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Irish Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Dangerous Animals review: Jaws meets Wolf Creek in this watery Ozploitation movie
Dangerous Animals Director : Sean Byrne Cert : 16 Genre : Horror Starring : Jai Courtney, Hassie Harrison, Josh Heuston, Rob Carlton, Ella Newton, Liam Greinke Running Time : 1 hr 38 mins Jaws meets Wolf Creek in a watery Ozploitation movie that seems to ask what would happen if Steve Irwin were a demented serial killer with a camcorder and mommy issues. The movie's villain, Tucker, played with operatic derangement by Jai Courtney of Terminator Genisys and Suicide Squad, runs a gnarly Gold Coast shark-dive business that is not what it seems. After luring unsuspecting tourists on to his boat, he sails into shark-infested waters, dangles his passengers overboard and films their deaths for his VHS snuff collection. New to town, Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) is a nomadic lone-wolf American surfer chick with a militant resistance to emotional intimacy. When she hooks up with a sensitive Aussie named Moses (Josh Heuston), she stays in her van and disappears before breakfast. Unhappily, that's when she gets nabbed by Tucker. READ MORE Zephyr's lock-picking girlboss survivalist isn't always enough to counter the film's fetishised female suffering or its subplot sending Moses to the rescue. For all the Oedipal signalling, Nick Lepard's script can't reconcile Tucker's strangely desexualised sadism with his desire to decorate his torture-porn tapes with locks of hair from his victims. The sharks – best when they are rotoscoped from nature footage – are demoted to junior partners in this crazy man's gendered trauma. They, of course, are not the dangerous animals of the title. A surprise inclusion at Cannes' Directors' Fortnight strand last month, Sean Byrne's third feature is neither as gripping as The Loved Ones, his prom-night horror, nor as intriguing as The Devil's Candy, his supernatural heavy-metal thriller, but it rattles along as effective B-movie gore. It even manages to include a rendition of Baby Shark without descending into the pointless camp of Sharknado. [ 'Incredible - real David Attenborough stuff': thousands of young sharks discovered off Ireland's west coast Opens in new window ] Harrison is a game final girl, Courtney is an imposing villain, and their two-step is a masterclass in look-out-behind-you dramaturgy. See it with an audience for the biggest possible splash. In cinemas from Friday, June 6th
Sydney Morning Herald
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
The movie about Aussie surfers being mean to Nicolas Cage is finally here. Is it good?
THE SURFER ★★ (MA15+) 101 minutes I imagine tales of Maroubra's Bra Boys may have helped inspire the tribe of Australian surfers giving Nicolas Cage a hard time in this film by Irish filmmakers Lorcan Finnegan and Thomas Martin but in this case, fiction is much stranger than truth. These boys have colonised their beach so completely that Cage's character can't get so much as a toe in the water. He's a divorced businessman who has been in the US for years, but now he's back in Australia harbouring an urgent desire to buy a house overlooking the break he surfed as a kid. He has brought his son with him so they can see the house and have an introductory dip. However, the exaggerated earnestness that makes Cage such an impersonators' delight has already kicked in and he's wallowing so deeply in nostalgia that he hasn't realised his boy doesn't share his euphoria. Having spotted the dirty looks locals are casting in their direction, he'd rather be at school. It came as no surprise to learn that Finnegan and Martin are fans of the Ozploitation films of the 1970s. Those were the days when certain Brits and Americans cherished the myth of Australia as a place where sharks leapt out of the surf at sunbathing tourists and kangaroos hopped along city streets challenging shoppers to boxing matches. And the human inhabitants were just as savage – hence the success of Canadian director Ted Kotcheff's adaptation of the Kenneth Cook novel Wake in Fright, the story of a gormless English schoolteacher barely surviving his first weekend in an Outback town. You know from the start that Cage is going to fare just as badly. His doggy-eyed histrionics guarantee it. But naturally, he doesn't see it that way. If he did, he'd go home to reconsider his real estate purchase and there would be no film. Instead, he stays on after his son leaves, waiting for his real estate agent to confirm the house's sale. And in just one day, he falls apart before our eyes, mocked by kookaburras, menaced by snakes and abused by the locals. They're all in thrall to Scally (Julian McMahon), the surfers' insufferable tribal leader, who has moulded the group into a cult devoted the kind of alpha-male pretensions we now know as toxic masculinity. In practice, this means that Cage is subjected to much nudging, sneering and spitting before the boys start going to work on his Lexus, which he's unwisely but typically left in the carpark.
The Age
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
The movie about Aussie surfers being mean to Nicolas Cage is finally here. Is it good?
THE SURFER ★★ (MA15+) 101 minutes I imagine tales of Maroubra's Bra Boys may have helped inspire the tribe of Australian surfers giving Nicolas Cage a hard time in this film by Irish filmmakers Lorcan Finnegan and Thomas Martin but in this case, fiction is much stranger than truth. These boys have colonised their beach so completely that Cage's character can't get so much as a toe in the water. He's a divorced businessman who has been in the US for years, but now he's back in Australia harbouring an urgent desire to buy a house overlooking the break he surfed as a kid. He has brought his son with him so they can see the house and have an introductory dip. However, the exaggerated earnestness that makes Cage such an impersonators' delight has already kicked in and he's wallowing so deeply in nostalgia that he hasn't realised his boy doesn't share his euphoria. Having spotted the dirty looks locals are casting in their direction, he'd rather be at school. It came as no surprise to learn that Finnegan and Martin are fans of the Ozploitation films of the 1970s. Those were the days when certain Brits and Americans cherished the myth of Australia as a place where sharks leapt out of the surf at sunbathing tourists and kangaroos hopped along city streets challenging shoppers to boxing matches. And the human inhabitants were just as savage – hence the success of Canadian director Ted Kotcheff's adaptation of the Kenneth Cook novel Wake in Fright, the story of a gormless English schoolteacher barely surviving his first weekend in an Outback town. You know from the start that Cage is going to fare just as badly. His doggy-eyed histrionics guarantee it. But naturally, he doesn't see it that way. If he did, he'd go home to reconsider his real estate purchase and there would be no film. Instead, he stays on after his son leaves, waiting for his real estate agent to confirm the house's sale. And in just one day, he falls apart before our eyes, mocked by kookaburras, menaced by snakes and abused by the locals. They're all in thrall to Scally (Julian McMahon), the surfers' insufferable tribal leader, who has moulded the group into a cult devoted the kind of alpha-male pretensions we now know as toxic masculinity. In practice, this means that Cage is subjected to much nudging, sneering and spitting before the boys start going to work on his Lexus, which he's unwisely but typically left in the carpark.
