The Black Demon (2023): Corporate Greed, Ancient Gods, and One Extremely Large Shark

There are shark movies where the shark is the problem.

Then there is The Black Demon, where the shark is apparently an ancient environmental auditor sent by an Aztec rain god to review several years of corporate misconduct.

Honestly, Nixon Oil should have just hired an accountant.

Nothing Says Vacation Like a Dying Oil Town

The movie begins with a warning about El Demonio Negro, a legendary shark off the coast of Baja said to appear when summoned. Two men are working near an offshore oil rig at night, and one diver heads beneath the surface to attach what looks like a demolition charge to one of the rig’s supports.

Then things get weird.

Underwater, the diver suddenly seems to enter a beautiful, clear patch of ocean filled with fish and jellyfish. For a moment he is basically Aquaman, calmly touching marine life while everything around him looks peaceful.

Then reality comes roaring back, something attacks him, and both men disappear into the water.

At this point we do not know exactly what they were doing or why. We only know that the rig has problems and something very large is living underneath it.

Two weeks later, Nixon Oil inspector Paul Sturges arrives in Baja with his wife Ines and their children, teenage Audrey and younger Tommy. Paul is supposed to inspect the company’s offshore rig, El Diamante, and has apparently decided this is also a perfectly reasonable opportunity for a family vacation.

The town he remembers is gone.

Hotels and restaurants are abandoned, buildings are covered in graffiti, and the remaining residents stare at the Sturges family with the kind of warmth usually reserved for people who just keyed your car.

Then Paul proudly announces that Nixon Oil practically built the town.

That goes over beautifully.

Talon disliked Paul almost immediately, and Dan was not far behind. Paul has the energy of a man who walks into a devastated community, announces that his employer created it, and somehow expects applause.

A local named El Rey makes it very clear that Nixon Oil is not beloved. Ines, who speaks Spanish, manages to calm the situation and learns that the strange idols around town are offerings for protection from El Demonio.

Tommy promptly steals one of the small trinkets and leaves a Snickers bar in exchange.

Considering the old commercials, maybe he assumes Tlaloc is just hungry and needs to calm the hell down.

It is as reasonable a plan as most of what follows.

Paul Goes to Work and Everyone Makes It Worse

Nixon Oil pressures Paul to complete his inspection immediately, so he leaves his family behind and heads for El Diamante.

Getting there requires two boats because apparently even transportation wants plausible deniability. The first captain refuses to go near the rig, leaves Paul with another boat, and warns him something is wrong out there.

Paul continues alone.

Meanwhile, Ines and the kids remain in town. After a group of men harasses Audrey and follows the family through the streets, they discover their car tires have been slashed. They flee toward the harbor and persuade a fisherman to take them out to Paul.

From a storytelling standpoint, this is basically the movie looking at the family and saying, “We need you on the rig now. Please cooperate.”

Paul reaches El Diamante first.

The place is surrounded by an enormous oil slick. Talon somehow spends a significant portion of the movie believing the reddish-brown water is blood.

This becomes increasingly difficult to explain.

How are there still gallons of blood in the ocean?

How many people has this shark eaten?

Why did somebody set the blood on fire earlier?

Eventually the obvious answer arrives: it is oil.

Talon describes The Black Demon as a movie that temporarily made her stupid, and this would not be the last time.

Only Chato and Junior remain on the failing rig, along with their surprisingly well-behaved Chihuahua, Toro. Most of the crew either fled or died, the radio barely works, and Nixon Oil has ignored requests for help.

Then Paul’s family boat appears.

Chato and Junior start firing flares and pounding metal against the rig.

Then everyone sees why.

The Black Demon is a megalodon.

Not a large shark. Not a “that is a pretty big great white” shark.

This thing looks capable of eating a suburban house without chewing.

The family barely reaches the rig. Audrey falls into the water and sees severed limbs while the shark charges from below. She is pulled out at the last second, and somehow the enormous shark stops without launching through the platform.

Both of us had questions about the braking system.

The fisherman who brought the family out tries to escape.

The Black Demon launches from the water and destroys his boat.

He was arguably the most innocent person in the entire movie, which means naturally he lasts about six minutes.

The Shark Is Real, the Body Parts Are Complicated

Once everyone is trapped on El Diamante, Chato explains what he believes is happening.

