Toothless Devil’s Mouth

1 star

Shark movies fall into three categories.

The good/great movies that you will sit down and watch whenever, like: Jaws, Deep Blue Sea, The Shallows, Open Water, and, yes, Sharknado.

The so bad they’re good/great, like: Bait, Jersey Shore Shark Attack, anything from the Asylum Studios where it’s a Shark Vs something (Giant Octopus, Crocosaurus, or Mecha Shark) and, yes, Sharknado.

And there’s the frustrating third category: the one where the filmmakers have a decent budget and a pretty good, if simple, idea for lining up the victims for the shark to snack on, but just can’t pull it together into an even interesting film, let alone an exciting one. The Devil’s Mouth falls firmly into this third category, and you’ll know it long before the CGO shark even shows up on the screen.

Directed by Jeff Wadlow (Truth or Dare), The Devil’s Mouth is the story of a group of obnoxious, entitled Americans who invade Thailand for a drunken weekend of sun, fun, and treating the locals like indentured servants. When they are told they can’t get the water tour they want, they bully/buy their way onto a local’s boat and hire a guide to take them where they want to go.

Although you know there’s at least another half hour of watching their ugly American behavior before you’ll see any of their blood in the water, it’s impossible not to start compiling a list of who you want to see killed first, waiting for the shark to show up. The two pretty boys are shark bait for sure, and you know at least two of the three girls aren’t making it back to shore intact. And even if you know in your movie-loving heart that the virginal last girl (Kathryn Newton) isn’t going to die, it’s OK to hope that the director will at least have the chutzpah to have her lose an arm or a leg or at least a couple of fingers to make the movie more than the predictable pabulum unfolding before your eyes.

No such luck. Eventually, the CGI shark shows up and starts chewing up what’s left of the scenery after the young hams are finished with it. And while the big toothy fish isn’t the worst representation of their cinematic species, they’re just bad enough to look distractingly fake whenever they swim up to feed on the cast. And maybe it’s because The Devil’s Mouth premiered on Amazon Prime the same week that Shark Week was on the Discovery Channel, but the shark in this movie just doesn’t behave enough like a shark to bring any authentic bite to the screen.

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