Baby Shark just won't sound the same after this excellent Aussie thriller

The Advertiser

13-06-2025

Dangerous Animals (MA, 98 minutes)
4 stars
The "final girl" is almost an essential in any horror film, the last of the film's female characters left alive to either triumph over the bad or evil figure, or the last and most spectacular of the film's killings.
Hassie Harrison, a young and blonde Texan actress with a season on the horsey drama Yellowstone on her CV, is the lead and final girl in this spectacularly gruesome new Aussie horror film.
She's an actor to keep an eye on because she is memorable in a film of memorable characters and moments, and particularly holds her own against Jai Courtney playing a character as iconic as John Jarratt's Wolf Creek antihero Mick Taylor.
In a fictional surf-swept town close to the Gold Coast, Captain Tucker (Jai Courtney) runs a charter boat business offering tourists the once-in-a-lifetime experience of diving with sharks.
It's a strange business for Tucker to have built for himself, considering a miracle childhood escape from a shark encounter that left his body scarred with the bite marks, but Tucker sees it as a marketing opportunity his tourists love hearing about.
A thing they probably don't love, as we discover in the film's opening scene, is that when Tucker discovers a tourist hasn't told anyone where they're going, he enjoys throwing them to the sharks and filming the blood churning in the water as the sharks tear them apart.
So, probably not the diving experience you're looking for.
A Yankie surfer touring Australia in a beat-up camper van, Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) is in the wrong place at the wrong time when she asks Tucker for help with her surfboard, and finds herself kidnapped and awakens on his shark vessel, destined to be chum.
But fortunately for Zephyr, she's made a real impression on local surfer Moses (Josh Hueston), who manages to track her down and just might have the fearlessness to take on Tucker.
Australia makes great low-budget horror, and this film is certainly great, a prince among the many budget slasher films Australia churns out, but with the exception of one or two moments, this film does not look cheap at all.
This is probably thanks to the assured direction of Sean Byrne, whose two previous turns in the director's chair, The Loved Ones and The Devil's Candy, were also very memorable.
A lot of the film is cleverly set on a rusted-out trawler just infused with atmosphere.
Harrison and Hueston, one of the cast of the recent Heartbreak High reboot, are very strong, and it's a weirdly enjoyable element of the screenplay that these two smoke shows continue to chat each other up and flirt outrageously even when they're being tied down and tortured by Courtney's serial killer.
Nick Lepard's screenplay isn't the most original genre mash-up, and yet it all just comes together as an original and enjoyable scare-fest, in the way that first Wolf Creek felt new and memorable.
And the most enjoyable and original element is Jai Courtney's performance, a force of nature that you almost want to root for as the anti-hero, and I feel this is a career second-act for Courtney, who has played villains before, but not like this.
You will, honestly, never listen to Baby Shark the same way again.
I had a brown underpants moment in my teens with a shark alarm at a surf carnival, so I am equal parts drawn to and terrified by shark films, and one of the interesting things in Dangerous Animals is that the sharks are probably the safer bet for the characters.
Dangerous Animals (MA, 98 minutes)
4 stars
The "final girl" is almost an essential in any horror film, the last of the film's female characters left alive to either triumph over the bad or evil figure, or the last and most spectacular of the film's killings.
Hassie Harrison, a young and blonde Texan actress with a season on the horsey drama Yellowstone on her CV, is the lead and final girl in this spectacularly gruesome new Aussie horror film.
She's an actor to keep an eye on because she is memorable in a film of memorable characters and moments, and particularly holds her own against Jai Courtney playing a character as iconic as John Jarratt's Wolf Creek antihero Mick Taylor.
In a fictional surf-swept town close to the Gold Coast, Captain Tucker (Jai Courtney) runs a charter boat business offering tourists the once-in-a-lifetime experience of diving with sharks.
It's a strange business for Tucker to have built for himself, considering a miracle childhood escape from a shark encounter that left his body scarred with the bite marks, but Tucker sees it as a marketing opportunity his tourists love hearing about.
