Dangerous Animals | review by Rafe McGregor

Dangerous Animals, by Sean Byrne (Independent Film Company)

Tucker's shark experience!

In my birthday wishes to Jaws' (1975) Bruce, I mentioned the host of terrible Sharksploitation movies I've watched since reviewing The Meg (2018), listed the lowlights, and noted two films of which I was sceptical in spite of the advance praise they had received. I've now watched both Fear Below (2025) and Dangerous Animals and can attest to the accuracy of my preconceptions about the former, which is indeed similar to Into the Deep (2025), with its well-deserved 27% on the Tomatometer. I won't say much about it here, except that I didn't think the shark very realistic and that sharks in rivers just aren't as frightening as sharks in the ocean, a pair of problems plaguing Under Paris (2024), entirely undeserving of its 66% on the Tomatometer. My reservations about Dangerous Animals were based on the trailer, which I summarised rather meanly (albeit, again, accurately) as an eye-rolling 'shark plus serial killer'. My point being… surely one is enough for a ninety-eight-minute film? Whenever I watch what is essentially a monster movie, I'm reminded of The Ghost and The Darkness (1996), a fictionalised account of the 'Tsavo man-eaters' in colonial Kenya in 1898. While the film is yet another example of the tired old trope of (hu)man versus nature, director Stephen Hopkins is surprisingly successful in making two 'normal' lions a source of suspense and fear – as Sherlock Holmes might have said, 'no dinosaurs need apply' (the first two instalments of the Jurassic Park franchise were released in 1993 and 1997 respectively).

The dangerous animal of this title is of course the serial killer, Tucker (played by Jai Courtney), not the shark(s) and what redeems it from being yet more chum to the maw (with apologies to Mark Bould) of Sharksploitation enthusiasts like me is that we don't see sharks very often and when we do, they are all real (as far as I can tell, anyway) until the last ten minutes. When a CGI shark does appear, it is convincing rather than cartoonish, which may well be because of the speed with which it disappears. We don't have to see sharks all the time to be scared and less is often more (as we know from M.R. James, among many other masters of the craft of horror fiction). So, yes, in its finest moments the film reminded me of Jaws, where the only flaw is when Bruce is revealed as a creature of fibreglass and steel rather than flesh and bone. Unlike Jaws, Dangerous Animals lacks sympathetic characters. Tucker himself is probably the most charismatic, but he does like to kidnap pairs of bikini-clad beauties and videotape one being fed to sharks in front of the other. (Actual VHS, not digital – no wonder he has issues!) It is also rather predictable. Very early on, I guessed that Tucker would be eaten by sharks and that the love interest, Moses (played by Josh Heuston), would not rescue the protagonist, Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), at least one of which came to pass. Notwithstanding, the film was much better than expected and one of the best Sharksploitation films I've seen. But if Zephyr thinks that Australia's Gold Coast is 'as far away from America as possible' she really needs to install Google Maps or ChatGPT on her smartphone (it's Mauritius or Madagascar, in case you're wondering). ***

Happy Birthday, Bruce: Jaws @ 50! – Rafe McGregor

Fifty years ago today, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) was released into the wild, into the world, and into the film industry and its golden anniversary is being celebrated globally with much hype and fanfare, including here, at Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction (which, as we all know, is possibly the UK’s second longest-running sf/f fiction zine and approaching its own silver anniversary). I wrote about the film’s impact on me, on Hollywood, and on sharks in the wild (none of which were particularly good) in my review of Jon Turteltaub’s The Meg (2018) so I won’t say much about any of that here. I will say that for all that harm the film may have done, it is in my opinion – and quite literally – almost perfect as a work of cinema and entirely deserving of its 97% on the Tomatometer. If it were up to me, I’d push that to 99%, deducting 1% for Bruce, the mechanical shark named after Spielberg’s lawyer. The problem is that Bruce moves like a wind-up toy (which is essentially what he is) rather than whipping through the sea like a fish in…well, water. It turns out I’m not the only one to have problems with Bruce and Jon Harvey’s recent article in the Guardian reveals that the decision to show very little of the shark until the end was motivated by practical rather than artistic considerations. Let me say one thing in Bruce’s defence (it being his birthday): what he lacks in speed and suppleness, he almost makes up in menace and mass. One more thing about Jaws before I move on to thoughts about recent imitations and the Sharksploitation genre more broadly. A few months ago I read Peter Benchley’s much-maligned 1974 novel, on which the film is closely based, for the first time. I thought it was good – very good, actually. Where the film is let down a little by Bruce’s performance, the novel suffers a little more from Benchley’s inability to write convincing women but is otherwise a compelling and chilling read.

