I once announced that the rise of more polished, serious, killer shark movies were far more preferable than the cheap, low budget, cartoon slop that followed in the wake of Sharknado. However, ever since then it seems like the genre has been furiously trying to get me to eat those words as voraciously as a hungry murder-fish going after a overweight group of slow swimmers. After years of the same recycled ideas surfacing again and again, that saw slight variations of very familiar friend groups get chomped in the type of environments we’ve seen dozens of times before, I’m getting to the point where it may be best for the entire sub-genre to disappear into the deep and take a bit of a rest.
However, obviously Amazon doesn’t give a shit about your opinions of the state of shark cinema, and have promptly dropped another, derivative teen-muncher into the rapidly crowding ocean of aquatic horror/thrillers. But could The Devil’s Mouth be the exception to the rule? Please, that’s one suggestion that’s just not going to float.
We join the standard group of partying college kids as they whoop it up during their holiday in Thailand, but it doesn’t take long to work out exactly how the dynamic of these friends are. Bullish and a little self obsessed, Max’s controlling personality tends to insist upon how things are done and her boyfriend James is content to fall in line and back her up for a quiet life, whereas Adrienne and Greg are your typical, PDA-obsessed couple who refuse to take life seriously. Acting as a literal fifth wheel is Sara, who despite being Max’s best friend from childhood, constantly feels that her controlling friend is too inconsistent to be calling the shots all the time. She’s proven painfully right when, she’s accidently left by the boat while swimming in the ocean and subsequently suffers an attack from some over-friendly jellyfish and while the group return, a guilty Max seems unwilling to fully accept that the incident was her fault and insists that the holiday continues.
This involves exploring a network of underwater caves called the Devil’s Mouth (because nothing bad ever happens at a place named after Satan’s pie-hole), but Sara is left feeling infantalized again when she discovers that her overbearing friend has tipped their tour guide extra money to keep an extra close eye on her. The money soon goes to waste when the party discovers that they’re sharing the labyrinthine caves with an unfeasibly hungry bull shark who simply won’t leave them the hell alone, but rather than listening to what the guide has to say, Max once again doubles down and tries to control the situation.
From here it’s the standard shark vs. idiots storyline we’ve witnessed a dozen times over, but with a strange twist – thanks to the controlling personality of one of their number, the idiots are even more idiotic than usual. Can Max genuinely guide them out on sheer self-confidence alone, or can Sara break her well-meaning friend’s influence before they’re all horribly killed.
At numerous times throughout Jeff Wadlow’s The Devil’s Mouth, you’ll find yourself wondering if you really are watching a shark movie where the big twist is that the protagonists are deliberately more unlikable than usual. I mean, it’s not like there’s any other other big twists around, as this latest bite of sharksploitation literaly recycles plot points and scenarios from every single shark flick released this century. Obviously the main actress has to have a character flaw/past trauma she has to overcome by trying to outwit an ocean-going predator, but despite being a little timid, it really does seem like to me that the only real flaw Kathryn Newton’s Sara actually has is that she’s has the shittiest friends imaginable. Seriously, I’ve been on the side of the shark while watching movies like this before, but never in all my years did I ever actually want to physically force-feed the cast to the shark that’s crapping on their vaction so hard – until now.
We’ve dealt with annoying casts in shark movies before – hell, the genre practically thrives on them now – but The Devil’s Mouth truly is something of an endurance test. Lana Condor seems to be cornering the market on stuck-up control freaks in Amazon premieres lately (see also Pretty Lethal), but the character she’s saddled with is so genuinely infuriating, it isn’t even fun in an ironic way. Every time her controlling personality keeps fucking things up, you think that director Wadlow is just about to throw in a character beat that pays off that central thread by actually having her listen to an exasperated Sara, but no – the more her friends get turned into chum, the more she’s still convinced it’s going to be she and she alone that’s going to get them out. As infuriating as that is, the fact that every other character continues to let his happen isn’t so much a commentary on toxic friendships, as it is triggering to anyone with even an iota of common sense. Not even the innate, kooky likability of Kathryn Newton, so skillfully mined in films like Freaky and Abigail, manages to break the surface, and her inevitable switch to battle-damaged survivor mode is just too little, too late.
It’s a shame, because a fair bit of effort has gone into making the titular cave something of a varied playground for the shark to hunt its prey. Every cave system has a slightly different look with one section being littered with old human bones, another offering up jagged stalagmites to cling to, and yet another offers up some bioluminescence in the water to punch up the visuals – but Wadlow chooses not to actually utilise them in bold new ways. Can you imagine a shark attack lit by an eerie blue glow as it clashes with crimson blood leaking into the water? Well, you’ll have to keep on imagining it, because the director is dead set on keeping things annoying basic – even though we’ve already had a batch of cave-dwelling shark flicks already over the years. Also, the choice of a bull shark means that there’s a slight difference in the type of attacks (he’s more of a rammer than a chomper), but once again some of the CGI can’t handle moments where the fish suddenly launches out of the water like a rocket.
Once again, streaming delivers yet another overwhelmingly mid shark movie to our homes – and while I’ll admit not all of them can (or should) contain the third act lunacy of the entertainingly bonkers Under Paris, you have to wonder if the people producing them are fully aware that other producers have been making the exact same movie for around ten years now. Not scary enough to hold the attention, too infuriating to enjoy ironically, the best thing for The Devil’s Mouth to do is to go to hell immediately.
The Killer Shark Movie Production Line produces yet another disposable offering that suggests that the genre is in desperate need of evolution. Appalling characters, so-so kills and a fumbled human story means that of all the shark movies released over the past ten years, The Devil’s Mouth’s only standout is that it’s the most recent – for now.
Shark Weak.
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We Have Issues 