We’ve seen a lot of different monster movies over the last few weeks, some a lot less plausible than others. But this one gets a little extra boost from an old friend, the “based on true events” concept. It’s called The Reef, and the crew out at Image Entertainment sent out a copy for us to review.

The Reef follows a group of friends who’ve been tasked to make a yacht delivery to a wealthy client somewhere near the Great Barrier Reef. After they tear open a hefty hole in the bottom, they’re left with a stark and downright horrifying choice: do they stay with the boat, which is slowly sinking, and hope for rescue? Or do they swim for land…land which is fully twelve miles from their current position. Oh, one further chunk of bad news: the stretch of ocean between them and land is full of a lot of life. Including, of course, sharks. And plenty of them.

For those thinking that this is little more than a recasting of Open Water, well, you’re not at all alone. At least, that’s what I thought when I went in on this one. Turns out it’s not so much Open Water as it is Open Water Moving In A Relatively Northern Direction.

The Reef is something of a strange animal, as it spends plenty of time being sinister. Vague hints of things lurking off in the distance is what we spend much our time looking at here. And this is something of a problem; as we discover in a lot of Japanese horror titles , when you spend a lot of time building tension without doing much to release it, the end result is that the tension you do build boils off into a sort of empty cloud, an empty cloud of dissatisfaction.

Thankfully, the time spent on unresolved tension is kept relatively low, so you won’t spend a whole lot of time being disappointed by The Reef.

However, you can’t get around the fact that the ending on this one is something of a downer. The Reef’s last ten minutes or so will leave you so patently depressed that you’ll probably regret watching it. That really isn’t the movie’s fault, though; rather, it’s a victim of its own true-story nature. The actual story is every bit as depressing as the movie.

So if you don’t mind a depressing, occasionally disappointing, monster movie, then The Reef is going to serve you reasonably well.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, gives The Reef a seven out of ten, because it’s reasonably good, if a bit depressing, and just a bit disappointing. Monster movie fans, here’s the real deal for you.