The Shark Cinema, as any serious student of filmic affairs will tell you, is just a solitary notch below The Spider Cinema in terms of how little a flick has to do to be entertaining. Fling a load of the fishy sons a bitches into the narrative, or have a load of arachnids scuttle around like the vile, malignant, evil bastards they are, and the viewer can't help but enjoy it.

A few years ago, the computer game what went by the name of The Resident Evil acknowledged this fact by having not just tarantulas the size of Volkswagens, but also a couple sharks for to freak the hell out of the fourteen year olds up to all hours banging away at the joysticks. Unfortunately, when The Resident Evil finally got all filmified, the director saw fit to lose both these elements, opting instead for gratuitous half-glimpses of Mila Jovovich's hoo-hah.

Still, sharks and spiders have both gotten big CGI make-overs in recent years, via the inexplicably wonderful Deep Blue Sea and the tongue-in-cheek antics of Eight Legged Freaks. Neither, however, were particularly scary.

Thank God then that Chris Kentis has gone ahead and made Two Folks Bitching In The Sea, released in some territories as Open Water, being a low-budget, shot-on-digital caper involving two folks who float about on the sea for an hour. Also, some sharks swim about.

Two Folks Bitching In The Sea, or 2FBITS, acronym fans, has no truck with plot or character development or anime sequences or none of that jazz. What Kentis wants to do is fill fifteen minutes with these two lovers, Susan and Daniel, arriving on a Caribbean island and then being naked for a minute or two and then get them on a damn boat as soon as possible, that they might all the sooner be stranded in the sea for to bitch and so on.

That right there is the height of the narrative. What 2FBITS is, essentially, is an exercise in sustained tension, a challenge what it rises to only in fits and starts.

The main problem one might conceivably have with the flick, is that before anyone even gets into the ocean, we are told that the sharks what parade around these waters aren't, in fact, dangerous to humans. With this knowledge in mind, it's kinda difficult to then feel scared when a load of fins start cropping up left and right.

It's a bit like if you had two folks get stranded in a big patch of dandelions, and you're expected to be scared since poison ivy can kill.