Believe it or not, Sean Byrne's new horror film Dangerous Animals has given me the ability to see into the future. Specifically, I can see, years down the road, college students everywhere clacking away their keyboards typing up essays related this Australian chiller. These tireless twenty-something's will wipe sweat from their respective brows while burning the midnight oil elucidating on the troublesome gender politics of Dangerous Animals. Given how shallow the rest of Animals is, there’s not much else to focus on beyond the glaring disparity in how male and female deaths/mutilations are depicted. The future is certain.
Cinema majors needing evidence for gender-themed essays will relish the existence of Dangerous Animals. Those of us hoping for a fun summertime creature feature like Crawl or Deep Blue Sea, meanwhile, are out of luck.
Tucker (Jai Courney) is an Australian boat captain who runs an outfit providing guided tours of sharks for tourists and locals alike. Unbeknownst to the general public, he's a sociopath who loves trapping women clients on his boat, feeding them to sharks, and then recording this carnage. His next victim: Zephyr (Hassie Harrison). This American surfer and bread roll enthusiast has reached the land Down Under to get as far away from her previous life as possible. Not even a cozy night with real estate salesman Moses (Josh Heuston) can stop her wandering spirit.
While getting ready to crush the waves in the early morning, Tucker kidnaps Zephyr. Once she awakens, she’s chained to a bed next to fellow captive Heather (Ella Newton). They soon realize Zephyr's malicious ambitions and the relentlessly resourceful Zephyr will do anything to get off this orange-colored boat. Meanwhile, Moses, despite only knowing Zephyr for 11 hours, grows concerned on the mainland that she's missing. With police proving unhelpful, Moses is determined to know where she’s gone.
Nick Lepard's script might've sustained a fine 10-minute short film. However, as a 98-minute movie, Dangerous Animals loses its bite. Once Zephyr’s trapped in the boat, endless scenes transpire concerning her stabbing/evading Tucker, narrowly escaping, and then being dragged back to her quarters. It’s all incredibly repetitive, which dilutes the excitement of an intended nail-biter narrative. Lepard’s too timid to take this story into really unhinged territory. Plus, the emphasis on female anguish also isn’t anything new. As countless long-forgotten 2000s torture horror films can attest, relying on just women screaming in agony isn't a recipe for lastingly impactful schlock.
Constantly cutting back to Moses as amateur Columbo/Charlie Cale only exacerbates the storytelling problems. Dangerous Animals needed an unpredictable, claustrophobic aura. Instead, Lepard’s screenplay embraces bloat in both scope and runtime. The only thing it skimps out on is the shark carnage. Those underwater beasties are only on-screen for a little bit of the 98-minute runtime. Dangerous Animals is less Deep Blue Sea 2.0 and more of a showcase of what would happen if Buffalo Bill or Wes Bentley in P2 committed their crimes out on the open sea.
Lepard’s writing combines these shortcomings with another fatal flaw: Zephyr’s lack of a concrete character arc. While Dangerous Animals flickered before my eyes, I kept contemplating superior modern genre movies about women trapped in single locations. Titles like 10 Cloverfield Lane, No One Will Save You, Crawl, Panic Room, these are just a few of countless superior titles that delicately balance internal struggles of jeopardized ladies with exciting thrills. Plus, these productions let their protagonists do more than just scream for help. Zephyr, meanwhile, has barely any personality to speak of beyond being gruff, didactically talking about how “there’s nothing for me on land,” and which Credence Clearwater Revival song she hates most of all.
Those personality traits quickly vanish. Instead, Lepard and Byrne concentrate on chaining her to beds, chairs, and other assorted objects. Instead of fleshing out Zephyr’s personal life, Dangerous Animals concentrates on Tucker, the film’s attempt to make a new wackadoodle serial killer for the ages. Much like John Malkovich in Opus, though, Tucker is way too prominent and “silly” on-screen to be threatening.
Entire scenes focus on him eating cereal while watching VHS tapes of women getting dismembered, dancing around in his open bathrobe to rock tunes, or quietly crooning “Baby Shark” as he prepares to incapacitate Zephyr. These segments, much like Jason Momoa’s wackiest Fast X antics, feel too calculated to inspire audience incredulity. They lack the genuine unpredictable menace of Nicolas Cage’s Longlegs killer, for example. Props to Jai Courtney for thoroughly committing to such an unrepentant slimeball. However, Tucker’s schtick wears out its welcome quickly.
Those gender-themed college essays will surely pick up on how Dangerous Animals continues pop culture’s larger fascination with male serial killers (both fictional and real) over the women they torture. Animals continues that phenomenon with its endless focus on Tucker, including making him the star of the film's prologue. Plus, like 2018’s Red Sparrow, the disparity in how violence against male and lady characters manifests on-screen is inescapable. Men quickly get their throats slit, while women wail in agony and their corpses linger on-screen.
However, a more egregious flaw in Byrne’s Animals approach is the project’s tedium. The snappy (no pun intended) fun of earlier creature features like Alligator and Tremors is non-existent. Dangerous Animals is too self-serious to be fun. Only one third-act plot beat involving Zephyr’s extreme lengths to temporarily escape captivity reaches the kind of B-movie lunacy Animals should’ve consistently hit. Otherwise, scenes of women screaming in pain or Tucker acting “eccentric” just blur together. Even "cheer-worthy" moments involving Zephyr outwitting or incapacitating Tucker ring hollow. They're just retreads of better B-movie moments focusing on ladies getting juicy revenge, like Death Proof's iconic ending, Revenge's most blood-soaked set pieces, or any of Cannibal Mukbang's chaos. Those films had the kind of propulsive entertainment and affection for their lead characters that Dangerous Animals severely lacks.
All while these dreary proceedings unfold, moviegoers will inevitably yearn for those sharks to just pop out of the water and start chomping on people. Anytime Dangerous Animals briefly fills up the entire screen with a shark, the movie gets a pulse. Byrne and cinematographer Shelley Farthing-Dawe also certainly make good use of brightly lit natural Australian backdrops for the story. Too bad both those critters and environments are at the mercy of an uninvolving script desperately needing more trashiness and fun. I’m glad Dangerous Animals can provide easy fodder for those future college students writing about gender roles in cinema. However, I would’ve vastly preferred getting some memorably outlandish oceanic carnage rather than something alternating between unpleasantness and monotony.