Sean Byrne’s third film brings shark horror to the Gold Coast. In a plosive prologue we meet a pair of backpackers, one Canadian, one British, who charter a shark diving expedition with Tucker, a fisherman played by Jai Courtenay. Something seems off about Tucker from the start but the tourists simply chalk it up to Australian cultural differences – a big mistake, since as soon as they’re out of sight of land, he dumps chum in the water, stabs the man, pushes him overboard and then (we learn later) imprisons the woman in the hold. Cut back to the Gold Coast, after the credits, where American backpacker Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) hooks up with local real estate agent Moses (Josh Heuston), parks her van in his driveway for a night, and then lets her commitment issues take her over the next morning, when she flees breakfast in bed for a dawn surf. When she’s abducted by Tucker in a Surfers Paradise carpark, and stored in his hold with the British woman, now introduced to us as Heather (Ella Newton), it’s a race against time to avoid Tucker incorporating her into his psychotic shark feeding rituals. Back on land, Moses hasn’t given up on their rapport either and, upon discovering her van abandoned at the beachfront, sets out to track her final movements.

To some extent, Dangerous Creatures taps into genuine sources of horror in Australian culture and beyond. There’s the terror of our unique fauna, the primal fear of the open ocean and more submerged anxieties about climate change, particularly evident in the party boat that always lingers on the horizon, just far enough away that the people on it can’t see or hear what’s taking place on Tucker’s shark boat. Some of the most memorable moments, horror-wise, see the characters coming to the very threshold of normality and then collapsing back into Tucker’s perverse ritual. At one point a surf lifesaving helicopter arrives just as Tucker is hoisting Moses over the chum-ridden water and he only just manages to rein his prospective victim back before the chopper flies directly overhead. Later, Zephyr manages to actually swim to the tranquil shore of a Whitsunday-esque island resort, crawling her way up the sand towards towels, beach chairs, party lights and the alluring murmuring ambience of tourists before Tucker arrives on a speedboat, drags her back on board with him, and returns to his vessel. Moments like these suggest an environmental threat that is always on the very cusp of breaking into everyday normality – a threat that isn’t inherent to the environment but that has been goaded on by the destructive rituals of Tucker and his kind.

Likewise the film taps more directly into the sense of horror and vulnerability that must have sprung up for backpackers contemplating the Eastern seaboard of Australia over the last decade. Whether the rise of true crime podcasts and documentaries has made us more aware of it, or whether there has actually been a rise in deaths and disappearances of transients from abroad, the surfer-backpacker lifestyle has had more than its fair share of unsettling stories and circumstances. Byrne emphasises this dimension for much of the film. When we meet the first two victims, the Canadian man and Heather, the British woman, before the credits roll, one of their initial reflections is that nobody at their hostel knows where they are. Later, when Moses tries to get the cops interested in investigating Zephyr’s disappearance, he’s told that “these transient types” aren’t exactly high on the list of police priorities. When Zephyr wakes up chained in the hold of Tucker’s boat, and meets Heather for the first time, they quickly establish that they are not likely to be missed: “Is anyone looking for you?” “No.” As in The Surfer, the surf carpark, flanked by ocean and anonymous urban strips, becomes a cipher for this vulnerable community of transients, who have to look out for each other rather than relying on institutions to support them.

All of that works really effectively at the level of horror and there are some genuinely terrifying moments in Dangerous Animals. But the real reason to watch it, and the core of its cinematic pleasure, is the way it finally provides Jai Courtenay with a role that gets his particular screen appeal. In the wake of the Die Hard reboots, Hollywood tried to transform Courtenay into the next big thing, a successor to Bruce Willis, but in many ways that role didn’t fit him. For one thing, he was shoehorned into a persona that was too serious; for another thing, he was forced to jettison the blokiness that, to any Australian, is baked into his appearance, demeanor and body language. Dangerous Animals rectifies that by doubling down on Courtenay’s Ausseiness, and turning him into the emblem of a blokey flamboyance that doesn’t quite meet modern standards of masculinity, or the requirements of a risk managed media sphere, but that it’s hard not to feel nostalgia for at times as well. Here, he goes full deranged larrikin, drawing on Steve Irwin and Shane Warne in equal measure, but twisting them in a demonic direction, as if to evoke a baroque blokiness that has become a kind of cultural piracy, and can now only survive on the high seas, where there’s ample room to fish, drink, listen to pub rock and above all discourse on anything and everything that comes to mind. Like Denan Kemp’s Bloke in a Bar podcast, the film is ultimately an elegy for a certain kind of blokey bar talk that now requires a recourse to horror or a canny knack for brand management to revive and rehabilitate it.

As a result, the most entertaining parts of the film tend to be when Byrne lets Courtenay cook. He still has the strange seriousness that made him an imperfect fit for perky action cinema but it’s paired now with a manic energy that makes for quite a dissonant and compelling performance – a laconic bloke with great white shark eyes. Some of the best moments simply involve him lounging and hanging about, as it’s then that you really feel his nexus between muscularity and corpulence, like a recently retired NRL player who’s just started to let himself go (and Courtenay is apparently a devoted Cronulla Sharks fan, appropriately enough). The way he inhabits the boat, lets himself go in it, turns it into a shrine for his refusal to live up to social media body norms – all these absurd touches quickly overwhelm the horror and almost transform Dangerous Animals into a dark satirical comedy. Whether it’s Tucker dancing to Aussie rock, making his victims vegemite sandwiches, or filming their deaths for his own ancient VHS collection, all his actions are laced through with the ironic self-deprecation of a blokiness as psychotic minoritarian subject position. For that reason, I was a bit disappointed there weren’t more disquisitions on marine biology – the best bits by far are when Tucker is pontificating on sharks and drawing out elaborate and tortured aquatic animal analogies, as much for his own sake as for his victims, as if he’s merely thinking aloud, vocalizing the endless inner monologue inside his own head. The best two examples of this are when he explains to Zephyr that she’s not a coral snake and then, later on, that she is a marlin. Surprisingly, his paeans to the shark itself tend to be relatively rare.

All of which is to say that the sharks aren’t really all that scary in the film – they’re more like supplements to Zephyr’s charisma, or byproducts of the Hostel-esque torture chamber that he’s disguised as a true blue fishing boat. If anything, the last two encounters with sharks (the only time we see sharks in their entirety, once underwater and once above water) are quite awe-inspiring and majestic, like a missive from a lost work of blokey gravitas that, once divorced from its natural habitat of the past, turns out to be ugly, ungainly and just a bit ridiculous. After all, even the most terrifying great white looks vaguely silly when removed from the water and hung up in a museum. Call it a great work of Aussie camp then, as much a throwback to Ozploitation as The Surfer, and a testament to the blokiness that continues to bubble away through Australian culture, more compelling to many of us than we’d care to admit in polite company.