy was a nice change-of-pace for Sharknado week.