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In 1960's PSYCHO, Alfred Hitchcock puts the audience into the mind of a killer. You see things his way. You want what he wants. You want him to get away with murder. Did you know that about yourself? Do you think I'm wrong about you? 

Let's jog our memories real quick: Motel owner Norman Bates discovers that "his mother" has murdered poor Marion Crane while she was in the shower. Norman can't have Mother be sent away! He quickly gets to work scrubbing down the crime scene, then puts Marion's body and her belongings in her 1950s Ford automobile and drives out to a local swamp, where he shifts the car into neutral and shoves it along. Norman watches anxiously. The car rumbles into the murky water, but..

The car suddenly stops sinking. 

Norman waits for a moment, looks around, feeling nervous that this is how he's caught in the middle of covering up a crime. Let's pause the scene. Do you recall how you felt when you first saw this scene? Do you remember what you were thinking? Were you hoping that someone would happen by and start asking questions? Were you hoping a cop would pull up on a motorcycle just then? 

Or were you, somewhere in your lizard brain, feeling a moment of eager anticipation, rooting for the car to go ahead and sink already? I think you were. I can tell you for sure that I was. Am I a monster? Am I on Norman's side? How can that be? Marion was a decent person who made a mistake. She was planning to go back, remember? There was hope for her. And I love Janet Leigh. She's Jamie Lee Curtis' mom, for Pete's sake! I didn't want Marion Crane to die, and I don't want Norman Bates to get away with it. Or do I? 

Unpause the scene. 

The Ford finally sinks below the dark surface with a muffled gurgle. Norman smiles. That's a weird reaction, isn't it? For a guy who still has to deal with his "mother" having killed a lady? Anyway, if you watched the rest of the movie, you know Norman's story, and where it goes from there. 

My point is this: Alfred Hitchcock was a sicko! And a brilliant filmmaker. Hitchcock knew how to use his camera, his direction, his use of score and set design and performance, to implicate the audience. He knew that casting Anthony Perkins as Norman was perfect, since Perkins was handsome and pleasant in demeanor and able to play affable but also able to suggest that he was hiding something. And he knew that by keeping his camera trained on that face, and shooting the car sinking into the swamp from Norman's point of view, would bring the audience over to Norman's perspective, even if just for a moment, even if we know that we shouldn't trust him, even though we know he's doing something terrible and may have done something even worse. 

In that moment, we want him to get away with it.

Which brings me, finally, to DANGEROUS ANIMALS.

 Written by Nick Lepard and directed by Sean Byrne, DANGEROUS ANIMALS arrives immediately as one of the best genre films of the year. 

Made in Australia, with a small cast primarily made up of Australians (with one notable exception), DANGEROUS ANIMALS harkens back to the glory days of Ozploitation, the tidal wave of action films and thrillers that emerged in the 1970s and the early 1980s and included stone-cold classics like TURKEY SHOOT, ROADGAMES (costarring the aforementioned Jamie Lee Curtis!), and MAD MAX its damn self. 

These movies were brutal but vibrant pop masterpieces, visceral and thrilling and with the exception of MAD MAX and its first sequel THE ROAD WARRIOR (but not its second, justice for THUNDERDOME), still underseen and not exactly as critically revered as many of them should be. If there's any justice in the world, DANGEROUS ANIMALS may herald an Ozploitation renaissance, but I'll settle for you rushing out to see DANGEROUS ANIMALS this weekend and we can work together from there.

Director Sean Byrne was born in Tasmania, and he isn't what you could call prolific. After a series of well-regarded short films, he made his feature debut with THE LOVED ONES (2009), which is a twisted story of obsession and campy excess that I don't think I'm overstating by calling a modern classic, one of the best of the current millennium, and a horror essential. 

Byrne's next film was THE DEVIL'S CANDY (2015), a robust midnight movie with unforgettable performances by a recognizable and super-talented cast, most prominently the great Ethan Embry. Hard as it is to believe and wrong as it feels, we have had to wait almost a full decade for the latest Sean Byrne film. It was worth the goddamned wait.

Jai Courtney stars as Tucker, the captain of a small-time boat-tour enterprise he calls "Tucker’s Experience," in which he takes tourists out to see sharks and to get into a cage to get up close. There are a few warning signs about Tucker — for one thing, is that his first name or his last? I didn't catch a second if he gave it. Early on, we see him bark sharply at a young man for daring to speak over a lady, but it's a little too intense to be an act of chivalry. And his shift back into boisterous tour-guide mode feels a little too practiced, like a mask he wears. But hey, maybe it's nothing.

Tucker takes a pair of youngsters who have been traveling through the country out to the ocean, and lets them have their shark dive. They're still giddy from their brush with alpha predators when Tucker suddenly stabs one tourist and lunges for the second. That's Tucker's game. He's a serial killer. 

Norman Bates has his motel. Tucker has his boat. 

He waits for tourists who nobody is likely to miss, and then takes them out on the water to throw them to the sharks. Tucker likes to watch. This links him to a long line of creepy watcher-types, from PSYCHO and fellow 1960 release PEEPING TOM, through half of everything Brian De Palma ever made, to 1986's BLUE VELVET and 1997's LOST HIGHWAY, and beyond. (To tie everything we've been covering here together, there's a strong Hitchcock influence present in plenty of Ozploitation cinema, and not just in the films of Australia's Richard Franklin, to whom Hitchcock was a mentor.)

