The shark film has come a very long way since Steven Spielberg showed how they should be done with Jaws (1975) and arrived in a place similar to the territory occupied by the Bigfoot film – it’s over-populated territory but most of the residents are very poor specimens indeed. Adrian Grünberg’s The Black Demon came with an enticing poster but it becomes very evident very quickly that there are multiple problems that Grünberg is unable to overcome, including a lack of budget, shoddy CGI, an apparent disinterest in sharks and the fact that the film is really not much better than the average Asylum mockbuster – Asylum will no doubt have had their answer to belated sequel The Meg 2: The Trench (2023) on a streaming service near you in time to ride on whatever coattails are to be found, but in the meantime, Grünberg’s film manage to beat even them to the punch.

Perhaps in an effort to distance itself from the steady stream of increasingly inane shark films, writer Boise Esquerra (working from a story by Carlos Cisco) introduces a ham-fisted ecological text (it’s so blatant that it scarcely qualifies as subtext) and gives his killer shark psychic powers. The bulk of the story – and it really is the bulk sadly – centres around oil company inspector Paul Sturges (Josh Lucas) who is dispatched to a small Mexican coastal town in Baja California, to check on an offshore oil rig. He takes his wife Ines (Fernanda Urrejola) and their two children, Audrey (Venus Ariel) and Tommy (Carlos Solórzano) with him and they’re all startled to find the town dilapidated, the locals surly and uncooperative. The cause is the drilling platform which has not only polluted the waters, devastating the fishing industry, but “El demonio negro” (the poster claims that the story is based on an actual Mexican legend but it really isn’t), the eponymous “Black Demon,” a 60-foot long megalodon shark that causes its victims to hallucinate floating body parts before it swallo0w them him. The Sturges family is soon stranded on the rig with a handful of oil workers as the shark picks them off one by one.

Perhaps realising that his CGI shark isn’t really up to much, Grünberg keeps it off screen for so long that it barely qualifies as a killer shark film at all. In its place we get some not-terribly-interesting family drama and a less-than-subtle environmental and anti-corporate message. There are some intriguing ideas about the shark being an agent of Tlaloc, the Aztec god of rain, sent to wreak revenge for the ecological disaster visited on the area by the anonymous Nixon Oil. It’s a worthy message, but one blandly delivered. The cast do their best and attack the material with a degree of commitment but it’s not long before even they reveal that their not really buying all this nonsense either.

It takes a good half hour before we actually get to see the shark – there’s an opening attack which mimics that of Jaws by keeping the shark off screen altogether – and when we do, it’s a crashing disappointment. CGI sharks have been around for years and given that they’re hardly the most physiologically complex of creatures, they lend themselves quite well to digital recreation. So it’s a sources of endless bemusement that they’ve never really got it right. This shark is extraordinarily large, but never feels like it’s actually there in the same shot as anything else – it lacks weight and presence, as so many of these things tend to do. Perhaps that was a deliberate choice, highlighting its ethereal, supernatural qualities, though one very much doubts it.

Worst of all, it’s very, very dull. After that initial attack, everything grinds to a halt so that we can get to know the uninteresting characters and listen to lectures on the made-up mythology and the political point it’s striving to make. But it’s all so shallow and superficial, and it’s badly written to boot – at the climax, the day is saved, after a fashion, but in doing so, another potentially massive ecological disaster is created and then blithely ignored. Couple all this with direction that might, at best, be charitably described as eccentric and you have a very trying viewing experience.

There’s probably a good film to be made about a huge Mexican shark-god trying to bring down US capitalism, but The Black Demon isn’t it. It’s exasperating that such a potentially interesting story is frittered away on poor writing and dreary characters and perhaps in future, if film makers can’t actually afford the effects wizardry needed to make a convincing digital shark, they might consider trying something else instead. But there seem to be no end in sight to the torrent of shark-based low-budgeters. There will doubtless be worse examples than The Black Demon – The Asylum will doubtless have a few more up its sleeves – but one suspects that there will be few any better. And what a tragic prospect that it…