War is enough of an unimaginable horror but writer/director Kiah Roache-Turner (Sting) morphs that unrelenting hellscape into a living nightmare with his newest feature Beast of War. Set in the Pacific Theatre of WWII, a group of Australian soldiers fresh out of basic training are forced to fight for their lives when their boat is capsized…in shark infested waters. Gore and gun smoke fill the frame but where the terror really lurks is just below the surface thanks to a killer looking shark and some brutal sequences that see these poor soldiers get eaten one by one.
Beast of War stars Mark Coles Smith (We Bury The Dead) as Leo, an Australian aboriginal with a tortured past, gearing up for the meatgrinder of 1940’s warfare. His effort and ethic have earned him the respect of his fellow soldiers but thanks to a particularly racist prick in their division, his fight begins before the squad ever sets foot on the battlefield. Leo is selfless and fast on his feet, which are qualities you really hope for in a person when you’re stranded in the middle of the ocean. After their boat is sunk by Japanese fighter pilots, Leo helps lash together a life raft for the group to stay afloat, but that’s when the real danger begins.
Wounded and drifting in a thick fog, the group barley has enough time to catch their breath and assess the situation when a thousand pound killing machine that’s nothing more than teeth and an appetite finds this swim-up buffet. And hoping that it’ll simply get bored and move on is pretty much out of the question while their untreated injuries are continuously chumming the waters like a dinner bell. It’s one battle after another in this indie-war-epic-turned-monster-movie, but thank to Kiah Roache-Turner love for good gory fun, both sides of this merciless equation are filled with brutal cinematic carnage.
Beast of War isn’t a war movie that suddenly becomes a shark movie, it’s a two-hander of unstoppable death. The poor bastards at the centre of the story are barely given enough time to recover from one big bad villain before another shows up to rock their shit again! And in a fun little horror twist (and perhaps a menacing nod to the Jaws score), the great white picking them off like human-sized hor d’oeuvres as a warbled air raid siren stabbed into his fin that cries out in the fog like a banshee’s haunting wail. Equals parts War Horror and Shark Horror, Beast of War is an unrelenting fight for survival with a dynamite looking shark for a big bad villain.
“It’s one battle after another in this gory indie-war-epic-turned-monster-movie”
Kiah Roache-Turner’s Beast of War hits theatres Oct 3 and was an official selection of Fantastic Fest 2025. Click HERE to follow our continued coverage of the festival and let us know what you thought of this gritty WWII shark flick over in the official Nightmare on Film Street Discord! Social Media is A Cesspool. Come Hang With The Cool Creeps.
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