THE BLACK DEMON - Mark Reviews Movies

The Black Demon, The Avenue

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 27, 2023

The Black Demon wants to be an old-fashioned monster movie, but its more significant desire is to be an ecological parable about dangers of interfering with and destroying nature. Both of these ideas are fine, either individually or as a combination, but the simple, unfortunate case of this movie is that it's not up to either task. It's definitely not up to finding a way to merge them together in a thoughtful or entertaining way.

Part of the issue is a matter of the budgetary restrictions clearly faced by director Adrian Grunberg. It would be a bit unfair to harp on the movie for what it doesn't possess, even if the filmmakers clearly want to have moments of spectacle involving visual effects. In this case, we're talking about a giant shark—a prehistoric megalodon awakened by the effects of deep-sea drilling, to be more specific—and its abilities to rattle an oil rig, lift a boat into the air and split it in twain, and bite a human in half or swallow one whole.

The shark here is, well, a mixed bag in terms of quality. That's fine to some extent, because Grunberg has put the movie's resources to other uses, such as giving us a convincing oil platform where most of the story takes place, while restricting the amount of screen time the marine beast actually receives. The shark is passable when viewed underwater, swimming through the murkiness of an oil-polluted sea, and when it does jump out of the water to attack an escaping boat, the sheer, silly extravagance of the sight almost seems to be the point. It's reasonable to view the moment in that way, at least.

The shark almost doesn't matter to this story anyway. That could be seen as a benefit because of those limitations, but here, it's definitely not. Carlos Cisco's screenplay is far more interested in its ecological message, and it's made in a ham-fisted, simplistic, and repetitive way.

As for the main excuse for the occasional shark attack and the constant messaging, it's a plot that involves Paul (Josh Lucas), a safety consultant for an oil company, and his family taking a vacation to Mexico while he's checking up on an old deep-sea rig. While he's out for the inspection, Paul's wife Ines (Fernanda Urrejola) and the couple's two kids, Audrey (Venus Ariel) and Tommy (Carlos Solórzano), wait for him in a small town that once benefited from drilling operation. In recent years, though, the town has fallen upon hard times from drought, and many believe it's a curse.

Obviously, it kind-of, sort-of is because of the drilling and the cutting of regulations. Paul arrives on the platform to discover that only two employees (played by Julio César Cedillo and Jorge Jiménez) are still there and traumatized by the horror of what "the black demon" has done to their co-workers. Through a lot of convolutions, Paul's family ends up on the rig, too—just in time to come under threat from the megalodon that killed everyone else and is attacking the structure.

The rest of the narrative feels a lot like these characters talking around the fact that there isn't much for them to see or do while they're stranded at sea. They're definitely not going to see the shark, which does its big leap with a boat upon the family arriving and spends the rest of the movie suggested by the platform shaking or barely visible in the inky waters (One scene involving a diving bell is barely comprehensible because of the intentional cloudiness). They're not going to have any conversations beyond repeating that they need to find a way off the rig, figure out how to avoid or distract or kill the megalodon, and pointing out all of the failures that have led to this problem in the first place.

The whole movie becomes trapped in some in-between approach, although it leans heavily toward the monotonous scenes of dialogue. The message here is worthwhile, of course, even if making a scapegoat and figure of redemption out of Paul evades the bigger issues, while the movie's references to Aztec mythology feel half-hearted at best. It's a move that wants to imbue this material with much more significance than it earns or, as a story about a giant monster that barely gives us that, deserves. The Black Demon is a cheap monster movie, not because of its effects, but mainly because of its transparent tactics in avoiding the monster and hammering home a pretty easy message.

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