Dangerous Animals, 2025.
Directed by Sean Byrne.
Starring Hassie Harrison, Jai Courtney, Josh Heuston, Ella Newton, Liam Greinke, Rob Carlton.
SYNOPSIS:
A serial killer who uses sharks as his weapon of choice kidnaps a savvy surfer who must use all of her wits to escape.
When is a shark movie not a shark movie? When the main villain is not a fish, that’s when. Dangerous Animals sees filmmaker Sean Byrne return to directing a decade after his heavy metal horror hit The Devil’s Candy, and with it he brings a sense of old-school filmmaking , mashing up the shark movie with a serial killer thriller to make the sort of genre film that entertains more than it pushes boundaries, which feels very refreshing in the current climate.
Not that Dangerous Animals doesn’t have some clever ideas – because machete’s, kitchen knives and razor-fingered gloves are all very well, but no one has used sharks as a main weapon (unless you count a couple of Bond villains from the 1970s) – but the slasher movie structure feels very basic, the survival thriller plot doesn’t go meta and twist itself up in its own logic and, also a novelty, we have a cast and characters that aren’t painful to watch.
Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) is a free-spirited, but strong-willed, surfer who lives in a van and just wants to surf. After a chance meeting with Moses (Josh Heuston) in a convenience store, they go back to his for some fun but in the morning Zephyr disappears to catch the early morning waves, much to Moses’ disappointment, so he goes searching for her.
Unfortunately, Zephyr gets kidnapped by Tucker (Jai Courtney), a serial killer who traps his victims by selling shark cage dives, and once he has them on his boat he offers them up to the sharks as he believes that sharks are underwater gods after being attacked by one and surviving when he was a child. Can Moses get to Zephyr before she is winched into the water by the fish-obsessed maniac?
Dangerous Animals isn’t perfect but answering that question exposes the movies biggest flaw, and that is in the pacing. Obviously, Moses is going to find Zephyr because that is going to set up the final act, in which our two leads must take on the killer because that is what the slasher movie structure does, but the point in which all of this happens is way too early and leaves too much time to fill with places where the movie should end but doesn’t, the false promise of the slasher movie climax being repeated at least two too many times.
However, that sort of criticism isn’t the worst this movie could have gotten, and thankfully everything else is so well-crafted that the slightly-too-long running time fades into the background. The visuals are stunning, with the drone shots of the Australian coast looking gorgeous, and the underwater photography is flawless, and despite the presence of a little CGI blood it never takes you out of the action.
And speaking of taking you out of the action, how good is Jai Courtney as a serial killer? Playing Tucker with loads of Aussie charm but always bordering on menacing, Courtney dominates this movie but never goes full pantomime villain, the script giving us enough of his backstory to get why he does what he does but that is it; no over-explaining or attempts to make us sympathise with him, he is just a cold-blooded killer with a dark sense of humour and a novel way of offing his victims.
To offset this, Zephyr is a fairly humourless character and played very straight by Hassie Harrison, but it is a performance that the movie needs to keep the sense of danger and determinism that makes Zephyr a strong contender for one of the best modern final girls, being quick-witted, smart and resourceful in a way that fits with the few details we are given about her, making her believable without the need for too much exposition. The only blight on her character is her relationship with Moses, who comes across as a bit pompous and is the weakest of the three leads, but she did leave him after a one-night stand and it was his being smitten that brought him back into the story, so by the end it all works to some degree, albeit there is one character whose fate wasn’t as compelling as that of the other two.
So, one or two small gripes aside, Dangerous Animals is a creature feature with the (admittedly flimsy) angle of ‘who is the real dangerous animal?’ (see what they did there?) and was clearly made by someone who wanted to make an exciting and tense horror/thriller the way they used to be made, i.e. being horrific and thrilling without being preachy or ramming socio-political metaphors down your throat. Jai Courtney has never been more charismatic and fun to watch, the action – with the sharks and without – is brutal and choreographed in a realistic way so you feel every punch and stab, and the opening scene of two hapless tourists getting a go in the shark cage is the best opening scene in any shark movie outside of Jaws. Oh, and to accompany the bloody mayhem there is a tremendously pumping score by Michael Yezerski that elevates what is already solid B-movie action into explosive and dynamic thrills. If pure escapist entertainment is what you seek, Dangerous Animals delivers.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
