While Ozploitation dates back to 1970, the predecessor Dangerous Animals calls to mind more than anything is 2005’s Wolf Creek. Only this time, the mayhem happens in open water. Both these sadistic Australian B-movies revolve around a psychotic serial killer preying on travelers and both serve up blood, guts and torture porn, which should provide gnarly amusement for genre fans. Director Sean Byrne doesn’t lean hard enough into the trashy pleasures for maximum fun, unlike some of the more preposterous recent shark movies. (Give me The Shallows, Under Paris, The Meg.) But he dishes up plenty of lurid chum and puts a kickass heroine in peril.

Considering the fascination with sharks in Australian beach culture and the robust numbers of Great Whites slicing through the oceans off the Western and Southern coasts, especially, the country’s output of shark thrillers has mostly lacked bite. Perhaps the chief exception is 2010’s lean and mean The Reef, while 2012’s Bait 3D earned points for its bonkers premise — sharks in a flooded supermarket! That film’s long-stalled sequel, Deep Water, is due later this year, courtesy of director Renny Harlin, who knows his way around a shark tank from Deep Blue Sea.

In the meantime, here comes Dangerous Animals, a curious choice to premiere in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, ahead of its June 6 release through IFC and Shudder. Neither the best nor the worst of the inexhaustible sub-genre birthed by Steven Spielberg’s unsurpassed classic, Jaws, Byrne’s good-looking film at least has the distinction of being one of the nastiest entries in a while.

That’s because the carnage around the boat is matched up on deck, where human prey are hoisted on a winch, then lowered bleeding into the shark-infested waters while Tucker (Jai Courtney) videos the gruesome feeding frenzy for his secret library of snuff movies. In case that’s not creepy enough, he tucks a lock of the victim’s hair into the packaging of each tape.

Over the course of just 20 years, Courtney has gone from strapping young hunk to brawny musclehead to Oliver Reed. He leans in with relish to the beefy character actor mold, injecting the big bear of a man with brash charisma, wily menace and ferocious brutality that hint at the roots of his unhinged mania. Not that Nick Lepard’s script offers much in the way of psychological insight.

Operating out of the tourist mecca of Surfers Paradise on Queensland’s Gold Coast, Tucker captains a weathered old fishing boat, on which he runs “Swimming with Sharks” tours, offering cage-dive thrills, usually to young travelers. Why these folks don’t change their minds when he asks questions like, “So, I assume no one knows you’re here?” is anybody’s guess.

He welcomes aboard Canadian Greg (Liam Greinke) and his Brit fellow hostel guest Heather (Ella Newton) and chugs far out from shore while making uncomfortable jokes about “human chum.” Tucker lightens — or heightens? — their nervous tension by singing a macabre shark ditty, before giving them the advertised experience of being lowered in a cage into a cluster of circling sharks. They emerge exhilarated, but that doesn’t last long when Tucker unceremoniously dispatches Greg, while Heather screams in terror.

Meanwhile, back in town, Moses (Josh Heuston), a young real estate broker with the body of an underwear model, is having car trouble. Having spotted American free-spirit surfer Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) shoplifting from a convenience store, he teasingly blackmails her into helping jump-start his car. Pretty soon, jumper cables are not all they’re connecting, and steamy sex segues into sweet afterglow talk (she quotes Point Break at him) that suggests a potential romance. But when the conversation gets too intimate, Zephyr takes off in the beat-up van that serves as her living quarters.

Reluctant to let her slip away, Marco guesses where she’s headed to go surfing before daybreak. But he gets there too late, after Tucker has hauled her off unconscious in a surfboard bag. (Excellent use of a multipurpose utility, BTW.) She wakes up on the boat handcuffed to a bed across from Heather, in a bare cell whose only amenity is a bucket. Names scratched into the rusty walls are a bad sign. When Moses sees Zephyr’s van being towed, he knows something’s wrong, and since the police are dragging their heels about investigating, he starts doing his own digging.

The lyrics of Crowded House’s “Mean to Me” — one of a handful of choice Oz-rock nuggets sprinkled in among the groaning and juddering of Michael Yezerski’s big-ass score — hint that Zephyr is not programmed to be a helpless victim: “She came all the way from America / She had a blind date with destiny.”

Harrison (Yellowstone) is a real asset here. It’s at first mildly distracting that she looks and sounds so uncannily like Jennifer Lawrence that they should be cast as sisters. But that takes nothing away from the sharp survival instincts, tenacity and resourcefulness baked into her character, which she plays with the bruised resilience of a woman who grew up in foster homes and couldn’t get away fast enough. Surfing for Zephyr represents the ultimate escape.

At her first sign of resistance, Tucker says he loves a fighter: “Makes for a better show.” She’s not afraid to call bullshit on his windy posturing about the hierarchy of animals, the importance of maintaining order in the ecosystem and his true spiritual calling to serve the god down below. She knows his type and her blunt reading of what made him such a monster appears to hit a couple of nerves.

For his perverse entertainment, Tucker hauls Zephyr up on deck and straps her into a chair to witness a horrific spectacle. “It’ll be your time to shine tomorrow night,” he tells her. Courtney’s performance works best in leering psycho mode, less so when Tucker is bloviating philosophically — but that’s the fault of the script. He’s scariest in his feral moments, for instance when he’s growling and snarling as he tools around town and spots another potential victim.

But his standout scene might be an exultant post-kill dance in the boat’s main cabin, swilling booze and hurtling himself around the room in underwear and a robe to Stevie Wright’s immortal 1974 Oz banger, “Evie.” It’s like the butch version of Jame Gumb’s Silence of the Lambs dance, with Tucker’s bronzed hairy gut proudly declaring his untamed ’Strayan masculinity.

The movie lags here and there as Zephyr’s escape attempts become repetitive. Every victory is followed by a setback, including the stealth arrival on board of Moses. But both Harrison and Heuston give audiences characters to root for, which sustains the suspense through to the bloody final act.

Byrne made a name for himself as a horror auteur with his twisty, subversive debut The Loved Ones and its American followup, The Devil’s Candy. Here, he is over-reliant on jump scares, but he makes a smart decision by smoothly blending manipulated footage of real sharks with live action, nixing the idea of mechanical creatures and minimizing the CG requirements.

Anyone with an aversion to physical and mental torture will likely find Dangerous Animals a repulsive turnoff, but others with a taste for grisly violence should find something juicy to chomp on.