Dangerous Animals (2025)

Director: Sean Byrne

Cast: Hassie Harrison, Josh Heuston, Rob Carlton, Jai Courtney

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. I was completely unaware of the film, until it was a last-minute replacement on our Beyond the Cabin in the Woods schedule. We were going to watch Him, and then decided against it after the film has already disappeared from our collective consciousness.

Thank goodness for last minute additions to this show. Without them, I might have missed both this and Sinners this year.

Did I Like It: It is not exceptional praise to say this is the best Shark film since Jaws (1975). There has literally never been a good shark film since then. So what I will say is that the film is a masterclass in horror movie pacing. At least five separate times, I thought I had a handle on where the film was going*—and being a little bored with that series of events—only to have the film send me in a completely different and thrilling direction.

One begins the movie thinking that I’m going to have to deal with Just Another Shark Movie™, and it suddenly—as one of these events would likely come to pass, were it to really happen—becomes an encounter with a deranged human killer. Then it becomes a credible rehash of Split (2016) or The Black Phone (2022). Then it’s Dead Calm (1985) for a good long stretch. Finally, Manhunter (1986) and Red Dragon (2002) get their due course. All of this before it circles back around to being the first credible shark movie since Spielberg swore off returning to the water for the rest of eternity.

*Often these occasional doldrums surrounded Tucker’s (Courtney) travails with trying to keep VHS and minimal apparent extra lighting as a valid means of documenting his crimes.

Terminator Genysis* (2015)

Director: Alan Taylor

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Clarke, Emilia Clarke, Jai Courtney

Have I Seen it Before: Yeah.

Did I Like It: And you know what, I kind of liked it back then. Sure, it’s a film powered almost exclusively by convoluted time travel, but I like convoluted time travel. Convoluted time travel is my bread and butter.

But here’s the problem, man can not live on convoluted time travel alone, nor should he try. Ultimately, this film reminds me of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Wait, wait. Come back. I’ll explain. I had spent several years between screenings of that most infamous second film directed by Orson Welles. The ending was taken away from him, re-shot by Robert Wise, a perfectly accomplished filmmaker in his own right, if more of a journeyman than Welles. Now Ambersons has never been my favorite Welles film, and I always thought the legends about the bastardized ending were off, but during my most recent viewing of the film, it was such a stark difference between the work of Welles and Wise that it had become inescapable how altered the movie had become.

Similarly, when comparing the work of Taylor against the work of Cameron—especially in those scenes where Taylor is recreating Cameron’s earlier work in The Terminator (1984), that difference is once again inescapable.

This is not to say that the film isn’t riddled with plenty of other unforced errors at which I could wag my finger. The film is riddled with awkward Riker Moments, where one character describes a phenomenon in the most convoluted technobabble available, forcing another nearby character to describe the same thing in terms so simple that even the not-so-bright kids will get it. Narration repeats stuff ad nauseum, just in case those same kids didn’t get the dumbed down explanations the first time. This renders the whole thing a pretty depressing affair, even if, again, some of that convoluted time travel still tries to justify this film’s existence far more than was done for its equally dim-titled successor, Terminator: Dark Fate (2019).

But do you want to know what really annoys me about the film this time, if for no other reason than I am mad at myself for not noticing it the first time. This film is so slavishly devoted to the mythology and iconography of the Cameron-helmed Terminator films. One can take that as a flaw or a comforting dose of nostalgia. Both perspectives are valid. But how in the hell does Kyle Reese (Courtney) have a photograph of Sarah (Clarke; not that one; no relation) just moments before he climbs into the time displacement field, when the first film really goes out of its way to show us that same photo burning during a Terminator attack? I’m willing to acknowledge that the makers of this film probably saw the original. I’m just not so sure they were paying that much attention.

*I needed several tries to get that title right. It is, truly, an insipid way to spell that word. Everyone was right on that front, at least.