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THE BLACK DEMON ★★★
(M) 101 minutes
As a filmmaker operating on the outskirts of Hollywood, Adrian Grunberg has found a very specific niche: stories about the relationship between the United States and Mexico, in which US anti-heroes head down south to purge their sins.
The perennial near-star Josh Lucas plays a hapless oil company executive in The Black Demon.
Grunberg’s 2012 debut Get the Gringo starred Mel Gibson as a low-life trapped in a hellish Tijuana prison, and was followed in 2019 by Rambo: Last Blood, which saw Sylvester Stallone’s special forces veteran turned bloodthirsty vigilante moving sluggishly but obsessively back and forth across the border.
Gibson and Stallone are not just larger-than-life screen presences but accomplished filmmakers in their own right, so in both cases there was room for doubt about how far Grunberg was really the one calling the shots.
That’s less the case in his latest, The Black Demon, with perennial near-star Josh Lucas (Red Dog) as the square-jawed but hapless protagonist Paul Sturges, who travels to Baja as a representative of the significantly named Nixon Oil Company. Paul has chosen to combine this business trip with a family outing, as well as seizing the chance to relive some romantic memories with his Mexican wife, Ines (Fernanda Urrejola).
The gigantic, but largely unseen, megladon shark that cruises the waters in The Black Demon.
But before long he, Ines and their two kids (Venus Ariel and Carlos Solorzano) are trapped on the largely deserted oil rig that Paul is meant to be inspecting, with the surrounding waters patrolled by a gigantic megladon shark (a supposedly extinct species, as we learnt in 2018 from Jon Turteltaub’s wretched The Meg).
If I’ve waited this long to explain that The Black Demon is a shark movie, that’s because it really isn’t one, or not in the way we’ve come to expect. The shark, for most of the running time, is little more than a glimpsed threat on the horizon, its presence evoked with piercing violins and ominous noises like someone trying to start a lawnmower. Nor is there much of an emphasis on blood and guts, beyond some eerie underwater shots of drifting body parts.
On the other hand, Grunberg and screenwriter Boise Esquerra are fully upfront about their intended environmental themes. The shark is identified with a god out of Aztec mythology, bent on revenging itself on sinful humanity – and more specifically on Paul, whose gradual recognition of his guilt is portrayed by Lucas with no less sincerity than he might bring if he were doing an Arthur Miller play.
Happily, Grunberg has the knowhow to dramatise these themes visually, staging scenes in depth so that Lucas appears to gain and lose stature to his co-stars, especially Julio Cesar Cedillo as Chato, one of the remaining workers on the rig, who could at first be taken for the kind of unassuming minor character liable to be killed off early on.
Like Grunberg’s earlier work, The Black Demon might be called a B-movie, whatever that ancient term has come to mean. Or you might say that it was made by someone who remembers what genre movies in general were traditionally meant to look like.
The Black Demon is released in cinemas on June 8.
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