A family vacation is interrupted by a sudden call to help with an emergency on an oil rig as it’s attacked by a mythological and legendary megalodon.
Why are we infatuated with shark films? Because we want to see the shark, right? We want to capture what Jaws was able to convey, with the build up and payoff of finally seeing the creature who has been terrorizing the characters. Some movies fail to live up to this expectation. Then there’s The Black Demon, which often forgets it’s a shark movie at all. Most films, I can find something worthwhile to praise. Not this one. There is not one redemptive aspect of this turd of a movie, from the repetitive CGI, the bad performances, and a story that couldn’t be more unoriginal if they had titled it The Meg-Jaws from 47 Meters Down in Open Water.
Adrian Grunberg decided to take the script from Carlos Cisco and Boise Esquerra and slap all of us across the face with it so hard that it left ink stains on my nose. Yes, we get it. We’re ruining the environment. But when you straight up tell me that verbatim more than once, and the reason I’m supposed to feel bad about it is because we’ve “angered the big scary shark god” and apparently summoned a prehistoric megalodon that has risen from the deep to *checks notes* attack one single oil rig, you kinda lose your platform there, buddy. Making a statement with your film is great. Trying to make it sound like the shark monster wants to eat my family because I used a Styrofoam cup is not.
And if you think that’s bad, the performances are worse. We’ve got an obviously very angry and “I’m all for diversity because I married a Hispanic chick” Josh Lucas yelling things like “I know a big ass shark when I see one” and “It’s BURGUNDY!” And we get a whole bunch of bad from his kids as they whine about the shark and how much they hate being on an oil rig. Literally the only good performance comes from Fernanda Urrejola, who acts like she’s in a different movie. One with a good script. Even the shark acts like it didn’t want to be on set, with its total time on screen being less than 2 minutes, and most of that is reused and recycled shots. And that’s all without mentioning the fact that they commit the cardinal rule violation, the biggest sin of shark movies; they quote Jaws. You ain’t got no spit, huh, Josh Lucas? I hope the shark eats you.
Even the reused CGI scenes look like someone who just learned Blender decided to try out some different shark skin textures and accidentally made a few shots of things like “big scary dorsal fin” and “big scary tail fin” that get shown so many times you begin wondering why you bothered watching this piece of crap. By the time we see the full shark, we’re so far past caring that we begin cheering for it to take down the oil rig and put the characters, and the movie, out of its misery.
The Black Demon makes Sharknado look like Jaws, and that’s not even an understatement. I sincerely hope that everyone involved with this film has to go through some sort of shark themed purgatory when they die, where the sharks can ask why they thought this movie would be a good idea.