Crew
Director/Story – Anthony C. Ferrante, Screenplay – Anthony C. Ferrante & Geoff Meed, Producer – David Michael Latt, Photography – Jeffrey Carolan, Music – Christopher Cano, Mikel Shane Prather & Chris Ridenhour, Visual Effects Supervisor – Sesha Burrow, Production Design – Charlie Harris & Cassidy Serene. Production Company – The Asylum.
Cast
Angela Cole (Gia Shah), Johnny Ramey (Jareth Danzo), Steve Hanks (Leo Reverend), Ashton Leigh (Charlotte Harlow), Hector Becerra (Teller), Michael Sandy (Batton), Michelle ‘Mini’ Ng (Paulina Lee), Rob Eubanks (Silas), Gerry Laytin (Governor Willis), Stephen Lamar (Dalton Shah), Joseph Aviel (Captain Oscar), Jonna Kae Volz (Lydia)
Plot
A shipment of drugs for the crime kingpin Leo Reverend is dropped in the Florida Keys in crates. The drugs have been hidden inside jars of the tea that Reverend’s respectable business sells. Reverend despatches Jareth Danzo to oversee a team of divers and a sharpshooter to retrieve the crates from the ocean floor. The team arrive at the location to find that widow Gia Shah has come out to the area in a boat to fish and dive in memory of her late husband. They also find that there are sharks in the area. When the sharks start to kill members of their group, Gia is forced at gunpoint to aid them in diving into the shark-infested waters to retrieve the jars.
Director Anthony C. Ferrante and the low-budget production company The Asylum had quite a reasonable hit with Sharknado (2013), which became a cult bad movie hit. Ferrante went on to make a string of sequels with Sharknado 2: The Second One (2014), Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (2015), Sharknado: The 4th Awakens (2016), Sharknado 5: Global Swarming (2017) and The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time (2018).
Even aside from that, The Asylum has made a host of other killer shark films with the likes of Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (2009), which fairly much started the gonzo killer shark genre, along with other efforts such as 2-Headed Shark Attack (2012) and sequels that keep adding more heads, Shark Week (2012), Ice Sharks (2016), Planet of the Sharks (2016), Empire of the Sharks (2017), Megalodon (2018) and sequels, Shark Season (2020), Shark Side of the Moon (2021) and Shark Thrash (2026).
Out in the real world, by the mid-2020s, people appear to have tired of gonzo killer shark films and the genre has swung towards thrillers about people stranded in shark-infested waters with the likes of Great White (2021), Maneater (2022), The Requin (2022), Shark Bait (2022), Shark Waters (2022), The Black Demon (2023), Blind Waters (2023), The Last Breath (2024), Shark Warning (2024), Something in the Water (2024), Beast of War (2025), Chum (2026) and Deep Waters (2026).
Great White Waters is Anthony C. Ferrante returning to make a killer shark film eight years after making the last Sharknado film. In that the genre has transformed in that time, he has now turned to making one of the serious survival in shark-infested waters thrillers. At which he does not too bad a job either. The film has been afforded a decent budget (for The Asylum anyway), looks well photographed and has gone to the extent of shooting underwater scenes with the cast members scuba diving.
Great White Waters has a fairly good script – not something you can say very often about a film from The Asylum. It is tight and keeps moving, while providing of a number of decent twists and surprises throughout. Certainly, the whole plot about diver(s) forced by criminals to go diving in search of a valuable sunken horde in an area menaced by sharks was done the same year by two other films with the Australian Fear Below (2025), another quite good film, and Into the Deep (2025). About the only point this reverts to the silliness of the Sharknado films is an improbable climax with a helicopter trying to lift the crates of drugs clear and the shark swinging on the end before blowing the boat up.
Anthony C. Ferrante is a former writer for Fangoria magazine and a makeup effects supervisor who has worked on numerous B horror films such as The Dentist (1996), Faust: Love of the Damned (2000) and Arachnid (2001), among others. He made his directorial debut with the haunted house film Boo (2005) and went onto Headless Horseman (2007), The Asylum’s Hansel & Gretel (2013), Forgotten Evil (2017), Zombie Tidal Wave (2019), Nix (2022), Time Pirates (2022), Blind Waters (2023), Dante’s Hotel (2023) and Water Park Shark (2026).
Trailer here