Movie Review: Dangerous Animals

Veteran Australian horror director Sean Byrne (The Loved Ones, The Devil's Candy) brings an earnestness to his latest feature Dangerous Animals that is pretty admirable. He made a movie about an eccentric boat captain (Jai Courtney) who owns a shark cage diving business in Gold Coast, Australia that loves sharks so much that he kidnaps female tourists and feeds them to them while he gleefully records the meal on a grainy old video camera whose well-oiled operation is suddenly threatened when he grabs an American surfer (Hassie Harrison) in the parking lot of a local beach who refuses to go quietly into the chum-filled waters that takes its premise very seriously. That's not to say that there's no campiness present as Courtney is having a blast hamming it up as this maniacal serial killer, it just isn't the kind of movie that's constantly winking at the camera, breaking up the tension with quips or having characters make dumb decisions simply to advance the plot. Having a movie that takes having a silly premise so seriously makes Dangerous Animals somewhat of a refreshing departure in an era where most B-movies choose to really play up the absurdity/stupidity factor.

Unfortunately, its strong conviction to play things pretty straight isn't paired with a movie that consistently delivers on the promise of its premise. Nothing from Byrne's direction to the other performances (Josh Heuston, Ella Newton, Rob Carlton and Liam Grienke round out the cast) come anywhere close to matching the excitement Courtney generates with the choices he makes every time he's on screen, the tension never quite reaches a real boiling point despite primarily taking place onboard a cramped boat that's docked in the middle of the terrifying vast abyss that is the open ocean and the only true wince-inducing moment in the entire film doesn't even involve one of the kills (shark-related or otherwise)-which are all surprisingly tame for an R-rated movie that boasts the words "bloody" and "grisly" in its MPA ratings descriptors. A movie that has such a fun premise and great villain should be more entertaining than this and it's a bummer that Dangerous Animals is ultimately nothing more than a decent genre exercise that will fade from my memory in relatively short order.                 

Grade: B-