Storm boy (1976)

I understand Colin Thiele makes it clear in his book that Mister Percival, the pelican raised by Storm Boy, is trained and responds to voice commands, but the movie springs this idea on its audience right when Mister Percival is needed to save a boatful of fishermen, resulting in a laughable Skippy moment that slightly strains the otherwise faithful adaptation, an emotional, likeable, and touching Australian classic, with the ten-year-old Storm Boy living a lonely but - to me - dream existence, quietly at the beach with the Coorong - its beaches, birdlife, and Ngarrindjeri culture (as taught to Storm Boy by David Gulpilil's Fingerbone Bill) - resplendent around him.

★★★★☆

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Dangerous Animals (2025)

As if to demonstrate the abyssmal depths to which film has sunk, this serial killer thriller and creature-feature mash-up, about an Australian serial killer who feeds foreign tourists to sharks, is built up around its thirty-minute-mark spectacle of a woman being torn to pieces by a shark, and nothing else matters:, the plot, very possibly spat out by Chatgpt, starts with a thoroughly unclever and utterly unrewarding opening sequence, then features disappearing bodies, plastic shiv neck injuries and knife wounds that are shaken off and disappear, plot lurches that defy logic, and a lot of repetitive catch-and-escape, catch-and-escape sequences - Tom and Jerry cartoons are more entertaining and efficient - and chaining the film industry to its watery grave forever at the bottom of the ocean is the fact mind-numbed audiences have given this prosaic nonsense an 86% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

★★☆☆☆

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Hachi: A Dog's Tale (2009)

When its master dies, leaving it to run free, a Japanese Akita called Hachi takes up residence at a train station, where everyone assumes it is showing extreme loyalty to its deceased master, but it's easy to cynically flip this otherwise pleasant story - based on the 1920s real-life dog, Hachiko - into a tale of animal neglect, seeing the dog's choice to squat at the station as the result of its having been turfed out by uncaring family, made to sit through rain, hail, or shine in the only place anybody will feed and pet him...sorry.

★★★☆☆

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K-9 (1989)

This differs from Turner and Hooch, released only three months earlier, in the way that the German Shepherd of the mismatched cop-dog duo is the straight-laced, authoritative, respectable Tom Hanks one while Jim Belushi does a slobbering Dogue de Bordeaux version of a cop-with-a-deathwish a la Martin Riggs/Axle Foley; which movie you prefer will largely depend on your actor and your dog breed preferences and how much you can tolerate this movie's weak love triangle-involving-a-dog subplot.

★★☆☆☆

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The Reef (2010)

There are two or three tense moments in this low-budget Australian 'natural horror' movie about a group of friends terrorised by a shark after their boat capsizes off the Queensland coast but otherwise it all quickly becomes a repetitive cycle of underwater goggle shots and the frantic treading of water.

★★☆☆☆

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The Shallows (2016)

Despite a rather bewildering climax, at just 80-odd minutes, this is a punchy thriller in the vein of the 2015-2016 spate of single-location, simply-themed confined-space thrillers (Green Room, Don't Breathe, Lights Out) featuring a likeable Blake Lively as a med student surfie struggling to stay alive on a rock at sea with a viscous shark circling, high tide approaching, and just a seagull for company.

★★★☆☆

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