The Black Demon

Writers: Carlos Cisco and Boise Esquerra

Director: Adrian Grünberg

For a film that features a huge shark, a vengeful Rain God and a ticking bomb, The Black Demon is definitely short of thrills. Matters aren’t helped by the miscasting of the film’s hero. Josh Lucas hasn’t got what it takes to be the family man battling dark forces on an oil rig just offshore the Baja Coast in Mexico.

Of course, Jaws haunts this film, right down to the dodgy special effects, but The Black Demon starts like a Midsommar or a Wicker Man. Engineer Paul is on a working holiday. He’s been ordered by his company Nixon Oil to go to Mexico to decommission the El Diamante, the glamourous name for a run-of-the-mill oil rig. But when he, his wife and their two kids drive into the nearest town they are given a cold welcome. The hotel where Paul and his Mexican wife met has closed down and the locals are hostile.

The Black Demon certainly won’t help the Mexican tourist industry. The first Mexicans we meet are sinister scar-faced gangster types while the next group act like potential rapists. Every Mexican, it seems, will do anything if given a wad of cash. While his family fight off the desperados, Paul goes off to the oil rig, slightly miffed with his boatman that he has to complete the journey alone.

However, he’s not alone for long as two oil workers remain on the rig and his family, pursued by the angry thugs, are soon to join him. A giant shark – a megalodon no less – appears out of nowhere to eat up the only ride back to land. The family is stranded, and soon Paul becomes aware of a bomb, counting down the minutes. strapped to one of the rig’s supports. The only possible escape is to make some sacrifice to the Rain God, Tlaloc.

It’s as silly as it sounds, but there’s no room for irony in this film. The acting is all very earnest, especially from Fernanda Urrejola, who plays Paul’s wife Ines, meeting each new disaster with the same quizzical expression. But at least you sense that Ines loves her children. As her husband, Josh Lucas appears to have been airlifted in from another film.

There’s a smidgeon of humour to be found in Lucas’s role as a city slicker out of his depth in a situation where muscles rather than brains are needed, but soon Lucas is wearing a vest like Bruce Willis in Die Hard. Lucas does his best with a clunky script, but he fails to live up to the tough guy image that the vest evokes. He really is a fish out of water in this film, best demonstrated when he selects a particular bolt cutter from a pile of identical bolt cutters. His character is meant to be knowledgeable about such things, but Lucas doesn’t portray this at all in the way he randomly and crazily shuffles through the tools. You wouldn’t want this engineer fixing your taps.

Adrian Grünberg’s film doesn’t lack subtext completely. There’s something there about the greed of corporations and the damage they cause to the environment. The beaches are strewn with litter while the sea itself is gloopy with black sludge. However, Nixon Oil is a faceless company that is never brought to justice. And the message gets lost in all the low-level drama. The film is caught between ecological allegory and folk horror and neither genre gets the right treatment.

Without a believable hero, The Black Demon, heavy already with some loaded symbolism as if it is M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, sinks. And it should remain at the bottom of the ocean forever.

Signature Entertainment presentsTheBlackDemonon Digital Platforms 19th June and Blu-ray & DVD 17th July.