The shockingly good giant shark threequel you never knew existed takes a bite out of the Netflix charts

Renny Harlin’s 1999 creature feature Deep Blue Sea remains a cheesy B-tier delight, with a rogue band of established character actors trapped in an underwater base that finds itself under attack from genetically enhanced sharks that have developed supreme levels of intelligence and a hankering for human flesh.

It’s every bit as gloriously stupid as it sounds, but it was a decent-sized hit at the box office after earning $162 million, before going on to find a second wave of popularity on home video. Nine years later, a sequel was rushed through production and sent out into the VOD wilderness, where it fully deserved the big fat 0 percent it ended up scoring on Rotten Tomatoes.

Undeterred, a third installment arrived just 15 months later, which turned out to be… actually pretty good. In fact, Deep Blue Sea 3 is the best-reviewed entry in the trilogy by virtue of a 71 percent RT rating, even if users have downvoted it substantially to the tune of just 34 percent.

History has shown that Netflix subscribers have a certain fondness for shlocky genre cinema, so we shouldn’t be all that surprised that Deep Blue Sea 3 has charted on the platform’s global rankings, even managing to reach as high as fifth position in Canada.

For better or worse, it delivers exactly what you expect from a giant shark movie with no intentions of being anything else, and that sort of undemanding and easily digestible entertainment is proving to be eminently watchable for customers of the world’s largest streaming service.