“Shark still looks fake.”

Marty McFly mutters this line in Back to the Future Part II after being startled by a 3-D virtual ad for Jaws 19, set in a futuristic 2015. This scene was partly a playful jab at director Robert Zemeckis’s friend and producer, Steven Spielberg. It also alludes to the way the artificial appearance of the shark in Jaws does not diminish the film’s ability to terrify audiences. Moreover, it unintentionally offers a fitting summary of the trajectory of shark films following Jaws. Despite being half a century old, the original film remains a significant cultural icon, even though the sharks in subsequent movies often appear noticeably artificial.

Interestingly, the shark in Jaws, whose mechanical hiccups famously led Spielberg to use creative filming techniques to mask its flaws, holds up quite well to this day. While not exactly realistic, the limited screen time of the creature renders it eerily effective. This quality is mirrored by its adaptation into an early version of a Universal Studios ride, drawing a parallel to the imposing presence of an animatronic monster on a theme park ride: its sheer size and level of detail make it genuinely unsettling.

Mechanical sharks pose challenges in terms of construction and mobility, real sharks defy control, and CGI sharks often fail to impress visually. Achieving a vivid portrayal, similar to simulating a superhero in flight, remains an elusive feat for filmmakers, even as these genres expand. As a result, directors continue to seek alternative solutions.

Dangerous Animals, a new shark-related horror movie that hits theaters this week and Shudder later this summer, finds a novel one: It’s really a serial-killer movie, and the shark isn’t the killer; it’s the weapon. This could be taken as a spoiler if you haven’t seen the ads, and the first scene of the film does a literal bait-and-switch with a pair of tourists in Australia approaching Tucker (Jai Courtney), seeking an authentic swimming-with-sharks experience. He’s excited, she’s reluctant, and we’re primed for a diving-cage mishap akin to the recent 47 Meters Down series.

But the dive goes well, both tourists are exhilarated… and mid-gush about what a powerful experience it was, Tucker suddenly stabs one of them in the gut, casually throwing him back into the water to be devoured. It turns out the most dangerous animal is, as ever, man! After all, no other creature is capable of capturing others, rigging them to a harness, lowering their bleeding bodies into the water to use them as shark bait, and gleefully filming every feeding session to add to a library of gruesome VHS snuff tapes. Once this information about Tucker is established, along with Courtney’s cred as a zestfully evil slasher villain, the movie follows American surfer Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), who we realize will at some point cross paths with Tucker and his death boat.

When she does, the movie gets more juice from its non-undersea logistical challenges: unlocking handcuffs, scrambling for flares, squaring off against a brawny Australian, and, only secondarily, actually avoiding shark bites. In other words, Dangerous Animals turns into a survival thriller that nonetheless doesn’t require heavy or constant use of sharks – a blessing, because while this lower-budget movie gets plenty of suspense mileage out of its serial-killer premise, most of its shark effects (unavoidable in some scenes) are pretty poor.

But then, that’s true of most of the better post-Jaws shark movies, which like their ancestor revel in work-arounds for the fact that actors are a lot more pliable than sharks. 47 Meters Down also has a survival-thriller angle that goes beyond whether sharks will eat humans, and The Shallows goes even further into woman-against-nature territory; it’s basically a two-hander between Blake Lively and a resourcefully spiteful shark. (There are other humans in the movie, as well as an injures seagull, but they’re mostly there so the shark has something to do to prove its menacing bona fides.) The best and worst big-budget shark-effects movie is Deep Blue Sea, because it’s unafraid to go hard with its army of superpowered sharks, but also relies so heavily on computer effects of 1999 that it can’t help but look far more outdated than Jaws (despite the latter being twice as old). Still, they beat the hell out of the effects in the ostensibly slick likes of Under Paris, which failed to deliver on its promise of urban sharks in the Seine. Even the Meg series, premised on a prehistoric creature that various Jurassic Park movies should have prepared filmmakers to execute, can’t help but look cheap and meager.

Dangerous Animals almost goes too far in the other direction, however understandably. The sharks in this movie don’t wind up doing a whole lot, and in the occasional money shots, they look fake as hell. Director Sean Byrne milks the film’s premise well, and Harrison makes an appealingly tough final girl – continuing a minitrend of shark-bait thrillers as proving grounds. It’s just not quite as diabolical as the very best screw-turning survival thrillers, nor does it have the shark leeway of The Shallows (where, when the creature appears, it’s used sparingly enough to look pretty good). Dangerous Animals is good fun, but keeps butting up against the carny-barker limitations of the shark-movie genre, which sort of inherently promises more than it can ultimately deliver.

But there’s something satisfying, too, about sharks remaining both so alluring and so limiting as a subject for fiction film, a full half-century after Jaws popularized them as such. Part of what makes them so scary to humans is the mystery and (to us) remoteness behind those opaque, unblinking eyes. It makes sense that physical depictions of them in film would mostly fail to get it quite right; they’re from a realm where most people can never spend too much time. Dangerous Animals particularly avoids one common pitfall (seen in The Shallows, great as it otherwise is): ascribing “bad” motivations to animals that truly pose far less immediate danger to most humans than a litany of other, more quotidian threats. Tucker is the dangerous animal here, manipulating the sharks by drawing blood in the first place. He’s also a reminder that humans can continue to make and consume shark movies, occasionally even coming across a Jaws-like masterpiece, but they’ll still only be imperfect imitations of the real, unknowable thing.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.