After DANGEROUS ANIMALS introduces Tucker, it sets him aside for a moment, introducing his ultimate nemesis, Zephyr, played by Hassie Harrison. She's a surfer from America who certainly qualifies as someone who doesn't have a lot of people in her life to miss her. The few hints she drops about her past indicate that it hasn't been an easy life, and she doesn't trust much, meaning she mainly keeps to herself. Harrison is an actor who I'd seen before. 

She's maybe known most for a role on Yellowstone. So far, that is. Her performance here suggests a lot more is to come in the future. Zephyr is in Australia for the waves, and that's it. She doesn't expect to connect with a local, in this case Moses, played by Josh Heuston, who is very winning in the role.

Lepard's script and Byrne's storytelling spends a good ten to fifteen minutes of screentime building the relationship between Moses and Zephyr, to the point that I briefly wondered where we were going with it. Trust these filmmakers. Because once you (and Zephyr) let your guard down and start to enjoy the company of Moses, well that's exactly when Captain Tucker comes to grab you.

Zephyr wakes up a prisoner aboard Tucker's boat. She isn't alone. One of the survivors of Tucker's earlier attack is also a prisoner, and now a veteran of Tucker's cruel routine. She is Heather, played by an actor named Ella Newton, who is painfully likable in the part. In a movie like this, you know not everybody is gonna make it. The question is how bad it's going to be, and how many other characters we care about are going to join them.

From here, DANGEROUS ANIMALS becomes a cat-and-mouse game between Tucker and Zephyr, almost literally an extended Tom & Jerry cartoon, but with deadly predators swimming in the water which is where Zephyr would go at any other time to make her escape. It's exciting and frustrating in equal measure to see Zephyr's ingenious attempts to get away, only to be recaptured by Tucker, who is both devious and irritatingly charming.

Jai Courtney is a revelation in this movie. Here in America, where our movie industry is hard-up for tough guys, we tend to outsource to Australia. Russell Crowe is the best-case scenario, but results vary. The most recent crop of them includes Chris and the lesser Hemsworths, Joel Edgerton, Jason Clarke, AVATAR's Sam Worthington, and Jai Courtney. While Chris Hemsworth sort of sailed right in there and Joel Edgerton carved out his role as the thinking-man's best-working-Australian-movie-star-in-America, it sometimes feels like Hollywood tried particularly hard to make Jai Courtney happen. 

He pretty quickly grabbed leads in the SUICIDE SQUAD movies and whatever the DIVERGENT series is. He stepped into the hallowed boots of Michael Biehn to play Kyle Reese in a new TERMINATOR movie, and he was cast as no less than John McClane Jr., I mean holy crap. All of these roles sound like big breaks, but you try to carve out a role as an action lead in America when you're standing next to Bruce Willis. The way forward became clear in the second SUICIDE SQUAD movie, which allowed Courtney to lean into his native accent and to show a flash of slovenly charisma before his character abruptly dipped out of the movie. Hollywood tried to doom Jai Courtney, but his homeland redeemed him.

In DANGEROUS ANIMALS, Jai Courtney gives a full-on character-actor performance, and it's a tremendous thing. 

Captain Tucker looks and acts like the title characters of CAPTAIN RON and THE BEACH BUM. 

If that puts you in mind of Kurt Russell and Matthew McConaughey, that's fine by me, and the compliment is intended. I honestly can't tell if Jai Courtney let himself go for DANGEROUS ANIMALS or if his burlish physique is just a matter of expertly-played posture, but either way, kudos to him. Tucker looks like he's soaked in seawater and warm beer. Just the way the character likes it, he sounds and comes off like your new best pal, until he suddenly snaps into position as the single most amorally lethal killer in the sea. 

Again, if there's justice, DANGEROUS ANIMALS will lead to many more high-profile roles for this actor, who I never really thought much about before now, to be honest. I never thought he wasn't a good actor, just never really even registered him much. This is the sort of movie that forces you to pay attention to what a guy is doing. He's phenomenal.

Watching this movie, I loved Jai Courtney as Captain Tucker, almost as much as I hated him. He's an apex predator of a movie villain. He's evil and you want him to die in the worst ways, but you're also entertained by him. You want his victims to get away, but you also kind of don't, since that would mean leaving him behind. This is what I was up to by invoking that key moment in PSYCHO. 

What is our fascination with awfulness? How the hell did Freddy Krueger ever become an icon? The guy's face is on lunchboxes — you do remember why the parents of Elm Street burned him, don't you? What's the true-crime phenomenon about? How in the name of God did that creature get anywhere near the White House? (That guy did not let himself go for the role, but the way. That's all Big Macs.) This isn't unique to America, obviously. It's human nature, reaching all the way down there to Australia. We want to hate the bad guy, and many of us genuinely do, but we also can't get enough.

DANGEROUS ANIMALS is out today, June 6th, in theaters everywhere. Go tonight. Choose the spot with the biggest audience you can find. This is an audience movie. Watch how they react. Pay attention to how you react. Consider carefully who the title refers to. Probably ain't the sharks, at the end of the day. Is it Captain Tucker? Or is it someone closer to you. Maybe the person next to you? Or maybe it's the one sitting in your seat...

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