DANGEROUS ANIMALS

***

Directed by Sean Byrne.

Starring Hassie Harrison, Josh Heuston, Jai Courtney.

Horror, Australia, 93 minutes, Certificate 15.

Released in cinemas in the UK on June 6th by Vertigo Releasing

If there is anything that Australian cinema has taught us recently, it is that maybe we should just stay away from the water down there. After the problems Nicolas Cage recently had trying to go surfing in THE SURFER, we now get to see Hassie Harrison put up with a lot worse in Sean Byrne’s  DANGEROUS ANIMALS. In what is only his third film in sixteen years, after the excellent THE LOVED ONES and THE DEVIL’S CANDY, Byrne further mines his fascination with unhinged individuals and their disturbing obsessions.

Taking charge of the carnage this time around is Tucker, played by a never better Jai Courtney. Seemingly offering tourists the chance to swim with sharks, Tucker is more interested in feeding his customers to the bloodthirsty creatures he seemingly has an affinity with, after surviving an attack himself when he was a child. Zephyr, an American surfing loner, played by YELLOWSTONE actress Hassie Harrison, soon finds herself crossing paths with Tucker and desperately tries to figure out a way to escape from a seemingly impossible and increasingly horrifying situation aboard Tucker’s dilapidated death trap of a boat.

Since the release of JAWS back in 1976, every shark, or sharksploitation if you prefer, film since has never managed to escape the shadow of that toothsome Great White, with recent films such as THE SHALLOWS and 47 METRES DOWN limiting themselves to women in peril narratives. There is no denying that this trope is at the heart of the premise here but it is somewhat lifted by Courtney’s performance as one of the more interesting serial killers to pop up on a cinema screen in some time. There was always a sense that Courtney was mismatched with the majority of projects he was offered in the string of American films that attempted to make him more of a household name. Back on home ground here, he is allowed to cut loose with his portrayal of a swaggering, beer bellied lunatic who pretends to feel an affinity with the dead eyed sharks he offers his victims to.

NIck Lepard’s script offers hints of what has made Tucker into the psychopath that he is, but these are mostly ignored in falling back on Zephyr’s attempts to escape and outwit her captor. This is all fine and passably entertaining enough, but these aspects soon suffer in comparison to whenever Courtney is allowed to let loose once again. As entertaining as he is chilling and sadistic, it is hard not to be reminded of John Jarrat’s disturbing murderer from the WOLF CREEK films. With his disturbing methodology and compulsive habit of recording and cataloguing his kills on VHS, Tucker can also come across as an Ozploitation take on Carl Boehm’s camera obsessed killer from PEEPING TOM, with just a tad more misogyny and booze added into the mix. And great big sharks.

While it never reaches the thrilling heights of his debut THE LOVED ONES, this is still a fun watch and a superior alternative to the glut of recent shark films with their bare bones storylines. Hopefully, it signals a more regular return to the screen for Byrne and also Courtney, now that we can see what he is truly capable of without the Hollywood star system constraining his more unhinged sensibilities. And at the least the film also serves as a warning to American surfers to maybe stay away from the country in general.

Iain MacLeod