The megalodon is not simply an unusually ambitious fish. He believes it is connected to Tlaloc, the Aztec rain god, and has appeared because human greed has poisoned the land and sea.

Paul dismisses all of it.

He is willing to accept a prehistoric shark large enough to destroy boats but draws the line at mythology.

Chato also explains that the creature can affect the mind.

That finally explains the opening diver’s peaceful underwater paradise and the dismembered bodies Audrey saw. Tlaloc, the shark, Mother Nature, or whatever department handles supernatural hallucinations is showing people things.

That revelation helped Talon enormously because until then she had been trying to figure out why the workers had surrounded their own oil rig with human body parts.

Her working theory was that they were feeding the shark so it would not eat them.

Which is roughly the same strategy as feeding a tiger enough meat to pet it safely for twenty minutes.

Chato and Junior eventually descend in a diving bell to restore power.

Underwater, Chato discovers the same demolition charge planted during the opening scene. The timer is almost finished.

Then the Black Demon attacks.

The shark crushes the diving bell with Junior inside. Chato escapes, but Junior floats to the surface in two pieces.

Paul reaches down, grabs him, realizes he has retrieved only half a man, and immediately throws him back.

There was something impressively efficient about Paul’s reaction.

Junior: deceased.

Useful rescue object: no longer useful.

Back in the ocean you go.

We Interrupt This Shark Movie for an Environmental Presentation

Chato becomes increasingly insistent that the shark represents punishment for what Nixon Oil has done.

The company came promising jobs and prosperity. Then regulations were loosened, safety was ignored, the rig deteriorated, and the town paid the price.

The movie has already communicated this clearly.

Then it decides subtlety is for cowards.

We get images of pollution, burning landscapes, struggling wildlife, melting ice and general planetary misery while the characters explain that humanity has taken too much from nature.

Talon understood the point before the montage.

Dan understood the point before the montage.

The montage arrives anyway, presumably in case someone wandered into the room halfway through and needed the theme stapled directly to their forehead.

For a shark movie, the shark itself remains surprisingly scarce. We see fins, quick passes and a few attacks, but nowhere near the level of shark mayhem Talon was hoping for.

Jaws famously withholds its shark too, but that builds suspense.

Here, people mostly argue about environmental responsibility while an enormous CGI megalodon occasionally swims through the same-looking underwater shot.

Show us some shark.

Talon had already established after Shark Night that her standards for shark cinema are not particularly aristocratic. She can enjoy absolute aquatic nonsense.

The Black Demon makes the dangerous choice of taking itself seriously.

Surprise: Paul Is the Problem

While the adults work on escape plans, Ines searches through documents on the rig.

She discovers safety reports showing years of violations and ignored problems.

At the bottom are Paul’s signatures.

Now the entire movie snaps into focus.

Ines confronts him in front of their children, and Paul initially tries to dodge the issue before admitting what happened. When he first inspected El Diamante years earlier, he documented the problems honestly.

Nixon Oil summoned him to an office and made the situation clear.

Rewrite the report or lose the job.

Paul rewrote it and kept signing for years.

Paul insists he did it to provide for his family. Ines correctly points out that the people in her hometown lost everything because men like Paul kept choosing themselves.

She tells him he had a choice.

Talon’s early dislike of Paul now feels less instinctive and more like a successful pretrial verdict.

Paul later talks with Chato and finally puts together the second half of Nixon Oil’s plan. The demolition charge on the rig is the same type his company uses.

The timer was set so Paul would be there when it exploded.

His signatures are on the reports. The rig is destroyed. Paul dies with it.

Corporate responsibility disappears under several million gallons of seawater. Neat.

Chato admits he knew who Paul was as soon as he heard the name. He did not know Nixon Oil intended to blow him up, but he knew Paul was connected to what happened to the town.

Paul finally understands that he is not just trapped in someone else’s disaster.

He helped build it.

Audrey Becomes MacGyver While Dad Finds Religion

With the timer running down, everyone starts preparing to escape.

Audrey suddenly becomes the most practically useful person on the rig.

They find an old inflatable raft, but it is full of holes. Audrey cuts material from life jackets, uses acetone to dissolve Styrofoam into an adhesive, and starts patching the raft.

Apparently the school system is doing excellent work.

