Director – Brendan Petrizzo, Screenplay – Ryan Ebert & Bill Hanstock, Story – Marc Gottlieb, Producer – David Michael Latt, Photography – Marcus Friedlander, Music – Mikel Shane Prather & Chris Ridenhour, Visual Effects Supervisor – Glenn Campbell, Visual Effects – Foxtrot X-Ray (Supervisor – Paul Denigris), Production Design – Marian Therese Nusser. Production Company – The Asylum.
Cast
Caroline Williams (Dr Rylie Clark), Eric Roberts (Lieutenant Commander Keith Sharp), Jessica Chancellor (Kirsty London), Alex Trumble (Dr. John Hilton), Jeffrey Daniels (Kurt Holt), Chase Hamilton (Corporal Lance Talbot), Brendan James Formella (Private Hoskins), Jordan B. Hubbard (Captain Kacey Keele), Javi Luna (Brunson), Sam Holeman (Ensign Baum)
Plot
The wounded USS King is returning from killing the megalodon. Nearby is the Cratus Platform, a project designed to tap the geothermal energies of an underwater volcano. The Cratus’s designer Dr Rylei Clark descends in a submersible and sees another megalodon emerge from the depths. The platform come under attack but they manage to trap one of the megalodons inside the gates. As other megalodons emerge, they appeal for help and the USS King diverts to their area. Dr Clark then realises that the megalodon is pregnant and about to give birth.
The Asylum also created another shark film series that began with Megalodon (2018), which was intended as a Mockbuster to accompany the big-budget The Meg (2018). This was followed by a sequel Megalodon Rising (2021). Megalodon: The Frenzy was the third in the series and was given a more prestige treatment than usual – it has two name stars with Eric Roberts and Caroline Williams. It also received a limited theatrical release, coming out two weeks after The Meg sequel Meg 2: The Trench (2023). Unlike most of The Asylum’s other shark films listed above, the Megalodon series doesn’t play everything unseriously.
I found the Megalodon films strictly average, nothing standout among The Asylum’s body of killer shark films. The Asylum’s in-house effects team have been steadily getting better in the last few years. Here though the effects for the film feel as though they have been produced on a budget. They often seem cut in their corners, even at the same time as the megalodon is now made even more giant-sized than before. We get repeated shots of it throwing its front half up on deck of a ship or the beach to chomp people, sometimes even swallow entire boats whole.
The megalodon attacks
Due to The Asylum’s low-budget filmmaking, most of the film consists of people sitting around in control rooms or the bridges of ships, sometimes on deck, debating technical solutions about what to do about the megalodons. There are a couple of submersible journeys and several megalodon attacks but most of the drama never moves out of people sitting around talking to one another or into radios. Megalodon: The Frenzy is also minus the political angle that the two previous films had; in its place we get a geothermal tapping project that feels like it belongs more to one of The Asylum’s disaster movies and their creative technology. What this really needed was a Joe Roche – The Asylum’s in-house creator of mad science scripts – to make the technical double-talk engrossing and believable.
Brendan Petrizzo has been a regular producer at The Asylum since 2019, producing some twenty or so films since then. He made his directorial debut with Monster Hunters (2020), followed by Devil’s Triangle (2021), as well as Mouse of Horrors (2025) for other companies.
