Directed by Sean Byrne | Written by Nick Lepard | 98 min | ▲1/2 | VOD

For us cinephiles, it’s impossible to miss the fact that this summer it’s been 50 years since Steven Spielberg’s Jaws changed Hollywood and became the favourite movie of a lot of people, deservedly so. The producers of this new film have the guts to do a shark movie in this anniversary season — and add a serial killer to the formula Jaws invented — suggesting they think it compares favourably. They’re wrong.

It’s not that Dangerous Animals isn’t competently made and acted. Jai Courtney is especially good, which is saying something since he’s never had a role in Hollywood for which he didn’t seem ill-suited. He plays a burly, boisterous Aussie named Tucker. He’s got a fishing boat on the Australian Gold Coast where he abducts and locks up young women, feeding them to sharks and filming their experience. American surfer, Zephyr (the improbably named Hassie Harrison) picks up a local hunk named Moses (Josh Heuston) but cuts him loose before running afoul of Tucker. Moses will show up again later when the plot needs him to.

Exploitation fans may find things to enjoy here, but precious little feels original. Dangerous Animals mines a real vein of torture porn, slathered with a traditional score that works overtime to deliver scares in a way that mostly overplays its hand. In some scenes the sharks are threatening, but in others the CGI is egregious, including a laughably bad moment in the last few minutes — Bruce from Jaws was never so hammy.

Courtney reveals welcome character actor notes in his performance — a lot more than he ever got to share in both abysmal Suicide Squad movies — but the script singularly fails to offer us much understanding of Tucker’s psychopathology beyond some barely referenced childhood trauma. He just wants to hurt women, and given how much of its running time this film offers to that revulsive element, there’s no way I could recommend it. The world doesn’t need more of this creative misogyny.