From the director of "The Loved Ones", Sean Byrne, (a good movie, twisted and sadistic yet a darkly humorous spin on the "teen prom" movie, elightfully old school sleaze. I love it) has followed it up with something in the same vein, but with a twist! I never saw "The Devil's Candy", and I really should - Ethan Embry is great.
Much akin to the very enjoyable "Heretic", a lot of the hype has been marketed around the performance of the villain - here Jai Courtney, finally getting to act rather than being funnelled into thankless Hollywood roles (remember his turns as John McClane's son, Kyle Reese and the villain of "Honest Thief"? Scratch that, remember "Honest Thief"?) and relishing it (though I do like him as Captain Boomerang, one of the few upsides of "Suicide Squid"); rightfully so in this case. Tucker is portrayed with the perfect balance of menace and entertainment value: singing "Baby Shark" and joking around with his victims from one moment, then prone to savagery and horrific violence the next - comparisons (as lazy as they may be) will inevitably be made to Mick Taylor from "Wolf Creek", which are not entirely unfounded, but I find Tucker a fun and relentlessly effective villain here. Good on you, Jai Courtney!
For he is the villain here.
It is a "shark attack" movie, but the sharks are portrayed and shot in honestly a refreshingly ehtereal, awe-inspired light: they feed because there is blood and they find the prey to resemble that which they eat. The frequent wide angle lenses ("fish eyes" if you will, har-har...) show us just how vast the ocean is (fuck the ocean, terifying place) and let them swim with grace, dignity and silky smooth reverance. They are scary creatures, but nothing is more terrifying than mankind: Tucker is a predator with nothing but darkness behind the eyes, comparing himself to sharks but with none of their beauty. I LOVED the scenes where he cruises by in his truck (already shot like a shark in the ocean) and is enraptured by passing young women, who are shot in slow motion as if they are beautiful creatures beneath the waves, prey for him to devour...
His foil is Hassie Harrison's Zephyr, who's bloody excellent in this. Her introduction is my favourite character introduction in recent memory: buying a slushie from a shop, only to tip it outside and reveal the tub of ice cream she had stashed within to keep cool on her way back to her van, showing her guile and cunning and that she's broke and in an unknwon land. She begins as guarded and defensive, a lone wolf (a lone shark if you will...) and gets put through the bloody wringer in this: kudos to Harrison, for this is the first thing I've seen her in and she absolutely nails this. If you do a good horror movie role, you're pretty much set for life in my books (Maika Monroe, Kaya Scodelario, Jocelin Donahue, etc) so I'm very keen to see where Harrison goes here.
The movie is sadistic and incredibly engaging: the narrow escapes and tantalisingly close exits are agonising, in the best kind of way for this genre of movie, and it's fantastic edge-of-your-seat stuff from a guy who knows what he's doing, utterly sold with conviction by committed performers in Harrison and Courtney. It never feels exploitative (there are wonderful touches of humanity like names on a wall, videotapes, and an honestly kind of chilling banality in the evil of showing Tucker do his nighttime routine) or sleazy and leering, and is just a rock solid cat-and-mouse game, of a man with a woman on his hook, who may be more wiley than he thought...
It gets a thumbs up from me!
Haaaaaaaaaaaaa
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