Meanwhile Tommy, who has spent much of the movie reading about Tlaloc, creates a little wooden boat with figures representing his family and sets it in the water as an offering.

The figure representing Paul falls out.

The movie is not exactly whispering anymore.

Paul, finally accepting that perhaps the gigantic supernatural shark specifically targeting his oil rig may have symbolic significance, comes up with a plan.

He can manually seal the leaking well.

Then he can take the demolition charge, lure the Black Demon toward him, and destroy both the shark and the rig.

The family will escape with Chato on Audrey’s repaired raft.

For the first time, Paul even agrees they should pray.

Ines is almost offended that after years of apparently trying to get this man to believe in something, it takes a megalodon and corporate assassination plot to finally close the sale.

Better late than never.

Six Minutes, Approximately Fourteen Minutes Long

Paul dives beneath the rig with an almost-empty oxygen tank.

He seals the leak while Chato takes Ines, Audrey, Tommy and Toro away on the raft.

The Black Demon begins circling.

And this is where the geography of the shark starts bothering us again.

This megalodon is enormous, yet it somehow navigates through and around the underwater support structure like a motorcycle weaving through traffic.

Talon wondered how something big enough to swallow her house keeps fitting between the rig supports without simply demolishing them.

Dan had not thought about it until she said it.

Talon considered this her intellectual redemption after spending half the movie wondering why blood was oily.

Paul retrieves the bomb and waits for the shark.

The countdown says six minutes, although those six minutes operate according to a separate cinematic calendar.

Paul has time to swim around, hide inside part of the damaged structure, give a lengthy goodbye speech over the radio, discuss gifts, apologize to his family and generally deliver the underwater equivalent of Bruce Willis in Armageddon.

At one point Dan compared his strained breathing to an asthmatic Batman.

Eventually the timer reaches thirty seconds.

Paul leaves his shelter and floats in open water.

The Black Demon rises beneath him.

Because the shark is so absurdly large, it does not really bite Paul. It simply opens its mouth and Paul disappears inside like somebody dropping a vitamin into a garbage disposal.

The bomb detonates.

Paul dies. The Black Demon dies. El Diamante collapses.

Paul finally becomes the sacrifice Chato said Tlaloc required.

The survivors are rescued by El Rey and Chocolatito, with Paul’s evidence meant to help the town hold Nixon Oil accountable. Rain begins falling, suggesting Tlaloc has accepted the sacrifice.

Then Tommy’s little wooden boat is suddenly yanked underwater.

So maybe Tlaloc accepted the sacrifice.

Maybe the Black Demon survived.

Maybe there is another shark.

Or maybe nature just wanted the last word.

The Verdict

Neither of us found The Black Demon particularly scary, and for a movie built around a legendary megalodon, it contains surprisingly little actual megalodon.

Talon wanted a shark movie and got an environmental cautionary tale wearing a shark costume. She does not object to the message. The oil spill, corporate negligence and destruction of the town give the story an actual reason for the shark to exist beyond “large animal hungry.”

The problem is that the movie takes itself so seriously while delivering very little shark action. Talon also strongly disliked Josh Lucas’s performance as Paul, even though she normally likes him as an actor. Something about the performance felt artificial enough that she could never fully settle into the character.

She was bored enough to check her phone during parts of the movie, confused oil for blood for an embarrassing length of time, and generally felt that a cheesier, stupider shark movie would have been more entertaining.

Talon gives The Black Demon 2 cents out of 10.

Dan is considerably more forgiving.

He agrees that it is not scary and that several pieces of the plot require an aggressive amount of cooperation from reality. The shark’s ability to navigate the rig, some of the timing, the repeated underwater imagery and a number of convenient developments do not exactly reward close inspection.

But he does not think the movie is terrible.

For Dan, it falls into background-movie territory: something he would leave playing while working on something else rather than actively shut off. There is enough here to keep it from being a complete failure, even if he would not call it especially good.

Dan gives it 5 cents out of 10.

So The Black Demon ultimately gives us a megalodon large enough to swallow a man whole, an ancient god demanding environmental accountability, a teenager inventing raft glue in the middle of an emergency, a Chihuahua who somehow survives everything, and a company man learning that corporate loyalty is not reciprocal.

Nixon Oil wanted Paul to take the fall.

Tlaloc just had a much more dramatic severance package.