Since reviewing The Meg, I’ve watched a host of terrible shark movies I haven’t bothered to write about. Lowlights include John Pogue’s Deep Blue Sea 3 (2020), Ben Wheatley’s Meg 2: The Trench (2023), and Andrew Traucki’s The Reef: Stalked (2024), all of which provide ample evidence for the law of diminishing returns in film franchises. Meg doesn’t even deserve its 27% on the Tomatometer; how The Reef and Deep Blue Sea achieved 71% and 79% respectively is completely beyond me. (Perhaps the Tomatometer isn’t as reliable as I thought.) I have yet to see Matthew Holmes’ Fear Below or Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals, both of which were released this year and come highly recommended, but both of which raise immediate reservations. Fear Below looks very similar to Christian Sesma’s Into the Deep (2025, 27%), which deserves dishonourable mention with the three franchise films, and Dangerous Animals is being marketed as ‘shark plus serial killer’ (eye roll). I’ve also watched Martin Wilson’s Great White (2021), which can consider its 44% on the Tomatometer generous; Justin Lee’s Maneater (2024), a well-earned 17%; and Joachim Heden’s The Last Breath (2024, AKA Escape from the Deep), with a very generous 30%. Yes, filmmakers keep churning (chumming?) them out and I keep lapping them up. I blame Jaws. (For both the churning and the lapping).

One thing that has become tiresome over decades of watching movies in what is now called the Sharksploitation genre, much more so than the appalling use of CGI in most, is the way in which they all replicate and reinforce the (hu)man versus nature trope. I’d have hoped that by now, with nature collapsing all around us, this might seem a little too twentieth (or even nineteenth) century to continue to appeal to audiences. This doesn’t just apply to Sharksploitation, but to many other contemporary films and franchises, such as, for example, Baltasar Kormákur’s Beast (2022) and the Jurassic Park (now Jurassic World) media moneymaker. Jurassic World Rebirth, the seventh film, is due next month and will no doubt involve plenty of land, sea, and air lizard mincemeat. Though I won’t be around to witness it, I also wonder if by the time Jaws’ centenary comes around, the orca won’t have replaced the shark as our favourite cinematic sea monster. Orcas are much bigger and much clever than sharks, hunt in pods, and are increasingly encroaching on human-infested waters as ocean temperatures rise. They do look like they’re smiling rather than snarling when they open their (immensely strong) mouths though, which probably doesn’t make a lot of difference if you’re in the water with one but might make them less likely film fodder. I leave that for the future...in the present, it’s time to revisit the past with (yet) another viewing of what might just be Spielberg’s best.

Office Invasion | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

If you like dumb, watch this horror/sci-fi/comedy mash-up. If you like humour, don’t.

Melusi Nkosi (Kabomo Vilakazi), the merciless new leader at mining company AMI, takes some extreme cost-cutting measures that put the three heroes of Office Invasion in financial peril:  geologist Sam (Rea Rangaka) can’t afford medication for his ailing daughter, accountant Prince (Kiroshan Naidoo) needs to stay in the finance department for five years to get access to his trust fund and therefore escape his tyrannical father’s hold on him, and security guard Junior (Sechaba Ramphele), frustrated by his mooching flatmates, just needs to make ends meet. 

Melusi sells the South African business to an international firm represented by a patently duplicitous trio consisting of Gregory (Greg Viljoen), a chipper Australian with bad hair, Badrick (Stevel Marc), a Jamaican ready to throw down, and Anya (Aimee Ntuli), a conniving Eastern European. 

The desperate heroes hatch a plan to steal some Zulcanoid, the liquid metal at AMI mines, and then sell it to a Chinese gangster who says he’s going to use it for benevolent purposes.   

Overarching all of this is an impending alien invasion, implied by the attack that opens the film and toward which it builds. It takes a long time – too long, in my opinion – before the aliens appear. 

The film’s primary shortcoming is its lack of humour stemming from an imbalance in characters: while the leads lack the eccentricity that would have made them more compelling, the secondary characters’ performances feel overblown and derivative. The outrageously idiotic Paul (aka Knobface), for instance, is clearly a rip-off of Brick (Steve Carell) in the Anchorman series. 

The protagonists have their moments, the best of which involve Prince and Junior showing their frustration. Prince has visions of extreme violence, but they seem tossed into the film for no other reason than to shock the viewer. 

Most of the scenarios in which the trio finds themselves end up feeling stagnant. When Junior loses his gun as part of the cost cuts, he gets sent to a training session where a supposed-to-be-funny-but-not-funny overly serious instructor shows security guards how to defend themselves with typical office supplies.

