It would seem that megalodons are the menace of the moment. These ginormous sharks, thought to be extinct for millions of years, have been retro-spawned for entertainment purposes by the audiovisual-industrial complex – specifically in the Meg franchise but also on the Discovery Channel – because great white sharks, veterans of the Jaws movies, just don’t cut it any more. Still, in thematic terms there’s a throughline that connects most shark movies: one way or another, they’re all about the return of the repressed, with the sharks manifesting the oceanic subconsciousness’ raging, violent id that has been enraged by the human superego effort at mastery over nature. In the original Jaws, it’s not so much Bruce the shark that’s the big bad as it is the township’s greedy mayor, determined to declare the beach safe in the interests of capitalism.
Directed by American Adrian Grunberg, its screenplay written by Boise Esquerra working from a screenplay by Carlos Cisco, The Black Demon effectively sticks to this well-greased formula. Yes, there’s a ginormous shark pootling around the waters along the coast of Mexico, locally known as “el demonio negro”. But the real, nefarious behemoth of the deep is a leaky oil-drilling platform offshore that was installed by a fictional conglomerate known as Nixon Oil, the name itself redolent of right-wing gringo corruption. (Which is ironic because Richard Nixon, for all his sins, was the president who started the Environmental Protection Agency.) Paul (Josh Lucas) is an engineer who works for Nixon, and as the film starts he arrives in the town nearest to the rig he supervised building years ago, with his wife, Ines, (Fernanda Urrejola) and two kids, Audrey (Venus Ariel) and Tommy (Carlos Solórzano) in tow for a family vacation while he inspects the rig.
Thanks to a series of somewhat unlikely events, all of them find themselves stranded out on the rig itself while the black demon batters the decaying structure. Employee Chato (estimable character actor Julio Cesar Cedillo) helpfully explains that the demon is sent by Tlaloc, the Aztec god of rain, who is mightily pissed off about the rig’s pollution of the waters, and only by making a sacrifice to the demon will Tlaloc be appeased. Of course the white man from the oil company thinks this is nonsense, so viewers versed in genre conventions will be expecting him to be humbled by either losing his own life or that of one of the people he loves. The only certainty is that Chato’s chihuahua pup Toro, a feisty little scrapper, will almost certainly survive because dogs always do in these movies.
Hokey as all that is, the cast commit to it all with evident sincerity, and the banter is nearly as entertaining as the periodic scary interludes; in the latter, stunt people descend into the inky drink to try to fix doodads and whatsits that could save the party, each time risking death by shark. The oil-soaked water probably helps hide a multitude of effects’ sins, as the budget looks pretty pinched. For a film of this type, though, this is pretty fun, and it’s nice to see that the teenage daughter gets to save the day via an understanding of the chemistry of nail polish.
• The Black Demon is released on 19 June on digital platforms, and on 17 July on DVD and Blu-ray.
