I can’t help but think that the killer shark movie has swum into some fairly stagnant waters. Thanks to the unlimited opportunities afforded by streaming to bang out a movie and make a quick buck, we’ve been at the mercy of a feeding frenzy of shark flicks that all look, sound and act the same and if I’m being honest, it’s all feeling a little long in the tooth. If the killer shark genre ever wants to regain any of the majesty it can sometimes achieve, it needs to bring in some new ideas and fast.
With this in mind, I wasn’t actually expecting much from Fear Below thanks to a title so generic it borders on offensive, but thanks to a teensy bit of ingenuity and a concept that’s a little out of the box, this Australian thriller actually had me fairly engrossed as it mixes shark and gangster movie tropes into a chum bucket and lobs them into the nearest body of water in the hopes that something interesting rises to the surface. Stunningly, it mostly does…
The year is 1946 and a small gang of criminals drive down a dusty road under cover of darkness as they make off with boxes of gold bullion that they’ve successfully managed to swipe. However, due to a driving snaffu, the truck containing the haul suddenly veers off the road and plunges into a nearby river where it promptly sinks without a trace. After taking it out on the subordinate responsible, gang leader, Dylan “Bull” Maddock and his remaining underlings realise that if they’re going to get their booty back, they’re going to have to hire some professional help.
Unwitting help is at hand in the form of the alcoholic Ernie Morgan and his washed up business, the Sea Dog Diving Company, that’s staffed by hopeful and loyal misfits, Clara Bennett and Jimmy Barriakada who hope they can turn their struggling fortunes around with the wad of cash Maddock is offering them. Utterly clueless to that what they’re diving for and who they’re working for, the motley crew get all their gear in place and enter the lake clad in their bulky diving suits, but not long after finding the sunken car, they find that they aren’t alone in the murky depths.
It seems that a fifteen foot bull shark has made its way up the river and considers the area it’s exclusive territory which means trouble for anyone foolhardy enough to go for a dip. But after Clara narrowly escapes becoming a canned meal, the decision is made to bring in a professional shark hunter to take out the toothy fish, but with every set back, Maddock gets ever more impatient. Soon, the burly crook has had enough with all the waiting and soon the employees of the Sea Dog Diving Company find that they’re literally caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Stay on dry land and they’ll have to face Maddock and his thugs; step into the water and they’ll get snapped up by an overzealous shark – what’s a diver to do?
It seems that Australian filmmakers have found something of a cheat code in order to make shark movies interesting again and all we have to do is add other genres to keep those creative teeth nice and sharp. While Sean Byne’s Dangerous Animals co-stared aquatic predators with Jai Courtney’s deranged, shark loving, serial slayer to make a killer shark/psycho killer stew, Fear Below takes the ferocious fish and dumps them into the middle of a period gangster film while sees them stand in the way of they obtaining some carelessly sunken loot. It’s a strange merging of genres, to be sure, but somehow, despite some tight budgetary restrictions and a wee bit of clunky plotting, the movie somehow manages to use its original settings to its advantage and even stave off the overfamilarity that’s blighted the shark movie so much.
On paper, none of this should really work. After all, despite the fact that the lake is incredibly deep, it’s hardly the same as bring stranded in the middle of the ocean and there’s potentially an issue of the bank being literally right there in our vision at all times. Even though the shark probably won’t let its prey make dry land at all time, having it constantly in view does sort of remove the primal fear of looking around and seeing nothing but sea and sky. However, by keeping the action moving fairly fast and adding the wildcard of gun totting gangsters demanding that the heroes have to keep getting their feet wet, it manages to sustain threat when all anyone has to really do is give up and go home. The Australian period gangster stuff is also fairly new too, especially when you’ve turned up to the party expecting a straight forward gut cruncher, but the addition of sharp suits and snappy hats gives the whole enterprise a fresher feel than the bog standard holiday/excursion-goes-wrong stuff the genre has been cramming down our throats.
Of course, at times the tight budget make things look a little too much like an episode of The Sullivans (a 70s Australian soap set in the 40s for the uninitiated) and some of the plot is slightly by the numbers (you just know that the heroes are somehow going to get the mobsters on the water by the final act), but I found that the pros generally tended to outweighthe cons.
The characters are a good mix with Hermione Corfield’s plucky Clara and Jacob Junior Nayinggul’s Aboriginal Australian being likeable, if slight, leads and on the bastard end of the spectrum, Jake Ryan’s crime boss and Josh McConville manage to convey enough menace to make the land set stuff carry enough threat. However, while the shark stuff is fairly standard stuff with murky forms in the distance, quick cuts of lunging teeth and the odd patch of gore, the claustrophobic, brown look of the muddy river water provides an interesting alternative to the clean, deep blues the genre usually throws at us on a regular basis.
However, while I’d definitely argue that Fear Below is a cut above the usual, direct-to-streaming fare we often have to paddle through, anyone looking for more hardcore shark thrills may be disgruntled that the watery predator has been relegated to sharing the villain spotlight with a bunch of Edward G. Robinson wannabes with Aussie accents, but while a lot of shark flicks with human antagonists usually make me want to chew my own arm off (Into The Deep, I’m looking at you), here it manages to keep the non-shark moments ticking along nicely until the bull shark tags back in to mess some shit up.
Fear Below may hardly be a major breakthrough for the genre, but I have to say that it had enough novel aspects to hold my attention nicely and helped me try to forget that awful fucking title (how about Bullion Shark – it’s just as shit but way cleverer?). It just goes to show that doing something a little different is sometimes worth its weight in gold bullion.
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