A thing they probably don't love, as we discover in the film's opening scene, is that when Tucker discovers a tourist hasn't told anyone where they're going, he enjoys throwing them to the sharks and filming the blood churning in the water as the sharks tear them apart.
So, probably not the diving experience you're looking for.
A Yankie surfer touring Australia in a beat-up camper van, Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) is in the wrong place at the wrong time when she asks Tucker for help with her surfboard, and finds herself kidnapped and awakens on his shark vessel, destined to be chum.
But fortunately for Zephyr, she's made a real impression on local surfer Moses (Josh Hueston), who manages to track her down and just might have the fearlessness to take on Tucker.
Australia makes great low-budget horror, and this film is certainly great, a prince among the many budget slasher films Australia churns out, but with the exception of one or two moments, this film does not look cheap at all.
This is probably thanks to the assured direction of Sean Byrne, whose two previous turns in the director's chair, The Loved Ones and The Devil's Candy, were also very memorable.
A lot of the film is cleverly set on a rusted-out trawler just infused with atmosphere.
Harrison and Hueston, one of the cast of the recent Heartbreak High reboot, are very strong, and it's a weirdly enjoyable element of the screenplay that these two smoke shows continue to chat each other up and flirt outrageously even when they're being tied down and tortured by Courtney's serial killer.
Nick Lepard's screenplay isn't the most original genre mash-up, and yet it all just comes together as an original and enjoyable scare-fest, in the way that first Wolf Creek felt new and memorable.
And the most enjoyable and original element is Jai Courtney's performance, a force of nature that you almost want to root for as the anti-hero, and I feel this is a career second-act for Courtney, who has played villains before, but not like this.
You will, honestly, never listen to Baby Shark the same way again.
I had a brown underpants moment in my teens with a shark alarm at a surf carnival, so I am equal parts drawn to and terrified by shark films, and one of the interesting things in Dangerous Animals is that the sharks are probably the safer bet for the characters.
Dangerous Animals (MA, 98 minutes)
4 stars
The "final girl" is almost an essential in any horror film, the last of the film's female characters left alive to either triumph over the bad or evil figure, or the last and most spectacular of the film's killings.
Hassie Harrison, a young and blonde Texan actress with a season on the horsey drama Yellowstone on her CV, is the lead and final girl in this spectacularly gruesome new Aussie horror film.
She's an actor to keep an eye on because she is memorable in a film of memorable characters and moments, and particularly holds her own against Jai Courtney playing a character as iconic as John Jarratt's Wolf Creek antihero Mick Taylor.
In a fictional surf-swept town close to the Gold Coast, Captain Tucker (Jai Courtney) runs a charter boat business offering tourists the once-in-a-lifetime experience of diving with sharks.
It's a strange business for Tucker to have built for himself, considering a miracle childhood escape from a shark encounter that left his body scarred with the bite marks, but Tucker sees it as a marketing opportunity his tourists love hearing about.
A thing they probably don't love, as we discover in the film's opening scene, is that when Tucker discovers a tourist hasn't told anyone where they're going, he enjoys throwing them to the sharks and filming the blood churning in the water as the sharks tear them apart.
So, probably not the diving experience you're looking for.
A Yankie surfer touring Australia in a beat-up camper van, Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) is in the wrong place at the wrong time when she asks Tucker for help with her surfboard, and finds herself kidnapped and awakens on his shark vessel, destined to be chum.
But fortunately for Zephyr, she's made a real impression on local surfer Moses (Josh Hueston), who manages to track her down and just might have the fearlessness to take on Tucker.
Australia makes great low-budget horror, and this film is certainly great, a prince among the many budget slasher films Australia churns out, but with the exception of one or two moments, this film does not look cheap at all.
This is probably thanks to the assured direction of Sean Byrne, whose two previous turns in the director's chair, The Loved Ones and The Devil's Candy, were also very memorable.
