The Black Demon (2023) Review

In The Wake of The Meg, Another Megalodon Movie

You should live up to the statement when you start your movie with superimposed text. The Black Demon’s intro sets up the film as a cautionary tale: indigenous gods may summon a demon to rebalance nature after greedy men have damaged the environment.

It’s an excellent idea for a movie and the series of comic books that accompany it. But The Black Demon doesn’t develop the indigenous or environmental aspects enough. It’s really an action movie focusing on the survival of a vacationing family.

Many great thrillers feast on fish-out-of-water Americans finding themselves in desperate situations in Mexican seaside towns. But the fish-flopping family in The Black Demon gets ferried off to an offshore oil rig where perfunctory action happens.

Unfortunately, the tension on the oil rig never competes with the palpable sense of danger in the town.

Paul Sturges is a cocky oil company engineer mixing business with a family trip. He’s taking his wife and kids to Baja California, where his foundational successes occurred. He approved the offshore oil rig’s safety for his bosses several years ago and met his wife there.

Paul is the kind of dude who will roll into a poor Mexican town, bop out of this luxury SUV and ask the locals if they speak English — instead of letting his Mexican wife handle things. He’s also over-eager to please his bosses at the ominously named Nixon Oil, leaving his wife and kids in a seaside barroom to check on the rig.

The Ciudad that once thrived on the generosity of Nixon Oil is now a dilapidated ghost town. But a handful of locals still work for the company, and they half-heartedly help him get to the rig.

While the condition of the town should have made Paul turn around, on the boat ride out to the rig, he gets the first clue that things are wrong out there as well. The superstitious boat guy won’t take him all the way there, like a coach driver who won’t take anyone to Castle Dracula.

Paul finds the neglected rig falling apart, a broken radio, two exhausted workers with tales of a giant shark attacking the structure and its crew, and a curse from the Aztec gods. Somehow, the wife and kids also become stranded on the rig.

The Black Demon is not so much a monster movie as it is a family adventure. With no way to get off the rig and no radio, everyone must pitch in.

Paul comes up with several engineering hacks, working with stoic rig survivor Junior. Soon, the sullen teenage daughter rises to positive efforts, busting out her chemistry class skills to bolster their escape. Mom supervises, and little bro handles the exposition of Aztec myths and history.

Sharks are indeed central to Mesoamerican cultures, and a shark-like creature, Cipactli, plays a starring role in the Aztec creation myth. The Megalodon, a prehistoric giant shark, shows up

In the fossil record of the area as well. Megalodon, an apex predator ranging from 40 to 70 ft long with 6 ft wide jaws, preferred warm water.

The Megalodon also fits The Black Demon’s environmental theme: a cooling climate change millions of years ago propelled the massive shark’s extinction.

While the Aztec religion theme is too understated, members of the group bat around the idea of a human sacrifice to appease the rampaging beast.

Corruption is a more tangible aspect of the film. Paul works for Nixon Oil, and the company is dirty like its namesake. Proud of his success, he imagines he’s not part of the problem. But his career is tarnished by his involvement in the extractive corporation’s reckless aversion to safety.

With the water stained with blood and limbs floating around just below the surface, the sea surrounding the rig is foreboding. There are many scenes of desperate underwater repairs interrupted by the marauding giant. But the murky underwater scenes don’t quite deliver the scares as the giant shark never seems to get there in time.

Josh Lucas (Paul) and Julio Cesar Cedillo (Chato) give the best performances, and the script fleshes out their uneasy-at-first relationship far better than Paul’s family dynamic.

The Black Demon crests before the August 2023 release of The Meg 2: The Trench, the sequel to the 2017 box office hit, The Meg.

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Michael J McMorrow writes about movies and pop music at popshots.news