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.

McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales | review by Rafe McGregor

McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales by Michael Chabon (editor)

McSweeney’s #10, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, paperback, £4.10 (used), 1 March 2003, ISBN 9781400033393

 

Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern is an award-winning American literary journal that was founded by award-winning and bestselling author Dave Eggers in San Francisco in 1998. Eggers has a long and varied bibliography, but is probably best known for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a memoir published in 2000. More important than any of this is the fact that McSweeney’s was Stephen Theaker’s inspiration for TQF, which he launched with John Greenwood in Birmingham in 2004. As regular readers of TQF (but probably not McSweeney’s) will know, Stephen’s secondary goal (after keep it going) was to catch McSweeney’s up, which he achieved in 2011. At the moment, TQF is in the lead – but only just – with seven-seven issues to McSweeney’s seventy-six. The next issue of McSweeney’s, which is due in February, will see a new editor, novelist and academic Rita Bullwinkel, take the helm. One of the features that distinguishes McSweeney’s from other literary journals is Eggers’ novel approach to editing and production:

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern continues to publish on a roughly quarterly schedule, and each issue is markedly different from its predecessors in terms of design and editorial focus. Some are in boxes, others come with a CD, still others are bound with a giant rubber band, and perhaps someday an issue will be made of glass.

Why the hell not!

The inspiration for TQF is not just any old McSweeney’s, but issue ten, McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, which was guest edited by champion of genre fiction Michael Chabon and published in February 2003 (a little over a year before the launch of TQF). It is easy to see why…from a garish cover borrowed from the October 1940 issue of Red Star Mystery Magazine to Chabon himself as editor to four hundred and eighty pages’ worth of twenty stories, some great illustrations, and contributors that include: Michael Crichton, Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, Nick Hornby, Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, and Michael Moorcock. I’ve no idea how deep McSweeney’s pockets are, but one would be hard-pressed to compile this kind of lineup with literally unlimited resources. Most of the tales don’t disappoint regardless of the stature of their authors and I agree with Stephen that this is one of – if not the – best collections of short fiction ever published for pulp fiction fans.

My favourite tale is the first, Jim Shephard’s ‘Tedford and the Megalodon’. As a shark story enthusiast, I wondered how much of the visual horror and signature suspense would be retained in the short story format (on which note the illustration, by Howard Chaykin, is a perfect accompaniment, breathtaking without being a spoiler). Simply stated, neither the horror nor the suspense are lost and the last sentence is one of the most chilling conclusions to a narrative I’ve ever read, all the more remarkable because it is not unexpected. Honourable mentions above and beyond Shephard’s illustrious peers go to Hornby, for ‘Otherwise Pandemonium’; Kelly Link, one of the pioneers of the New Weird, for ‘Catskin’; and Moorcock, for ‘The Case of the Nazi Canary’. Moorcock’s contribution is an outing for his occult detective, Sir Seaton Begg, AKA the other Baker Street detective, Sexton Blake. King’s contribution, ‘The Tale of Gray Dick’ features Roland Deschain, protagonist of The Dark Tower series, although as I’ve only read the first two books, I’m not sure where it fits chronologically (he is already missing some fingers, if that helps anyone work it out). I was only disappointed twice: Eggers’ contribution is, to my mind, out of sync with the rest, too slow and too long, and I found Ellison’s contribution insubstantial and just not very funny (assuming the aim was comedy). McSweeney’s #10 is now out of print (along with the rest of the first thirteen issues), but used copies remain available from the usual vendors and are, at the time of writing, still relatively cheap (the upper end of the range I saw was £20, postage excluded).

Having set such an incredibly high bar, has TQF ever come close? No doubt I’m biased because it featured one of my Roderick Langham stories, but I don’t think TQF#50, which was published in January 2015, was too far off. Aside from the eleven stories in three hundred and twenty-four pages, which include a few of my personal favourites, I very much enjoyed its showcasing of so many of the magazine’s regular contributors, including several whose collaboration with Stephen and John predates my own (which began with a single and somewhat scant review in TQF#23 in 2008). That said, I have particularly high hopes for TQF#80, which is due shortly. The last page of McSweeney’s #10, the source of my quote above, states that (only) fifty-six issues were planned. When McSweeney’s #56 was published in 2019, the (true) goal was revealed as one hundred and fifty-six. Perhaps when that issue is published, it will be two hundred and fifty-six. Let’s hope that day comes and that, as Stephen puts it, both McSweeney’s and TQF keep going.

The Meg | review by Rafe McGregor

Size matters.

I first watched Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) on the small screen in the late seventies or possibly in 1980 or 1981 – some time in the second half of my first decade. I don’t remember the year or whether my experience was courtesy of videotape or 8mm film, but I do remember being absolutely, completely, and utterly terrified. So scared that for a weeks I was reluctant to bath, let alone swim in a pool. That didn’t last, but the fear of sharks did. Not exactly clinical galeophobia or even enough to keep me from swimming in the sea, but enough to cause some of the physical symptoms of the phobia for nearly four more decades of seeing sharks on film and in dreams. As is well known, Jaws became the prototypical Hollywood blockbuster and its form, style, and content have been emulated with more or less success for forty-three years. The film also became a franchise, spawning three sequels with diminishing critical and commercial returns: the best thing about Jaws 2 (1978) was its tagline (“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water”); Jaws 3-D (1983) was as disappointing as the other attempts to revive 3D cinema in the early eighties; and Jaws: The Revenge (1987) was nominated for eight Golden Raspberry Awards, achieved a rare but well-deserved 0% on the Tomatometer, and showed that even the great Michael Caine can make poor career choices. None of the four were, however, financial failures and the shark movie was soon established as a subgenre of the horror film.