Above sea level, man may be the apex predator. Within the sea? That mantle belongs to the shark. The free spirited Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) has made her way to Australia, living out of a van and surfing the country’s greatest waves. At a convenience store, a chance meeting with a cute local looking for help with his car leads to a night of intimacy. Moses (Josh Heuston) and Zephyr enjoy each other’s company, but before Moses can bring breakfast in bed, Zephyr has already departed.

After approaching an individual for a necessary tool, Zephyr later awakes chained in a room of a large boat, with. Turns out, she and Heather (Ella Newton), the other person in the room with her, were abducted by Bruce (Jai Courtney) a local shark instructor who uses the profession as a way to hide his violent tendencies. Unhinged, Bruce tortures and toys with his captives before dropping them into the sea to meet their ends, which he captures on VHS for reasons only known to him. Stuck between the proverbial rock of the boat and the hard place of the shark-infested ocean, the odds of the ladies escaping their predicament are close to nil.

Summer movie season should mandate at least one shark flick or adjacent creature feature per year. Even for some of the worst, there’s usually a couple notable moments that make the feature amusing and/or thrilling. You can kind of classify Dangerous Animals as a shark movie, but it has more in common with, say, No Exit, than something like The Shallows or 47 Meters Down. The melding of a psychopath using the terrifying predators as his instruments of death is a gripping premise on paper, but in execution, the end result is sort of a nothing burger.

Dangerous Animals represents the first film in a decade for director Sean Byrne, whose The Devil’s Candy has become a cult hit in the horror community. Dangerous Animals shows the filmmaker’s ability to hew closer to the thriller side than the horror one, leaning on one location solidly enough to center much of the film’s activity. Bruce’s captivity room is appropriately dingy, swimming with bacterial sickness in every square inch of the surface, and the home video portion resembling snuff is a nice addition from Byrne, if underutilized as a whole.

There’s a plot straightforwardness that Dangerous Animals, written by Nick Lepard, carries, not looking to surprise or pull the rug out from its viewers. This is a movie you follow for the duration of its 98 minute runtime knowing full well how it’s going to end and being OK with it, because its setup suggests there will be a consistent level of bedlam led by Bruce and augmented by the sharks that circle his boat. Save for a bang-bang opening scene, the feature is desperately in need of more chaos, mostly in the form of attacks from its aquatic predators and its human one. I feel a bit morbid wanting more bloodshed, and maybe the lack of kills is a result of a smaller budget, but it would have been nice for Byrne and Lepard to show a few more deaths, even if it was just Bruce watching his past handiwork on VHS in some sort of montage-like sequence. Guess I’ll need to satiate my bloodlust with Final Destination: Bloodlines rewatches.

If anything, the missing chaos means that a crackling villainous performance by Courtney settles in at about a 7 or 8 when it was right on the table he could have got to 9 or 10. The movie still feels like it’s holding him back with limited things to do outside of delivering unhinged dissertations of the food chain structure and dancing enthusiastically post-shark feeding. Harrison proves to be a capable final girl carrying decent chemistry with Heuston, even if the film pushes too hard that these two could be soulmates after a one-nighter.

Byrne and Courtney can be applauded for injecting a different flavor into the common man-versus-shark survival setup by making sure that we know the biggest shark isn’t out in the water, but on land. I just wish that Dangerous Animals gave us more unpredictability from both.

C

Photo credits go to impawards.com, teaser-trailer.com, screenrant.com, and IMDB.com.