This year Australian shark movies have been particularly ravenous, swimming into different waters and taking a bite into other genres. Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals arrived in local cinemas in June, blending the creature feature and serial killer movies into one foul fishy stew, with Jai Courtney playing a psycho who feeds his victims to the sharks. And now we have Kiah Roache-Turner’s Beast of War, a second world war movie with a great white twist, which cheekily begins with a text insert declaring that it was “inspired by actual events”.
That’s cheeky because this film doesn’t exactly aspire for social realism, which will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Roache-Turner’s splatterific oeuvre (he cut his teeth helming monster movies about spiders, vampires and demons). Then again, one could argue – as many have – that all art is inspired by life. So perhaps it’s not too outrageous to connect this film to the sinking of HMAS Armidale, the aforementioned historical event in which an Australian corvette was attacked by Japanese bombers in 1942, resulting in the deaths of 100 of its 149 crew members.
