The Black Demon
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M, 100 minutes. Amazon Prime
2 stars
For generations, kids have loved dinosaurs, played with toy dinosaurs, had favourite dinosaurs (mine is a Stegosauraus, in case you were wondering) and made Steven Spielberg richer watching Jurassic Park and its sequels.
The Megalodon, the giant shark of the Miocene era, is really like the poor third cousin, just not capturing the imagination of a public unappreciative that it ruled the seas for 20 million years.
But the Megalodon is having its moment, what with Jason Statham battling one and keeping another as a pet in The Meg 2 earlier this year, and Tim Flannery releasing his book Big Meg, and now this straight-to-streaming feature film hitting Amazon Prime just in time for Christmas.
Paul (Josh Lucas) has brought his family to a sleepy village on the Baja Coast in Mexico where he first met and romanced Ines (Fernanda Urrejola), the mother of his children, years earlier.
![Josh Lucas plays a hapless oil company executive in The Black Demon. Picture supplied Josh Lucas plays a hapless oil company executive in The Black Demon. Picture supplied](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/MxhEgQKUJhZgHxwVaKiqcq/4f6e6745-709c-473a-bf4f-8e08dda1b29d.jpg/r0_187_6000_3560_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
It probably wasn't clear thinking on Paul's part to bring along young son Tommy (Carlos Solorzano) and petulant teen daughter Audrey (Venus Ariel), considering he's actually come on behalf of his company to decommission the oil rig just off the coast that is the village's primary source of income.
Corporate politics are the least of everyone's worries though, as something murky in the sea has scared away tourism and the town is practically abandoned.
When Paul makes it out to the rig, he finds two employees - Chato (Jukio Cesar Jimenez) and Junior (Jorge A. Jimenez) - remain after a beast in the waters has killed most of the workers and has taken damaging bites out of the rig.
The Mexican men feel the beast is the mythological beast Tlaloc. Meanwhile, dangerous locals have driven Paul's family to take a boat to what they think will be the safety of the oil rig.
The budget for The Black Demon is obviously not as epic as the Jason Statham megalodon film from earlier this year, and so a lot of the film's horror is reaction shots with the camera tight on the faces of the terrified future shark lunches.
This is probably a good thing because when there is CGI, it looks a little unfinished, though anyone who saw The Flash movie knows you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on CGI that can also look unfinished.
Director Adrian Grunberg has some terrific films under his belt including the Mel Gibson flick Get the Gringo and Rambo: Last Blood, but The Black Demon is that blip in your CV you try and brush over in job interviews.
I feel Grunberg might have been doing his best working around the limitations of a small budget and a screenplay that lapses in judgement and coherence.
Writers Carlos Cisco and Boise Esquerra are a little lazy in their explanations behind the appearance of this threat, steeped in made-up Aztec mythology, but also explained away by corporate greed and human climate impacts, and weirdly allowing all of the characters to not for one second question why a dinosaur shark has reappeared after three million years.
They also follow the disaster-movie trope of a rag-tag team pulling together to come up with ingenious solutions, but two of those characters are Paul's kids who suddenly turn into biochemists and engineers when the plot demands.
I do credit those kid actors though: Solorzano and Ariel give very watchable performances.
And look, I am being critical here because I am a critic, but for all the things I found frustrating or laughable about this film, I actually also enjoyed it, and I'd watch it again.
When the turkey is cleared away and the in-laws are starting to get on your nerves, this would be a perfectly fine film to lock yourself away and smash out under the air-con this Christmas.