The Black Demon

while the selachian serial killer is known locally as ‘el demonio negro’, oil is the other black demon here, dredging up humanity’s insatiably self-destructive corruptibility

Like Grunberg’s earlier work, The Black Demon might be called a B-movie, whatever that ancient term has come to mean. Or you might say that it was made by someone who remembers what genre movies in general were traditionally meant to look like.

The Black Demon effectively sticks to [its] well-greased formula.

Sometimes after a grueling day at work where everyone’s demanding a pound of flesh from you, you need a killer shark movie to properly unwind. This is not that movie.

The Black Demon only loosely explores its cryptid and instead uses it as a tool to spin a cautionary tale of manmade ecological disaster. But it never builds upon its shallow ideas, resulting in a messy effort sunk by its lackluster human focus.

Grunberg has some terrific films under his belt including the Mel Gibson flick Get the Gringo and Rambo: Last Blood, but The Black Demon is that blip in your CV you try and brush over in job interviews.

A film with a potent idea but fails to find the best way to develop it... [Full review in Spanish]

The kind of film that makes you wonder if someone lost a bet and had to make a film, no matter how terrible the idea was.

Adrian Grunberg and his two screenwriters clearly don’t want the audience thinking too hard about things like plot and motivation.

Maybe not the creature feature that everyone was hoping for - but still not a bad film - certainly holds the suspense.