Somehow the Australian director Sean Byrne only has three movies. There was THE LOVED ONES (2009) and THE DEVIL’S CANDY (2015) and now a whole ten years later he has DANGEROUS ANIMALS. I liked all three of these, but this is the first one I caught in a theater, which required some initiative because it only lasted here a week. If you missed it you can watch it on VOD and it will eventually be on Shudder and I assume on disc.

The title refers to 1) sharks, 2) a maniac who feeds people to sharks for kicks and 3) (arguably/poetically) the protagonist, who we hope has the killer instinct to survive numbers one and two.

This is not as mean or hopeless as WOLF CREEK, but it reminds me of that movie because it creates a very Australian slasher in a very Australian setting. Instead of the outback this is the Gold Coast, it’s all surfing and sharks, and like WOLF CREEK it has a really knock out, darkly funny performance by the actor playing the killer. Even better, that actor is the once-mocked and underappreciated Jai Courtney. Everything about this movie is good, but he’s the main reason to watch it.

He plays Tucker, captain and owner of a small shark tour boat. In the cold open he’s hired by Greg (Liam Greinke) and Heather (Ella Newton, GIRL AT THE WINDOW), a pair of young tourists, and wickedly amuses himself with little comments implying they won’t be making it back. The kind of corny jokes a non-evil guy makes, possibly while winking, but the joke to him is that he’s not joking.

He’s a weird guy for sure. He shows them a framed newspaper article about the time he was attacked by a shark when he was a child. Asked what it was like he pulls his shirt up to reveal the enormous scar and says, “It didn’t tickle. It didn’t tickle.” How many hundreds of times do you think he’s used that line?

If we were them instead of people watching a horror movie we might buy his nice guy act too. He makes
terrified Heather laugh until she’s comfortable enough to go down in a shark cage and see the things face to face. As soon as his guests come back on board, thrilled at what they’ve just experienced, he shocks them with his true intentions.

This is a good old fashioned horror movie, so we have ourselves a strong female protagonist. Her name is Zephyr (Hassie Harrison, SOUTHBOUND, Yellowstone). She’s running from unspecified trauma in the states, lives in her van, becomes the shoplifting surfer dream girl to Moses (Josh Heuston, “Zeus Pretty Boy,” THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER), a guy who runs into her in a convenience store and needs his car jump-started but she refuses to help him until coerced.

I guess in another movie Moses could be the killer, but this is honestly kind of a romance, and this is the meet-cute. One sign that maybe they could get along is that when he asks her how she got into surfing she recites the “metal coffins” speech from POINT BREAK as if it’s her own, and he knows the reference. I was happy for them when the movie did what I was hoping and jump cut from their awkward conversation to going at it in her van. It’s a very sweet one night stand and hang out but she’s a loner Dottie, a rebel, so she ditches him before dawn to go surfing by herself.

As the genre requires, Zephyr encounters and is abducted by Tucker, locked in his boat, later to be videotaped hung from a crane as a wriggling snack for sharks. In the meantime he enjoys alcohol, music, dancing, goes for lunch, occasionally delivers marmite sandwiches. Zephyr is tough and resourceful, she makes multiple clever escape attempts and puts up a real fight. Meanwhile Moses uses the few clues he has to try to find her, first because he’s lovestruck, then because things really point to something being wrong. (For example he finds her van parked by the beach, tries to text her and hears her phone ringing inside.)

It’s handled just right because Moses is smart and brave and we root for him, but it never turns into the man rescuing his helpless lady. She’s gonna have to be the one to come through here. I really enjoyed this because the two young people meeting and having a thing for each other portion of the proceedings worked for me and then the next thing you know it’s all surviving and battling a top notch movie psycho. It gets pretty gory, there are some very effectively painful action beats, a bunch of harrowing close calls, strong atmosphere. In a particularly memorable sequence she tries to find help by swimming to a torch-lit party beach. You can hear revelry going on nearby but we never see anybody and they never see her getting tackled, manhandled and yanked back right after she reaches the shore.

The guys on the horror podcast The New Flesh kind of liked this but said the shark FX were really cheap and probly looked terrible on the big screen. I felt quite the opposite. It seemed to me that it was mostly compositing real shark footage, except for one money shot they mentioned, but that one didn’t bother me. It’s more ANACONDA than JAWS anyway. And the important thing to note is that this is less a shark movie than a slasher movie where the slasher’s favorite weapon is sharks.

He’s such a good villain because he has charisma, he makes you laugh, but in that way where it doesn’t get in the way of you hating him, maybe makes you want to see him die even more. The guy that flips you shit and you instinctively smile like it’s all in good fun but no man, no, it’s not, this guy fucking sucks. Fuck this guy. He’s this big macho dude, burly but not chiseled, a bit of a belly, seems kind of broken down and stiff, sort of waddling around in his flip flops or bare feet. And all this fits when he seems to know some jiujitsu.

Courtney is an interesting phenomenon – I didn’t watch Spartacus so it seemed like Hollywood just plucked him out of the clouds when they foisted him on us as leads in two very unfortunate sequels to action classics, A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD and TERMINATOR GENISYS. I didn’t blame those movies on him and I thought he was really good as a scary guy in JACK REACHER, but only when he showed up as Captain Boomerang in SUICIDE SQUAD did it become obvious that (not unlike Sam Worthington) just letting him keep his accent makes him way more charismatic. And then letting him play a crazy asshole? Forget about it. This is the best I’ve ever seen him. He appears dead at the end but shit, make him the Australian Freddy. Or the aquatic Mick Taylor, I guess.

Unlike his first two movies, Byrne didn’t write this one – it’s from Nick Lepard, a first-timer who also has another one coming out this year called KEEPER, directed by Osgood Perkins (LONGLEGS).