Office Invasion plays the typical, stale feel-good cards like victims revolting against corporate oppressors and putting the needs of others before personal needs. Yawn.—Douglas J. Ogurek **

Terrifier 2 | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Knives, hammers, and scissors speak louder than words: gore exhibition holds a mirror up to visceral horror and carves out new slasher villain superstar.

Early in Terrifier 2, the part-mime/part-clown known as Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) uses his own blood to write “ART” on a mirror as his latest victim struggles to stay alive. Yes, this is the deranged villain’s name, but it’s also an announcement that this sequel will hold a mirror up to the cinematic phenomenon known as torture porn. Is Art solely a vessel for shocking the viewer? Or is he an artist? Is Terrifier 2 simply another bloody entry in the pantheon of pointless violence, or is it commenting on the splatterpunk subgenre?

When Art, constantly on the brink of breaking that fourth wall, rapidly raises his eyebrows twice, the mute murderer acknowledges other characters, but he also enlists the viewer and dares them not to turn away from the atrocities he is about to commit. And he takes those atrocities far… really far. 

Terrifier 2 bears the distinction of being both terrible and brilliant. Its weaknesses include bad dialogue, a flimsy plot, poor acting, female objectification, and a fair amount of senselessness. Why, for instance, does the electricity of a haunted house at an abandoned carnival still work? Why is there a little girl version of Art that only he and a few others can see? Also, why aren’t any cops following up on Art’s horrific murders?

High schooler protagonist Sienna (Lauren LaVera), who is destined to encounter Art, has no real goal other than to design a warrior princess Halloween costume that her deceased father sketched. He also left her a sword apparently endowed with special powers. Sienna’s nerdy younger brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam) is obsessed with the Miles County Massacre that Art committed the previous Halloween. Their moody mother Barbara (Sarah Voigt) tends to berate both Sienna and Jonathan.

The interest level takes a dramatic shift the moment Art enters a scene. What he lacks in words he makes up for with his Ace Ventura-level exaggerated facial expressions and gestures. When he laughs (at the physical or psychological suffering of others), he throws his head back, shakes his shoulders, or puts his hands on his knees. When he sneaks up behind someone, he does so with a cartoon character’s panache. But there are also moments when Art stands motionless, creating a contrast to his typical flamboyance, a contrast that is both creepy and at times funny. 

When the time comes for Art to take centre stage, the story comes to a halt so he can indulge in his art: the brutal, prolonged, unrelenting, over-the-top maiming and killing of people. Art doesn’t just hit, whip or stab someone once. He does it over and over and over. Moreover, the camera doesn’t turn away. The film also empowers victims with near-supernatural stamina that enables them to stay alive and conscious during the attacks. And just when you think Art’s done, he might just come back and do more. 

Despite a contemporary setting, the film has an eighties feel thanks largely to its synthesizer-heavy music, aligning it with the classic horror films and villains of that era. If Art the Clown, with his tiny askew top hat secured with a rubber band, his weapons-filled black garbage bag, his terrible teeth, and the black dot on his nose, continues to appear in films, he may become a name as recognisable as Jason and Freddie. 

Terrifier 2 is Art.—Douglas J. Ogurek *****

Knock at the Cabin | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Film’s insistence on spoon-feeding answers to viewers detracts from magic of novel.

Paul Tremblay’s novel The Cabin at the End of the World made a huge splash in the horror community and beyond. The story details the plight of Andrew and Eric and their daughter Wen after a quartet of strangers approaches their remote cabin. 

M. Night Shyamalan’s best films – Signs (2002) and The Village (2004) stand out as examples – achieve a rare mixture of strong storytelling, distinctive characters, a goosebumps-inducing climax and a positive message. 

What happens, therefore, when a talented albeit idiosyncratic director adapts a masterful novel? 

Knock at the Cabin immediately pulls the viewer into the story with the intimidating figure of Leonard (Dave Bautista), blurred and bulky, approaching Wen (Kristen Cui) as she collects grasshoppers. It’s an unsettling scene characterised by extreme close-ups of the two as they talk. Adding to the tension is Leonard periodically glancing sideways and leading the viewer (but not necessarily Wen) to wonder: Is he making sure someone doesn’t see him? Or is he waiting for someone? 

Most of the film sticks to the source material, and this is where it succeeds. Each character is well cast, particularly Bautista’s Leonard, whose burly frame contrasts with his calm, “I’m sorry I have to do this” disposition. Though Andrew (Ben Aldridge) and Eric (Jonathan Groff) lose some of the distinctiveness of their literary inspiration (a forgivable offence considering the difficulty of condensing a novel to a one-hour-and-forty-minute film), both actors convey the tension, disbelief and anger of their characters.

