REVIEW: ‘Jaws’ meets ‘Silence of the Lambs’ in ‘Dangerous Animals’

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Half a century after Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” stirred fear and fascination by painting sharks as bloodthirsty monsters of the sea, the tongue-in-cheek horror thriller “Dangerous Animals” gets its kicks watching a predator in cargo shorts and flip-flops – not one with a dorsal fin and sharp teeth – toying with his prey.

In a sharksploitation subgenre teeming with ridiculous premises (see: “Ouija Shark,” “Cocaine Shark,” etc.) and plenty of atrocious CGI, this vicious little Australian import is a breath of fresh oxygen. Lean, mean and bloody, director Sean Byrne’s latest (he made “The Devil’s Candy”) finds a fresh way into the annals of survival horror by pitting surfer vs. serial killer on the open seas, and as a corrective of sorts to the “Jaws effect.” Here, it’s not the carnivorous fishies its heroine should be worried about, but the sociopath with a misogynist streak trawling nearby waters.

Hassie Harrison (“Yellowstone”) stars as Zephyr, an itinerant American surfer in Australia who gets cold feet after a meet-cute with sensitive real estate agent Moses (Josh Heuston, stretching a thin role far enough to sell the connection). Ditching him after a passionate night together, she crosses paths with a stranger only to awake handcuffed in the bowels of a boat at sea in a nightmare scenario straight out of “Saw.” Like February’s slasher mash-up “Heart Eyes,” “Dangerous Animals” uses rom-com conventions to raise the stakes: Can this guarded loner escape a serial killer so she can learn to let down her walls and un-ghost her maybe-soulmate?

Not if her captor can help it.

Played with nutty aplomb by Jai Courtney, Bruce Tucker (Bruce being the nickname given to the mechanical shark in “Jaws,” one of this movie’s many homages) is a local charter boat captain and diving guide who’s made a hobby of kidnapping female tourists and using them as chum for his own twisted VHS snuff movies. Sunburned and sadistic, Tucker fancies himself an apex predator. After surviving a childhood great white attack, with the gnarly scars to prove it, he knows how to weaponize that down-under charm to disarm his unsuspecting victims, even if he mostly relies on sharks to do his killing.

Byrne wisely unleashes Courtney whenever possible, starting with a playful but foreboding prologue when meek English student Heather (Ella Newton) and her arrogant hostel hookup (Liam Greinke) arrive at Tucker’s dock seeking oceanic thrills. Capturing sunbaked postcard hues along Queensland’s Gold Coast and the eerie glow of Tucker’s ramshackle boat by night, cinematographer Shelley Farthing-Dawe turns ocean vistas from bright and welcoming to portentous in the blink of a sunset, and gives underwater scenes featuring footage of real sharks an unnerving sense of gravity and grace. Horror and humor go hand in hand throughout as Tucker and Zephyr face off and Moses valiantly attempts to find her, though an intermittently screechy score overplays tense moments to the point of distraction.

Courtney’s beastly performance remains the main attraction, electric whether he’s crooning “Baby Shark,” casually slicing jugulars or showing off drunken dance moves in his underwear a la Buffalo Bill in “The Silence of the Lambs.” And he’s quietly chilling as he explains his impulse to subjugate “weaker creatures” in the name of order.

Still, it’s Harrison who carries the movie with steeliness and smarts. The film hints at common childhood wounds that sent predator and prey – or is it predator and predator? – on different paths of survival, but it doesn’t probe very deeply, instead more interested in putting Zephyr through her gory final-girl paces.

As her attempts at escape turn repetitious, the script by Nick Lepard never quite figures out how to fill its 98-minute run time with new cat-and-mouse (or shark-and-marlin, as Tucker dubs her) twists, and “Dangerous Animals” loses steam treading familiar trope-filled waters en route to an oddly mawkish ending. At least it knows not to take itself too seriously – even if it did have its world premiere at the recent Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight.

Spielberg’s shark movie crown is still safe for the moment, even if the waters still aren’t. Happy summer.

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Two and one-half stars. Rated R. At theatres. Contains grisly violence, language, sex, drugs and sharks. 98 minutes.

Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.