Dangerous Animals

Grade: B

Dangerous Animals has correctly been described as Jaws meets The Silence of the Lambs. I also thought it would have made a fine Roger Corman/Jack Nicholson lark in the late 60s/very early 70s. It’s about a serial killer who sometimes blasts pop music while dancing around on his boat, drinking wine straight out of the bottle. Not terribly realistic – seems more like something a fictional character who wants to show off for the cameras and audience would do. But it sets an entertaining tone you’ll just have fun with and not take too seriously.

He is Tucker, who has run his own Shark Tour business off an Australian coast for years. He has a kink for kidnapping 20-something women one-by-one, and putting them on his boat. He drugs them, and when they come to, they are on a harness dangling from a crane, being lowered into the water. With an old-school VHS video camera, he films them being eaten alive by sharks. As long as he’s been doing this, and with it taking place in the present day, you’d think family/friends would put two and two together when people keep going missing, last seen boarding his boat – but that’s a question I thought of just now.

The latest would-be victim is Zephyr. Her home is her van, and it’s a nice one. She is getting ready to hit the waves at about 4am, when she is intercepted by Tucker, and it’s off to the races. Hassie Harrison and Jai Courtney play Zephyr and Tucker with commitment, that’s for sure. Sometimes they literally throw themselves into the roles. We don’t see as much blood or gore as you might think; most of it is implied. I don’t know if that’s an artistic or financial choice (maybe they showed as much as they could afford to), but either way, it works. In a climactic scene involving somebody biting something off, the worst part of it is the sound.

The other shoe drops about 5 to 10 times, as we are presented with fakeout after fakeout. When it finally does end for real, it’s abrupt. Dangerous Animals won’t win any big awards or change your life, but the actors are memorable, the soundtrack is banging, and for a fun summer popcorn nail-biter, you could do a lot worse.

Grade: B