I decided to watch this flick since every time I turned on my TV using a Firestick device, an ad for "The Black Demon" popped up at the top of the screen. Why not, I thought. It's got to have some cool action with a huge shark at the center of the story. Well folks, you'll have to wait for it, and wait for it, and wait for it some more. There was a nice tease about a quarter of the way in when the huge monster, straight out of Jurassic Park, lunged out of the water to make mincemeat out of a motorboat escaping from a deserted oil rig, the Diamante. But after that, most of what you saw of the creature took place in murky, underwater scenes that didn't really give scope to the animal's size. Which by the way, was a megalodon, and not a shark per se, a species that went extinct three million years ago until it got revived in "The Meg".
A number of anomalies appeared in the story that I can't explain, either that or I wasn't paying attention. For example, how did all those human body parts manage to remain intact in the ocean, even without the megalodon hanging around to dispose of them all? Wouldn't they have been gobbled up by other sea creatures or simply decompose on their own? It's not like the meg had just attacked the oil rig the day before. And then there's the question of that underwater bomb rigged to detonate when Paul Sturges (Josh Lucas) arrived to investigate. Its timer began at the one-hour mark, so how did it get initiated? Paul was down there attempting to repair an oil leak, so maybe that's what triggered it, but that was never made clear.
And of course, there was the not so subtle agenda of blaming man for angering the Aztec god Tlaloc and nature's way of seeking revenge by creating the demon to avenge the oil rig disaster, of which Sturges played no small part by signing off on its safety over the years. Which in its own way contributed to the film's somewhat satisfactory ending, if not a happy one for the rest of his family. So, at this point I have to mention that Paul's wife was portrayed by Chilean actress Fernanda Urrejola, who by some serendipitous chance I had seen for the first time in a movie I watched just before this one. She was the title character in "Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman", which begs the question of a sequel to this picture that might go something like 'Big Fish Meets Machine Gun Woman'. Wouldn't you like to see that?
A number of anomalies appeared in the story that I can't explain, either that or I wasn't paying attention. For example, how did all those human body parts manage to remain intact in the ocean, even without the megalodon hanging around to dispose of them all? Wouldn't they have been gobbled up by other sea creatures or simply decompose on their own? It's not like the meg had just attacked the oil rig the day before. And then there's the question of that underwater bomb rigged to detonate when Paul Sturges (Josh Lucas) arrived to investigate. Its timer began at the one-hour mark, so how did it get initiated? Paul was down there attempting to repair an oil leak, so maybe that's what triggered it, but that was never made clear.
And of course, there was the not so subtle agenda of blaming man for angering the Aztec god Tlaloc and nature's way of seeking revenge by creating the demon to avenge the oil rig disaster, of which Sturges played no small part by signing off on its safety over the years. Which in its own way contributed to the film's somewhat satisfactory ending, if not a happy one for the rest of his family. So, at this point I have to mention that Paul's wife was portrayed by Chilean actress Fernanda Urrejola, who by some serendipitous chance I had seen for the first time in a movie I watched just before this one. She was the title character in "Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman", which begs the question of a sequel to this picture that might go something like 'Big Fish Meets Machine Gun Woman'. Wouldn't you like to see that?