“Dangerous Animals” is another typical horror film with a lot of sharks, but there is one thing to distinguish itself a bit among many other shark flicks which came out after Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” (1975). It has a crazy serial killer who has been obsessed with sharks, and you may enjoy how it has some twisted fun with the juxtaposition of these two different horror genre elements.

The main story of the movie begins with your average Meet Cute moment. In the Gold Coast area of Queensland, Australia, two different young people come across each other, and we observe how different they are from each other in many aspects. While Moses (Josh Heuston) is a local lad from some affluent family, Zephyr (Hessie Harrison) is a young American woman who simply prefers to be alone while wandering around here and there, but it does not take much time for them to get attracted to each other more as sharing their enthusiasm on surfing.

In the end, they end up having a romantic time inside a van where Zephyr has lived for a while, and Moses is willing to be more serious about their relationship, but Zephyr, who turns out to have a very unhappy past, hesitates. As a result, she leaves him while he is absent, and then she goes to a certain beach area previously recommended by him.

When Zephyr happens to encounter a stranger there, we get nervous because the opening scene already showed us how dangerous this figure is. While he just looks like a rather eccentric due running his little tourism business involved with those sharks in the sea near the Gold Coast, Tucker (Jai Courtney) is actually a serial killer who incidentally has a very morbid idea about sharks, and he chooses Zephyr as his next victim.

Not long after she is suddenly ambushed by Tucker, Zephyr wakes up to find herself locked up inside Tucker’s boat along with a young woman who has already been trapped there for a while. As your average tough girl, Zephyr naturally tries to find any possible way out, but Tucker is already preparing for another killing, and it seems that all is lost for her.

The movie does flinch at all as depicting how crazy Tucker is about sharks. To him, people are just pieces of meat to be sacrificed to what has fascinated him for years since his unfortunate encounter with a shark during his childhood years. In contrast to Robert Shaw’s shark-hating character in “Jaws”, this dude admires and worships sharks in his own insane way, and we are more chilled when the movie eventually presents his ritual of killing on the screen. 

As Zephyr keeps struggling for her survival, the movie provides a series of intense moments between her and her captor. Although the situation becomes all the more hopeless, Zephyr comes to show some resourcefulness, and that leads to a serious setback for Tucker to our little amusement. After he loses something important due to Zephyr’s little act of defiance, she comes to have more time and opportunity for her survival, and then it looks like there is actually a really good chance.

This suspenseful drama between Zephyr and Tucker is intercut with a part involved with Moses’ search for Zephyr, which often feels like a filler material in my trivial opinion. We just watch Moses looking baffled and then worried as continuing to look for Zephyr, and then there eventually comes a point where he comes upon something which may lead him to her.

Around the last act, the screenplay by Nick Lepard is hampered a bit by some plot contrivance, but it does not disappoint us at all as presenting a lot of sharks on the screen. It goes without saying that they are CGI creatures, but they do look scary as our heroine becomes more terrified along the story, and we come to brace more for whatever may happen in the end.

The main performers in the film are well-cast in their respective parts. As the eventual center of the story, Hassie Harrison is engaging as her character comes to more of vulnerability as well as strength, and she is particularly convincing when her character comes to make a very drastic decision not so far from the climactic part of Danny Boyle’s Oscar-nominated film “127 Hours” (2010). Although he is merely required to play a nice-looking lad, Josh Heuston has a little but precious chemistry with Harrison, and that makes their intimate scene early in the film sweet enough for us to care about their characters.

Needless to say, Jai Courtney has a horribly colorful character to play with gusto, and his committed performance is certainly the best thing in the film. Although he has been rather bland and passable in many of his previous films including “Suicide Squad” (2016), he finally finds a really interesting role for him here, and he willingly chews every moment of his in addition to bringing menacing insanity to several key scenes of his in the movie.

On the whole, “Dangerous Animals” is a solid genre piece to enjoy, and director Sean Byrne, who previously directed “The Devil’s Candy” (2015), did a competent job of maintaining the level of suspense to the end. It does not reach to the level of “Jaws” (Well, how can that be possible?), but it has some enjoyable stuffs to remember, and that is enough for me for now.