Dangerous Animals: Sean Byrne pits 'surfer vs. serial killer on the open seas'

Half a century after Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" stirred the public's "fear and fascination, by painting sharks as bloodthirsty monsters", a "sharksploitation" subgenre is flourishing, said Jen Yamato in The Washington Post. These films tend to have ludicrous premises ("Ouija Shark", "Cocaine Shark" etc.), and to make use of "atrocious CGI". But this "tongue-in-cheek" new horror-thriller from Australia is "a breath of fresh oxygen".

Lean, mean and bloody, Sean Byrne's film "finds a fresh way into the annals of survival horror by pitting surfer vs. serial killer on the open seas". Here, the shark is not the real threat. Instead, it's Tucker, a psychopathic charter-boat captain on Queensland's Gold Coast who makes a practice of kidnapping female tourists, using them as bait for the local great whites, and filming their grisly deaths for his collection of "twisted VHS snuff movies".

Tucker's spree is going well until he takes as his latest victim an American named Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), who puts up more resistance than he anticipated, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. "The movie is basically one knock-down, drag-out fight for survival between the pair of them. She escapes from his boat twice, only to be dragged back – lending a tedious circularity to the plot."

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Still, Jai Courtney is "an absolute hoot" as Tucker, said Ben Travis in Empire – whether he is "leading a threatening singalong of 'Baby Shark', barking like a dog (at an actual dog), or watching footage of a vicious shark attack while chomping his own fish dinner". Nobody would call "Dangerous Animals" great art, but it's "stylish and tense", and very enjoyable.