Beast of War (now streaming on Shudder) offers a rather grim game of Would You Rather: Would you rather face a big hungry great white shark or try to survive as a grunt in World War II? Take your pick! This Australian B-flick opens with an INSPIRED BY ACTUAL EVENTS title card suggesting that it might draw from real-life horror stories like that of the USS Indianapolis, an American WWII cruiser that was torpedoed by the Japanese, leaving survivors at sea to be picked off by sharks (perhaps you recall that Capt. Quint from Jaws was a veteran of that ordeal). And that’s sort of what happens here, albeit on a smaller scale – blame the budget, I guess.
BEAST OF WAR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: AUSTRALIA, NINETEEN FORTY-TWO. What we’ve got here is a buncha grunts boot-camping in the bush. There’s the usual array of personality types – the scrawny guys, the jerks, an eccentric or two and the one Indigenous fella, Leo (Mark Coles Smith), who’s regularly reminded that his skin color means he makes one-third the salary of the other soldiers. But Leo proves to be 10 times the man of any of them when he saves Will (Joel Nankervis) from drowning in a mudhole while the rest of the squadron is too worried about meeting the sarge’s deadline for a grueling hike. Kelly (Sam Delich) is one of the jerks and Stan (Maximllian Johnson) is one of the eccentrics and guess which one gets his ass handed to him by Leo for being a jerk?
Perhaps it goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway: There are no sharks in the Aussie bush. I know the locale is famous for its exotic fauna, but it’s not that exotic, and this isn’t one of those movies with land sharks or quicksand sharks or sharkalanches. We’re quickly privy to haunted Leo flashbacks where he couldn’t save a boy, presumably his little brother, from the hoary deeps of the dark dark sea and whatever may be lurking in it. Then we’re on a military boat in the Timor Sea and the guys are playing cards when WHAMMO they’re hit and there’s chaos and the boat is sunk and now what?
Here’s what’s now what: Leo rescues Will from the sinking vessel and they clamber atop a big slab of floating boat hull. Flaming wreckage bobbing in the waves. Planes roaring overhead. Shooting. Explosions. Smoke. War is hell. A handful of other survivors pile on. One guy has a head wound that’s making him loopy. One guy is Kelly and another guy is Stan, I think – it’s OK if you can’t tell these Caucasian blokes apart because they’re all in the same clothes and they have very few discerning physical or character attributes and it doesn’t matter because although this isn’t a typhoon-full-of-sharkicudas movie, it’s definitely one of those guys-die-one-by-one shark-chomp-chomp movies. And she’s a big ’un, all scarred-up, ancient-looking and scary as eff, a 20-footer with teeth on top of teeth on top of teeth. Throw your buck into the character survival pool now, people.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? OK, what joker made a supercut mashup of Jaws and Saving Private Ryan? (And here I’ll refer you to the better shark movie of the past year, Dangerous Animals, which was a supercut mashup of Jaws and The Silence of the Lambs.)
Performance Worth Watching: Leo is the only one around here who gets something resembling a character arc, so it’s Smith by default – and he quite ably helps establish the tone, which tightropes between earnest and goofy.
Sex And Skin: None, mate.
Our Take: Correction: This isn’t always a guys-die-one-by-one movie, as the shark sometimes mixes it up and takes half or a quarter of a guy at a time, depending on where on the corpus the biting occurs. Director Kiah Roache-Turner doesn’t shy away from guts ‘n’ stuff as the guys on the makeshift raft fight back against teeth, teeth and more teeth with a small clutch of hand grenades. Bloodthirsty audiences may just find themselves duly satisfied.
Better yet, the filmmaker keeps visual effects within the realm of the practical in places where it counts, with prosthetic intestines and an old-school shark made of rubber and metal and plastic and foam and such, all the better to not annoy us with cheap and easy CGI. Of course, this is a low-budget affair obviously shot in a water tank on a soundstage, so Roache-Turner pumps in gobs of sea-fog to keep the scale small and the atmosphere muted and claustrophobic, a reasonably admirable creative flourish that’s clearly manufactured, but ultimately enhances the horror-flick vibe, assuring that Beast of War doesn’t look like every other shipwreck-survival film out there.
Not that we can take any of this too seriously – “ACTUAL EVENTS” or no, realism is not the film’s forte, as the shark functions more like a mythological beast or cryptid than your standard ocean predator. Roache-Turner keeps enough of a tongue in a cheek to inspire a few chuckles, but never tips over into campy indulgence. He also isn’t afraid of cliches – at one point all I could do was groan oh jeez this is the part where the war survivors share their sad stories – and character development clearly took a backseat to mayhem. But he does throw in a compelling man-vs.-man conflict in the third act to counter the man-vs.-nature stuff, and you might end up pondering something vague about the nature of violence if you’re willing to stretch it a bit. And the scene in which shipwrecked men are attacked by an enemy plane? That’s a war crime. Funny enough, I learned that from the news recently. So here’s your reminder that true sharks, as ever, have no regard for the rules.
Our Call: Beast of War is far from groundbreaking, and the story is thin. But it’s also a taut 87 minutes, and offers just enough of a variation on familiar stories to be worth your time. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.