The Black Demon

There are two kinds of good shark films: serious analaogies for human pride or emotional turmoil and hilarious gore-fests with not a small amount of skin. In general you'll need to pick one, please. Seriously, there's just the two types of shark movies. Hell, really shark stories, cause Jaws was originally a fantastic book.

No, please don't argue it.

Look, the point is that shark movies, while they've always had an ecological subtext, are not really about ecology per se. And even if you were to somehow make a third type of shark movie, one about ecology, it would actually have to have something intellegible to say about ecology. Maybe something about how the warming waters is hurting hunting, or any number of issues that would actually be kinda interesting to do.

You know where you shouldn't be going with shark movies? 

Aztec gods out for revenge.

You wanna go and do that sorta thing your characters had better be totally on point, your commentary on ecology totally up to date, and I better be learn everything there is to know about Aztec gods by the end of your movie. You wanna do something that weird, it better be pristine. And I do mean pristine. You wanna make a third kinda shark movie? You better freaking do it right.

The Black Demon doesn't do it right.

First off, the characters are cookie-cutter trash. I mean, seriously, I could count the number of actually interesting characters... well no, no wait, I couldn't, because there weren't any. And they do all the stupid bullshit you'd expect: crooked white dudes with corporate jobs, superstitious locals, the hot Mexican wife, the bratty kids who might speak Spanish like their Mexican mom, the salt of the earth folks who of course hate the white dude... who has a sudden change of heart at the end as he sees the consequences of his actions and sacrifices himself because he's a better man now, thank you.

I've seen this movie a million times, just this time it's got a crappy shark CGI'd in.

Why is the shark barely in this particular film? I get "less is more" was done in Jaws, and I get that that is one way to do this... but it's a megalodon. Why are we skimping on a megalodon? I get that there's a budget, that that's a real problem, all that but....

Look,  can I just say "it's a megalodon" and have everyone agree that sometimes something so freaking awesome should be indulged? Even a little bit? This isn't a shark film, really, it's a freaking kaiju film. And most kaiju films make their monster as awesome as possible, whether that be with practical effects or an actual CGI budget. 

But hey, there’s another way this film falls flat! This film tries to be a supernatural thriller too! But does it feature the gods as cruel and implacable monsters, with no  true care for human life, ironically making it apparent why Christianity is where it is historically?

Actually yes!

But everything else sucks so much it doesn’t matter. 

Poor Black Demon. There’s a kernel of something interesting here. But it’s buried beneath metric tons of bad characters, confused genre and themes, and bad effects. It’s a level of excrement so deep that you’d drown in it. I’ll take death by water, thank you.