A couple of flashbacks masterfully show the intolerance Andrew and Eric confront while casting further uncertainty onto the visitors’ intentions. One flashback, for instance, starts just after the couple comes out to Andrew’s parents. The father’s blatant disgust as he stares at Andrew is so arresting that it overwhelms whatever trivial thing the smirking mother says. 

Things start to derail toward the end of the film. Several key character outcomes deviate from those in the novel, and Shyamalan gives the viewer a much different takeaway than Tremblay gives the reader. 

What makes the novel so effective is its ambiguity: Are these visitors lunatics suffering from a collective delusion, or do they have a legitimate reason for the extreme request they are making of this family? Are the natural events that are unfolding in other parts of the world connected to this group, or are they merely coincidences?

Shyamalan, however, seems so focused on delivering his message that he dismisses that ambiguity. He puts his own spin on the conclusion, and the film suffers because of it. In his quest to put everything on a neat platter and spoon-feed answers to the viewer, he goes so far as to have one character announce what key characters symbolize. In one scene, it’s as if the film is saying, “See? Look! Here’s the evidence that proves the answer.”—Douglas J. Ogurek ***

Till Death | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Makeup on a robot: it’s Home Alone 6, starring Barbie! 

There are two things you can be certain about in Till Death, starring Megan Fox as Emma, a chilly trophy wife who spends most of the film dragging around her husband’s corpse and dropping f-bombs. First, despite all the trials that Emma undergoes in a remote cabin in the middle of the winter somewhere in New York, her makeup will not get ruined. Second, no matter what the plot throws at Emma, her tepid responses will fail to gain the sympathy of a discerning viewer.

Emma’s lawyer husband Mark (Eoin Macken), whom she met when he successfully prosecuted the man who attacked her, is the controlling type – he tells her what to wear and what to order off the menu. Mark, who gives no indication he’s aware she’s having an affair with one of his employees, takes her on an ostensibly conciliatory getaway to a remote lake house to celebrate their eleventh anniversary. Then he dies.   

The film, directed by S.K. Dale, offers some of the mysterious note-leaving and brutality of Saw and some of the suspense of the typical home invasion story in which an underdog uses her ingenuity to try to outwit would-be killers. However, Till Death seems to be so focused on maintaining Fox’s Barbie-like complexion that it falls short in other factors. Her robotic performance leaves her cold to her husband, cold to her lover, and unfortunately, cold to the viewer. Moreover, as antagonists pursue Emma within the lake house, one wonders how hard it is for able-bodied men to find a barefooted woman handcuffed to a bloody corpse.

Most log lines about Till Death say something about a woman awakening to find herself shackled to her dead spouse. Not only does the film take too long to build up to that inciting incident, but that description leaves out a technicality that plays into the way the story evolves. Rather than building up to this scenario, a more compelling structure might have started with the handcuffed spouse discovery, then shifted between Emma’s more well-defined past and her attempts to escape. 

The most interesting, albeit weakly explored, facet of this film is the concept of the beautiful young woman kept as an object by an older, wealthier man. Perhaps Till Death would have been much better if its makers dropped the horror aspirations and injected Emma with more backstory, depth, and life.—Douglas J. Ogurek **

Vampires vs. the Bronx | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Stranger Things partners with Fright Night and moves to the city to take on gentrification 

Kids find out vampires are trying to take over their neighbourhood. Adults don’t believe it. And so a familiar scenario plays out in Vampires vs. the Bronx, directed by Oz Rodriguez. Lots of clichés in this one: hissing, baring teeth, gathering weapons, taking notes from movies. However, one thing does set this film apart from other vamp flicks: the predators use the guise of a real estate firm to pursue their malicious goal. They even go so far as to enlist some of the neighbourhood thugs to help them.

The Conjuring, reviewed by Douglas J. Ogurek

Scare Magician Wan Conjures Up another Haunted House Hit

Just before The Conjuring started, my wife said, “I dropped my wedding ring.” When the theater darkened, we still hadn’t found it. We decided to resume our search after the film. Unknowingly, we also challenged director James Wan (and writers Chad and Carey Hayes) to take our minds off our dilemma for a couple hours by cranking up the scares, like Insidious did.

In the early seventies, renowned demonologist/paranormal research duo Ed and Lorraine Warren confront their most frightening case. It starts when the financially strapped Perron couple and their daughters move into an old Rhode Island house. True to the haunted house formula, creepy things – Wan’s forté – start to happen. Carolyn Perron (Lili Taylor of The Haunting) reaches out to the Warrens.