A lot of the film is cleverly set on a rusted-out trawler just infused with atmosphere.
Harrison and Hueston, one of the cast of the recent Heartbreak High reboot, are very strong, and it's a weirdly enjoyable element of the screenplay that these two smoke shows continue to chat each other up and flirt outrageously even when they're being tied down and tortured by Courtney's serial killer.
Nick Lepard's screenplay isn't the most original genre mash-up, and yet it all just comes together as an original and enjoyable scare-fest, in the way that first Wolf Creek felt new and memorable.
And the most enjoyable and original element is Jai Courtney's performance, a force of nature that you almost want to root for as the anti-hero, and I feel this is a career second-act for Courtney, who has played villains before, but not like this.
You will, honestly, never listen to Baby Shark the same way again.
I had a brown underpants moment in my teens with a shark alarm at a surf carnival, so I am equal parts drawn to and terrified by shark films, and one of the interesting things in Dangerous Animals is that the sharks are probably the safer bet for the characters.
Dangerous Animals (MA, 98 minutes)
4 stars
The "final girl" is almost an essential in any horror film, the last of the film's female characters left alive to either triumph over the bad or evil figure, or the last and most spectacular of the film's killings.
Hassie Harrison, a young and blonde Texan actress with a season on the horsey drama Yellowstone on her CV, is the lead and final girl in this spectacularly gruesome new Aussie horror film.
She's an actor to keep an eye on because she is memorable in a film of memorable characters and moments, and particularly holds her own against Jai Courtney playing a character as iconic as John Jarratt's Wolf Creek antihero Mick Taylor.
In a fictional surf-swept town close to the Gold Coast, Captain Tucker (Jai Courtney) runs a charter boat business offering tourists the once-in-a-lifetime experience of diving with sharks.
It's a strange business for Tucker to have built for himself, considering a miracle childhood escape from a shark encounter that left his body scarred with the bite marks, but Tucker sees it as a marketing opportunity his tourists love hearing about.
A thing they probably don't love, as we discover in the film's opening scene, is that when Tucker discovers a tourist hasn't told anyone where they're going, he enjoys throwing them to the sharks and filming the blood churning in the water as the sharks tear them apart.
So, probably not the diving experience you're looking for.
A Yankie surfer touring Australia in a beat-up camper van, Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) is in the wrong place at the wrong time when she asks Tucker for help with her surfboard, and finds herself kidnapped and awakens on his shark vessel, destined to be chum.
But fortunately for Zephyr, she's made a real impression on local surfer Moses (Josh Hueston), who manages to track her down and just might have the fearlessness to take on Tucker.
Australia makes great low-budget horror, and this film is certainly great, a prince among the many budget slasher films Australia churns out, but with the exception of one or two moments, this film does not look cheap at all.
This is probably thanks to the assured direction of Sean Byrne, whose two previous turns in the director's chair, The Loved Ones and The Devil's Candy, were also very memorable.
A lot of the film is cleverly set on a rusted-out trawler just infused with atmosphere.
Harrison and Hueston, one of the cast of the recent Heartbreak High reboot, are very strong, and it's a weirdly enjoyable element of the screenplay that these two smoke shows continue to chat each other up and flirt outrageously even when they're being tied down and tortured by Courtney's serial killer.
Nick Lepard's screenplay isn't the most original genre mash-up, and yet it all just comes together as an original and enjoyable scare-fest, in the way that first Wolf Creek felt new and memorable.
And the most enjoyable and original element is Jai Courtney's performance, a force of nature that you almost want to root for as the anti-hero, and I feel this is a career second-act for Courtney, who has played villains before, but not like this.
You will, honestly, never listen to Baby Shark the same way again.
I had a brown underpants moment in my teens with a shark alarm at a surf carnival, so I am equal parts drawn to and terrified by shark films, and one of the interesting things in Dangerous Animals is that the sharks are probably the safer bet for the characters.