Dangerous Animals review: a shark slasher with maximum bite

Australian director Sean Byrne is one of horror’s premiere mixologists. His debut, 2009’s The Loved Ones, meshed teen romance with gruesome Hostel-style extremism. 2015’s The Devil’s Candy put a heavy metal spin on the haunted-house romp. His new film, Dangerous Animals, in theaters now, raises a question no one was asking about a classic B-movie subgenre: When is a killer shark movie not a killer shark movie?

Answer: When the killer shark is just a weapon in a human killer’s hands.

Despite arriving just in time for the 50th anniversary of Jaws, Dangerous Animals has less in common with it (or with The Shallows or 47 Meters Down) and is more in line with Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Saw (or one of Australia’s modern horror successes, Wolf Creek). Hassie Harrison (Yellowstone) stars as Zephyr, an American surfer floating around the Australian coast looking for the perfect waves — and maybe the right romance. She does not find it in Tucker (Jai Courtney of Terminator Genisys), who abducts her off the beach before dawn and locks her up with another tourist, Heather (Ella Newton), on his shark expedition boat. Tucker is a mega-creep who gets off on shark attacks. Zephyr and Heather are his latest chum.

At 90 minutes, Dangerous Animals is lean and mean fun. Zephyr is no damsel in distress, and quickly plots an escape from what looks like an impossible situation. Tucker has driven them out to the middle of the ocean where he can gets wasted on cheap liquor, dance to disco tunes, and prepare to ritualistically dunk his prey into shark-infested waters. He’s an absolute psychopath, and Byrne lets Courtney completely off the possible-Hollywood-leading-man leash. The actor is frothing at the mouth and twitching in his eyes throughout the deranged picture, with a level of egolessness that manifested slightly when he played [checks notes] Captain Boomerang in Suicide Squad. This is better.

Harrison summons her own power in the face of Courtney’s towering physique in Zephyr’s multiple escape attempts. Byrne takes full advantage of the claustrophobic setting of the boat — and the vast emptiness of the sea surrounding it. It’s a geographically coherent but unsettling maze for a cat shark-and-mouse game that rarely succumbs to contrivances to ratchet up the tension. Getting off a boat surrounded by sharks just seems really tough! And for as blockheaded as Tucker seems, he’s devoted much of his life to building the ultimate floating prison.

While Dangerous Animals never goes full Deep Blue Sea with far-fetched shark kills, Byrne, by way of Tucker’s fetish, still sets up some nightmarish attacks. Tucker doesn’t just like to watch sharks tear his victims to shreds, he also videotapes them on a 1990s-era camera for future VHS viewing. So the deaths are slow and savage, with Courtney’s wide-eyed gaze committing as much violence as the razor-sharp shark teeth. There’s blood in the water, and all over this killer’s hands.

In the days of so-called “elevated horror,” Dangerous Animals delivers earnest thrills with a simple-yet-innovative slasher premise. In my mind, the freshest horror movies find a kernel of specificity in a timeless premise. Byrne’s movie isn’t far off from the Halloween formula — big guy hunts down indomitable woman with scary weapon of choice — but whisking us to Australia, sending us to sea, and the what-if of a sightseeing tour guide with a hard-on for shark attacks is the focused lens a filmmaker needs to deliver something new. Sick, but new.