PREMISE
When Zephyr, a savvy and free-spirited surfer, is abducted by a shark-obsessed serial killer and held captive on his boat, she must figure out how to escape before he carries out a ritualistic feeding to the sharks below.
THE GOOD STUFF
JAI COURTNEY- It’s strange to think that once upon a time, Jai Courtney was being pushed, as many others have, to be the next big thing. It’s not that he didn’t have the talent for it, but he was one of many individuals who were forced down the audience’s throats, and he seemed to have had his proper run before transitioning into character-based fare. With Courtney, there’s a lot of the gruff alpha male-ish kind of masculinity that these Australian actors (like Hemsworth, Jackman, Crowe, and even Gibson) tend to bring to everything that they do. And it is kind of refreshing to see that kind of energy projected in a horror movie.
Courtney is not playing an unstoppable monster in this or anything like that, but he’s still relatively indomitable and freakish, even though this character is ridiculously nonsensical and silly. He’s the highlight of this movie by light years, and is the only person on screen doing anything that’s even remotely interesting.
THE BAD STUFF
THE FIRST 20 MINUTES- You know what? It might not have even been a 20-minute stretch of film that I’m talking about here, but everything after the prologue of this movie is just so unbelievably boring. The story of the two wayward soul surfers with the supermodel looks (and the wildly bad dialogue) who fall in love with each other after a one-night stand is as dull to watch as it just was to describe. The prologue does a good job of explaining the backstory of Jai Courtney’s character as to why he is the way that he is. It would have been nice to see more of that, but instead we got this.
THE MODUS OPERANDI- You know, you get these horror movies with these serial killers, and at some point they’re going to have their Scooby-Doo moment where they explain why they do what they do, and we, the audience, see the methods in which they do their thing.
This particular serial killer has a really goofy modus operandi that would be significantly less goofy had we gotten an actual backstory about him. However, because we don’t, we are left with lengthy monologues about the nature of sharks being predators that have almost certainly been lifted from nature documentaries word by word. Also, the elaborate nature of how the serial killer gets the kill is just so overtly complicated, and yet he’s out here doing this routine in the daytime. Like… Yes, I understand you’re in the middle of the lake in a boat, but, like, these helicopters can see you.
My goodness, if I go any further, I’m going to go into spoiler territory, so I have to stop.
THE UGLY STUFF
OUR HEROES- Goodness, if you want a textbook example of what happens when your two romantic leads have zero chemistry and they’re just there because they look like supermodel pornstars… boy, is this the movie for you. Just show a smash reel of the meet cute between the two characters talking about Clarence Creedwater Revival, the post coitus convo (yes there is a full-blown sex scene here for no reason) that is complete with fake laughter at the badly written jokes, and the “you feel something for me don’t you?” conversation that they have in the middle of the film…and you’ll have a prime example of what zero romantic chemistry truly is. And I mean zero. Not even 0.1 folks. Totally zero.
Hassie Harrison performed well on YELLOWSTONE, and a big part of the interest in this movie for me was to see how she would fare in a movie like this. Only to realize that her face doesn’t move. At least not in this movie anyway. At different points in the film, her character experiences happiness, sadness, terror, drug-induced stupor, screaming, being chased by sharks, and making love to someone. And the face just never moves. The expression stays the same.
I don’t want to judge Josh Heuston as a model first and foremost before turning his interest to acting. Still, he appears to be inexperienced altogether and lacks any screen presence. He’s also horribly miscast here as a man who looks like he can physically handle himself only to repeatedly get his ass whooped over and over again wondering what the use is of all of those muscles that he is flaunting this movie.
**************
Look, I get it. Small budget genre horror flick. I understand that things are going to be goofy, but they also have to be entertaining, don’t they? Does it hurt these small-budget filmmakers to create a story with characters that are well written? Does it hurt to have characters that make intelligent decisions, rather than creating contrived situations? Do we have to give our antagonists superhuman powers just so that we can continue the story, no matter how much logic there is in doing so?
Is it too much to expect competent storytelling, good performances, and a decent enough feeling when I walk out of the theater? I do get that from time to time, but the reason why I don’t really f*** with horror movies like that, is because more often than not I get horses*** like dangerous animals.
DANGEROUS ANIMALS is in theaters now
