Dangerous Animals | review by Rafe McGregor
Dangerous Animals, by Sean Byrne(Independent Film Company)
Tucker’s shark experience!
Inmy birthday wishes to Jaws’ (1975) Bruce, Imentioned the host of terrible Sharksploitation movies I’ve watched since reviewingThe Meg (2018), listed the lowlights, andnoted two films of which I was sceptical in spite of the advance praise theyhad received. I’ve now watched both Fear Below(2025) and Dangerous Animals and can attest to the accuracy of my preconceptionsabout the former, which is indeed similar to Into the Deep (2025), withits well-deserved 27% on the Tomatometer. I won’t say much about it here, exceptthat I didn’t think the shark very realistic and that sharks in rivers just aren’tas frightening as sharks in the ocean, a pair of problems plaguing UnderParis (2024), entirely underserving of its 66%on the Tomatometer. My reservations about Dangerous Animals were basedon the trailer, which I summarised rather meanly (albeit, again, accurately) asan eye-rolling ‘shark plus serial killer’. My point being…surely one is enoughfor a ninety-eight-minute film? Whenever I watch what is essentially a monster movie, I’mreminded of The Ghost and The Darkness (1996), a fictionalised account of the‘Tsavo man-eaters’ in colonial Kenya in 1898. While the film is yet anotherexample of the tired old trope of (hu)man versus nature, director StephenHopkins is surprisingly successful in making two ‘normal’ lions a source ofsuspense and fear – as Sherlock Holmes might have said, ‘no dinosaurs needapply’ (the first two instalments of the JurassicPark franchise were released in 1993 and 1997 respectively).
The dangerous animal of this title is of course the serial killer, Tucker (played by Jai Courtney), not the shark(s) and what redeems it from being yet more chum to the maw (with apologies to Mark Bould) of Sharksploitation enthusiasts like me is that we don’t see sharks very often and when we do, they are all real (as far as I can tell, anyway) until the last ten minutes. When a CGI shark does appear, it is convincing rather than cartoonish, which may well be because of the speed with which it disappears. We don’t have to see sharks all the time to be scared and less is often more (as we know from M.R. James, among many other masters of the craft of horror fiction). So, yes, in its finest moments the film reminded me of Jaws, where the only flaw is when Bruce is revealed as a creature of fibreglass and steel rather than flesh and bone. Unlike Jaws, Dangerous Animals lacks sympathetic characters. Tucker himself is probably the most charismatic, but he does like to kidnap pairs of bikini-clad beauties and videotape one being fed to sharks in front of the other. (Actual VHS, not digital – no wonder he has issues!) It is also rather predictable. Very early on, I guessed that Tucker would be eaten by sharks and that the love interest, Moses (played by Josh Heuston), would not rescue the protagonist, Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), at least one of which came to pass. Notwithstanding, the film was much better than expected and one of the best Sharksploitation films I’ve seen. But if Zephyr thinks that Australia’s Gold Coast is ‘as far away from America as possible’ she really needs to install Google Maps or ChatGPT on her smartphone (it’s Mauritius or Madagascar, in case you’re wondering).***
