Dangerous Animals: Thrills, Chills & Cheese Make for a Shark-infested Potential Summer Hit
By Liz Braun
Rating: B+
In Dangerous Animals, a serial killer lures women to his fishing boat and then uses them as shark bait. At the center of this survival thriller is the woman he abducts who decides to fight back.
Jai Courtney is suitably charming-but-deranged as Tucker, the chipper skipper ripper who offers shark tours but actually provides mayhem and murder.
And snuff films.
Jai Courtney is a salty sea-dog serial killer in Dangerous Animals
Hassie Harrison is the feisty female who refuses to go down without a fight.
It’s all claustrophobic and terrible and … wildly entertaining. As always, director Sean Byrne (The Loved Ones) goes above and beyond the requirements of the genre.
Dangerous Animals kicks off with a pair of obviously-doomed backpackers showing up at Tucker’s boat, hoping to hire him to take them cage-diving in shark-infested waters. The guy tourist thinks it’s a great lark; the young woman, Heather, (Ella Newton) is terrified, as well she might be.
Tucker tells the tourists a bit about himself: having survived a shark attack as a child, he now respects these powerful predators as an adult. Heather is very curious about the shark attack, specifically — why was no adult watching over Tucker when it happened? A dark look crosses Tucker’s face, setting the psycho scenario.
It isn’t long before Tucker is busy cutting human bait. His M.O. is slicing, dicing and hoisting one human over the side to be shark food, while another human is forced to watch the carnage from the boat. Gack! Crunch.
Enter Zephyr (Harrison) a free-wheeling, independent surfer girl with ties to no man. Zephyr has a chance encounter with a sweet guy named Moses (Josh Heuston) before her inevitable run-in with Tucker, a meet-cute prior to the meet-brute that helps set up the rest of the story.
Zephyr is a loner and a fighter, a good match for the creepy Tucker who abducts her from a deserted beach. She has both the brawn and the brains to keep herself alive, up to a point. It couldn’t hurt that Moses eventually goes looking for her.
Dangerous Animals is full of interesting surprises — breathtaking footage of the ocean, arresting musical choices, flashes of deep, unexpected emotion. Tucker is a bit of a comic, as killers go, often joking around with his victims, and the storytelling moves seamlessly — and disturbingly — between slapstick and sickening. Watching a shark-feeding frenzy is one thing; watching a nanosecond of the passion on a killer’s face as he witnesses a victim expire is something else.
Tucker plans and executes his victims’ deaths carefully, videotaping the carnage and keeping a well-organized film library. He jokingly calls “Action!” and makes little asides about intermissions and matinees as he organizes a kill — just a monster making movies, and all of it part of the movie Sean Byrne has made for us avid slasher voyeurs.
Byrne manages to skewer the genre, the creators and the audience all at once in kind of a, I dunno, cinematic shish kebab, maybe?
Anyway, it’s impressive.
Dangerous Animals: Directed by Sean Byrne, written by Nick Lepard. Starring Jai Courtney, Hassie Harrison, and Josh Heuston. In theatres June 6.