Stream It Or Skip It?

It’s not wabbit season or duck season these days – it’s shark season, shark MOVIE season to be precise, and Dangerous Animals (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) offers a fairly fresh variation on the typical chum-and-chomp subgenre. Writer Nick Lepard and director Sean Byrne fill the water tank and stir a human serial killer in with the fearsome finned fish – two great tastes that taste great together, as they say, and it’s a welcome change from the usual dumbass sharkicanes, sharktopi and other lame nothingbudget quasi-horrors CGI-ing their way through the cinematic sea.

The Gist: This young couple. They have names but they might as well be Mr. and Miss Cold Open Crunch. They wander up the dock to a charter boat for a swim-with-sharks excursion off the Australian coast led by a chap named Bruce Tucker (Jai Courtney), whose first name is not a coincidence. Now Tucker here, he’s a miracle. He shows off bite-mark scars that have you in utter disbelief that he’s still here today to be a psycho who stabs Mr. Cold Open Crunch in the abdomen and pushes him into the shark-ridden drink, then sets his eyes on OK-I-guess-she-has-a-name Heather (Ella Newton). Dum-dum-dummmmm. Cue the opening credits. 

Cut to: A surfer girl. She’s Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), a tanned-and-toned loner nomad from America who’s living in her van and here to surf surf surf. You know the type – the only direction they need in life is out to the wave and then back in, over and over again. She meets local hunk Moses (Josh Heuston) and they share a moment after sharing their genitals, and then as he makes some pancakes for her, she bolts to the beach, leaving him with syrup bottle in hand. This is important. She’s usually not one for mingling with others, but now someone might know that she’s missing, should she go missing, not that she’ll necessarily go missing, although sure enough, she goes missing after Tucker sneaks up and plastic-bags her head and everything goes black for a bit.

Zephyr awakes handcuffed to a bed in the bowels of Tucker’s boat. Heather’s her roommate. Up on the deck, Tucker casts out a line and hopes to hook some dinner. He’s quite the fisherman, see. He drops in to visit his captives and delivers the first in a series of speeches about wildlife, including mean snakes, mosquitoes, marlins and the you-know-whats that live at the top of the food chain out here in the Aussie waters. Under cover of nighttime he drugs Zephyr and Heather and when they come to Heather’s trussed up on the boat’s big crane. And Zephyr gets to watch as Tucker seasons the water with bloody fish guts to draw in the sea dogs, presses record on his old video camera, then lowers Heather into the soup. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This is one of the better shark movies in the 21st-century pantheon, next to The Shallows and above 47 Meters Down – although Open Water is still the most terrifying. 

Performance Worth Watching: Oh, and The Silence of the Lambs is an obvious reference, since Courtney gets his Buffalo Bill dance scene. Playing a madman suits the actor quite well, and it may just be the most memorable performance of his career.

Memorable Dialogue: Tucker, always one for a good quip or soliloquy, points up to the sky then down to the water: “Most people think God is up here. But nah. God’s down there.”

Sex and Skin: A medium-spicy sex scene with equal opportunity male/female sideboob.

Our Take: Dangerous Animals offers a more detailed take on genre storytelling than is typical, especially in look-ma-we’re-killin’-folks horror flix. There’s room for subtle character work in the margins, whether it’s Harrison’s quietly melancholy, lived-in take on a lifelong runaway, or Courtney relishing a chance to drink deep the elixirs of madness and go entertainingly big. Note that Tucker is a movie director of sorts, making snuff films tailored to his highly specific obsession-slash-fetish, and we get a great moment in which he heartily engulfs his dinner while watching one of his videos of a shark snacking a hapless victim – a lovely moment of pitch-black comedy.

Not that the film is unpredictable; one glance at Zephyr establishes her as a final girl destined to be the shark bait that bites back. But it is enlightened enough to upend a couple of Jawsish tropes – check that third act Moment between Zephyr and a true leviathan that’s far more lyrical than we’d ever expect – about the brainless eating machines of the deep, the screenplay pointing its sharp little finger at the true evil on this planet, the type that’s capable of “eating” its own for nothing more than sick kicks. Sharks, of course, kill because they must. It’s a broad gesture that seems notably smart, especially in the context of movies that wring as much as they can out of very little resources and eventually end up on Shudder.

None of this is gourmet subtext – it’s food as fuel for a movie that keeps it to a tight 98 minutes and exists primarily to play primal-fear notes on our nerves. Fish a metaphor out of this if you want, but it’s not necessary. Byrne’s direction is savvy, with a clean ‘n’ brutal approach to violent action sequences and visual effects that mostly belie some likely significant budget limitations. He also finds room for thematic parallels and flourishes – e.g., the shadow of a shark in the water terrifies the victims, but the shadow of a helicopter over the water terrifies the killer. Tonally, Byrne walks the line between funny and suspenseful, pitting Tucker against Zephyr in a battle between, respectively, irony and earnestness. And remember, nothing’s more earnest in its motive than a hungry shark.

Our Call: Not all shark movies leave a distinct bite mark, but Dangerous Animals does. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.