Dangerous Animals

Take any typical serial killer / hunter film and replace whatever weapon they carry  – knife, gun, scythe, etc – with sharks and there you have the basic concept for Dangerous Animals.  The film opens with a pair of backpacking tourists, Greg and Heather, who had overslept at the hostel and so missed an outing, seeking a shark cruise with boat owner Tucker (Jai Courtney in brutal and beefy approach).  Regaling them with information about sharks, and how one almost killed him in his youth, Tucker seems to almost worship the creatures.  After the tourists complete their cage dive, Tucker violently attacks Greg, before turning on Heather and abducts her.

That intro sets up the foundation well for what is a pretty straightforward serial killer film, which follows paths that will be extremely familiar to the majority of horror fans, albeit with one unique difference that makes it work – the sharks.  Tucker’s obsession with sharks, stemming from that near death experience as a child, has an almost religious level of depth to it.  His female victims that he captures are run through some kind of ritualistic imprisonment and torture, before finally being ceremoniously lowered into the shark infested water, all the while Tucker filming on his old style VHS camera.  As the film kicks into gear with Tucker abducting drifter Zephyr to add to his victim count, so begins a hunter and prey approach to the film, in the tight confines of the sea-craft.  Meanwhile, a real estate agent named Moses, who had connected with the usually lone Zephyr the night before, is concerned that she has vanished, and sets about trying to locate her.

Dangerous Animals is tight, sleek, and keeps ramping up the tension throughout.  The cast excel in their parts, especially Hassie Harrison and Jai Courtney whose interplay as hunter and hunted is imbued with raw energy.  Courtney in particular gets a chance to play rather different to what we used to see, and he delivers the part of Tucker with dark wit, a thuggish physicality, and a whole layer of dark menace.  Tucker’s connection to the sharks through his personal experience works well to explain the nature of the character, whilst Courtney almost exudes shark-like stalker menace with every physical gesture.  The only character that felt superfluous in general was Moses.  Josh Heuston does a decent job in the part, but his actions in trying to locate Zephyr just seem to interrupt the main, tension mounting flow of the film.

But that minor niggle, and the sometimes dubious looking sharks (they are mostly impressive, but with a few shots that look out of place), don’t get in the way of the raw terror on display here.  This would be a solid serial killer film even without the inclusion of sharks, but the addition of the beasts does certainly give it some bite!