Flasz On Film

Australia as a cultural concept persists in the collective consciousness of most of us as a continent where a lot of lifeforms evolved seemingly with a specific intent to kill humans. A deadly Sydney funnel-web spider might live in your garden. A redback spider might crawl into your shoe. You might find a venomous snake in your washing machine, toilet or pool. A kangaroo can choke you out with a skill of a BJJ black belt if you encounter it in the wild, or if it hops into your garden. A saltwater crocodile might take care of you while you go out for a swim. Even a koala might give you chlamydia. And of course, a shark might confuse you for a seal or a turtle while you are out there surfing the majestic mavericks. Suffice it to say that to those of us who have never been there, Australia presents itself as a real-life equivalent of a hardcore PvE (Player v Environment) server in a stunningly realistic MMORPG that is planet Earth. And a cursory glance at such movies as Black Water and its sequel, Great White or Rogue, all set in Australia and directed by Oz-based filmmakers, would likely reinforce the belief that it is so.  

Therefore, you could think that a movie like Dangerous Animals would predictably add to what you might see as a cultural legacy of animal attack horrors from Down Under, at least based on the poster and word-of-mouth marketing. However, it is important to remember that Australia has, perhaps mistakenly, been labelled as “that cursed land where all animals are venomous, aggressive and teethy” despite the fact you are twenty times more likely to be murdered by a man than you are to be eaten by a shark or a crocodile.  

At the risk of launching onto a tangent and debating if this country practically lends itself to giving psychotic serial killers more shelter than other places, you might think it is so because the country is huge and a killer might be able to get away with more simply because if there is nobody to witness a crime or to find the body, it might be impossible to distinguish between a disappearance and a killing. Perhaps this is a sad reflection of a more general reality that you are less likely to be hurt by a wild animal than by a man who might look as though he wanted to help you, especially if you are a young and vulnerable woman. Cinema acknowledges this reality in such movies as Wolf Creek and its sequel, The Royal Hotel or The Loved Ones… the latter of which was directed by Sean Byrne, who has now come back to the genre fray with Dangerous Animals, a movie that seems to want to be a bridge between two classically predictable subgenera of horror: a shark attack survival horror and a good old-fashioned serial killer slasher. Great White meets Wolf Creek, to keep it in Oz-derived terms.  

Conceptually, this is a phenomenal idea as it can draw from two traditions while crafting something new and exciting and perhaps build towards imbuing the movie with otherwise difficult-to-access messaging. The basic premise is simple. Tucker (played by Jai Courtney who looks as though he had just auditioned to play Seth Rogen in a movie about his life or something) owns a boat and offers tourists adrenaline-infused experiences that involve swimming with sharks. However, what he really digs is kidnapping his unsuspecting customers and then filming them using an old VHS camera as they are lowered off the boat to be fed to sharks. He also enjoys dancing in his bathrobe like Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs when nobody is watching, an unironic highlight of the movie as a whole. And one day he meets his match as he kidnaps a young American surfer Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), a feisty loner with incredible survival instincts who only looks like a defenseless prey item the Gold Coast beaches are teeming with.  

Admittedly, this is a cool premise because it manages to effortlessly introduce these two horror traditions into the same pot and promises an entertaining bout reliant on good old-fashioned suspense, intensity and violence. And the movie does have its moments where it utilizes this overarching idea to a satisfying extent.  

However, everything else about it is as trite as you can imagine and to extract the entertainment I speak of you really must forgive Dangerous Animals its out-and-out stupidity. Pretend the on-the-nose music cues don’t exist and the plot conveniences implicating Zephyr’s one-night-stand-turned-white-knight-saviour Moses (Josh Heuston) in the showdown against Tucker somehow don’t matter, all in addition to many other smaller instances of deus ex machina, fake technology and other magic the filmmakers choose to rely upon to propel the story forward. You must remember that you are after all watching a genre movie and suspension of disbelief rules apply.  

Once you do so, Dangerous Animals has a chance to get under your skin a tiny bit and the marriage of the animal attack survival horror and the serial killer slasher will begin to (a) make sense and (b) add up to more than the sum of its parts. Granted, it is laid out rather clumsily, but the movie finally elbows enough space for itself to ask you, the viewer, to equate the character of Tucker with a shark, an impenetrable predator who does what he does without any other reason than because it is driven by instinct to kill and consume everything it considers to be prey. In fact, the filmmakers spell it out because Courtney’s character ponders this himself. He practically sees himself as an apex predator roaming the coastal waters and waiting for an unsuspecting victim to show up on his radar. What he does not realize, however, is that Zephyr is also an apex predator, but of a different extraction. She physically resembles a canonical scream queen, a victim-turned-victor who stands up to the threat and defeats the bogeyman, but she’s built different. She’s a survivor.  

We get to witness her resolve firsthand on many occasions, at least one of which adds up to the most intense moments in the movie. Of course, horror has long featured badass scream queens, but this film literalizes this idea in a fresh, primal way. What makes Dangerous Animals stand out in this regard is that this concept of an apex predator serial killer meeting his match because he mistook an orca for a dolphin is literalized in this movie, a move that is as jarring to the viewer as it is intriguing thematically. Towards the end of the film, we end up witnessing a scene in which Zephyr is thrown overboard, bleeding and vulnerable, and comes face to face with a massive shark… which then leaves her be. It is as though the shark recognized an apex predator in her and chose to go after a different prey item, perhaps out of some kind of primal respect.  

In the moment, it is a fun visual that can be interpreted as either camp or braindead. But upon reflection, it serves to reinforce the title of the movie. After all, what we are privy to is a battle to the death between dangerous animals. A merger of a shark attack survival horror and a serial killer slasher ends up openly and visually positing that slasher villains and scream queens are different breed of apex predators. Killer sharks and shark killers.  

Thus, Dangerous Animals—while still being mostly clumsy, overt and convenient as it goes about unfurling its narrative—adds quite a bit of colour to the horror tradition by dint of meshing these two templates and producing something fresh enough to pass onto audiences as entertainment. It’s a movie that does in fact prove you can play PvP on the PvE server of Australian genre moviemaking and you can get useful results out of mapping Wolf Creek onto Great White or Black Water. It’s not going to win any Oscars; I can tell you that much. Though I contend that you haven’t lived until you saw Jai Courtney sing “Baby Shark” before killing a guy or dancing seductively wearing nothing but a stained bathrobe and novelty budgie smugglers. This, in addition to the engagement you can derive from watching a shark attack movie where sharks are not the villain and in actuality people are sharks, is probably enough to earn Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals at least a mild stamp of approval, despite the fact the entire movie falls apart towards the end in a flurry of conveniences and camp exhilaration that is not necessarily well placed. It’s messy, campy and often idiotic—but it’s also entertaining, oddly sharp and maybe even subversive in its own gnarly way. Which ought to count for something.