Parents' Guide to Dangerous Animals

This surprisingly entertaining thriller is elevated by an impressively over-the-top villain and appealing leads. Courtney has played various antagonists before, but he brings a preachy, unhinged, Buffalo Bill-meets-Patrick Bateman energy to his performance as Tucker in Dangerous Animals. Tucker's deranged sermonizing about powerful ocean predators feels genuinely unsettling, and a scene in which he dances to a diegetic song in a silk robe seems like a clear nod to The Silence of the Lambs. Harrison delivers a believable performance as the intrepid if slightly naive Zephyr, while Heuston imbues her love interest with sweet persistence.

One notable element of Nick Lepard's screenplay is that, while Tucker targets beautiful young women as sacrifices, there's no indication that sexual assault is involved. Instead, his psychopathy stems from an obsession with feeding sharks, rooted in surviving an attack as a child. Director Sean Byrne wisely keeps the movie's survival action confined to the boat and only occasionally lingers on victims' mutilated remains. The early romantic subplot works better than expected and effectively motivates Moses' refusal to chalk up Zephyr's disappearance as a solo traveler's whim. Bottom line? While it won't redefine the shark thriller genre, this bloody oceanic nightmare succeeds by keeping its human monsters more terrifying than anything lurking beneath the waves.