Movie Review: HOT SPRING SHARK ATTACK (ONSEN SHAKU)

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: July 11th, 2025 / 02:04 AM

HOT SPRING SHARK ATTACK movie poster | ©2025 Utopia Select LLC

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Takuya Fujimura, Yuu Nakanishi, Sumiya Shiina, Kiyobumi Kaneko
Writer: Morito Inoue
Director: Morito Inoue
Distributor: Utopia Select LLC
Release Date: July 11, 2025 (theatrical, VOD)

Anyone remember TOP SECRET!, the 1984 spy movie parody from the AIRPLANE team? Val Kilmer played a rock ‘n’ roll star whose repertoire included a number entitled, “How Silly Can You Get?”

This is relevant, because it seems that writer/director Morito Inoue is attempting to answer that question with HOT SPRING SHARK ATTACK (ONSEN SHAKU), a Japanese-language movie that make the first couple of SHARKNADO entries look like nature documentaries.

It is probably helpful to go into HOT SPRING SHARK ATTACK knowing that, while “onsen” does mean “hot springs” in Japanese, it also refers to “hot tubs.”

In the coastal tourist town of Atsumi, a new hotel has recently been constructed with rapid 3D printing. Hotel guests have been mysteriously disappearing from the premises, their naked and mauled remains found on the beaches.

It is up to about-to-retire police chief Denbei Tsuka (Kiyobumi Kaneko) and media-obsessed young Mayor Mangan (Takuya Fujimura) to investigate the situation. To this end, they bring in extremely excited shark expert Dr. Mayumi Kose (Yuu Nakanishi).

In the film’s first twenty minutes (to give readers a sense of how things proceed), Dr. Kose deduces that an ancient, enormous species of shark, Carcharadon Fons Calidus, has been revived. Since sharks have cartilage rather than bones, and this variety of shark is more flexible than most, they are squeezing themselves through the plumbing to attack bathers in the hot tubs and drag them back to the ocean.

This is far from the goofiest aspect of HOT SPRING SHARK ATTACK, which takes clear pride in VFX that alternatively look like stuffed animals, color animatics, and props from 1960s children’s TV shows.

The cast, which also includes Sumiya Shiina as a character appropriately known as “Maccho,” all perform with enthusiastic verve. The tone is quasi-AIRPLANE!, but a lot of the jokes depend less on detail and more on how loony the narrative becomes.

Individually, many sequences are funny, but cumulatively, they are a lot. Whether HOT SPRING SHARK ATTACK will strike most viewers as successful parody or just overkill within the great sea of gonzonana is a matter this reviewer dares not presume to guess.

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