Customer Reviews

Animals

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This movie had an interesting idea behind it. However there were only 2 actors that could act, there was not enough of a story to go with it. Sure, the overall plot was acceptable, but there was no real drama or hook that draws you in, begging for you to see the next scene. There was very little character development and of course the CGI was (I'll be kind) lacking in anything remotely resembling a great monster impression. Bottom line, If you like a stale story, horrible special effects, and 7 sex scenes randomly placed within a movie for no reason at all, then this is the show for you! However if you like actual character and story development, real drama, and a longing to know how it will turn out, then please do not waste your money like I did. This movie was not worth the $3 dollars I lost to watch it. Please learn from my mistake, do not watch Animals.

Animals should have been a good "Grade B" horror flick, but it really never got interesting enough to make it worth seeing.

The plot seemed interesting enough - No spoilers from me: The story revolves around a washed up football player who returns to his backwards hometown only to fall into a serious rut. Along comes a beautiful stranger who takes an interest in him, but she has a serious ulterior motive.

What follows is a lot of sex, some fairly well done gore effects, a few weak fight scenes, and perhaps the cheesiest CGI special effects ever (seriously). The acting was on par with other low budget movies, but there were really no standouts to make this movie worth seeing again. This movie really moved slowly and the odd camera work and editing also made it difficult to watch.

Not Recommended.

CFH

If you like special effects that turn so-called monsters into paper mache' pinatas, this one's for you! What a joke. The acting was non-extistent; script played out like it was written by a 10-year-old, and the blood effects looked like jellied cranberries. Avoid! Avoid! Avoid...I wish I had, before wasting my time on this total BOMB! I give this 1 star because of the cover artwork. It is quite impressive...so unlike the film! AVOID!

All in all as a movie production goes, I would give "Animals" 2 -3 stars. However, the sex scenes in general were very sensual and the scene in the alley was off the charts! WOW!!! What an awesome, erotic and powerful performance by Nicki Aycox. Where has she been hiding that body?

It's tempting to say that Animals, penned by Craig Spector and starring Marc Blucas, could have been so much more. But now, thanks to the Twilight and Underworld franchises, the werewolf genre is both exploding and being whipped to the ground. Soon it will go the way of the zombie by being so ubiquitous as to be positively loathsome, no matter how sexy the actor/actress playing the part. On the writing end: as a pair, John Skipp and Craig Spector wrote some of the most formidable horror of the 1980's and early 90s with such fare as Light at the End, The Cleanup, and the Scream. By the time the Animals novel came out, their star had long faded as the quality of their earlier work seemed to be lacking. How appropriate that their weakest work gets made into such a weak movie that tries to capitalize on the werewolf craze. To harken again to the mainstream franchise movies, the werewolf film genre' wasn't just reignited with these movies, but positively exploded as werewolves were no longer solitary tragic figures, but were now dynamos of sexuality. Animals is very upfront about getting its horndog on as the unsympathetic leads pretty much spend half of the movie doing it all over the place. As many reviewers have remarked, there is not much of a plot. Girl runs away from abusive controlling douche bag boyfriend (played with a sleazy relish by Naveen Andrews), girl meets guy and treats him like how she was treated and gives him something (wink-wink, nudge-nudge). The special effects weren't cheap so much as they were insubstantial-I kept wondering what the hell it was I was seeing all the time. If you're looking for a point to this movie, there isn't one.....oh wait, there's a little bit of animal in all of us. Whoa. That epiphany came from nowhere--which, come to think of it, is where this movie should have stayed.

I picked up this movie after finding out it was put out by Maverick Entertainment Group. MEG specialize in independent direct to DVD films and overall their products are worthwhile B-Movies when you buy them used. Animals is no different, it contains gratuitous nudity and is totally an Urban Romance Novel come to life. Overall it wasn't a bad way to spend a late Friday night.

(actually I'd give it two and a half stars, but the template won't let me go halfway on a star... but since I *really wanted to like* this movie more than the final verdict left me, figured I er on the side of nice.)

So, the movie version of one of the best werewolf novels ever... wound up as a direct-to-redbox cheapy. Nowhere near as bad as feared; in fact, there's a lot going for this, particularly in atmosphere and inspired character-actor casting - I think I'm in love with Eva Amurri and Nickie Aycox [hot werewolf girls... literally at each other's throats... *growl*], Marc Blucas is perfectly cast and deserves to go far as an actor, and villain Naveen Andrews is a pure wicked treat. But I swear, someone in the freakin' editing room must have been on a Mission to make this movie suck! And the story/mythos-changes did nothing but clutter things worse. Also, they made that most frequent of gambles when adapting material like this from page to screen, namely taking story elements that were withheld 'til later in the book, creating tension and mystery that built to surprise twists, and presenting it in real-time from the git-go (as in pretty much every screen/stage version of DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE). Sometimes said switch-around works out well, in other cases not. Here... not so much :-/ And seriously, when adapting a 500-page novel with a rather packed plot, there's no excuse for so much filler in the first half of an 80-minute movie, then truncating the second half of the story within an inch of its life. All that internal POV/voice-over/werewolf-DNA-microscope-footage nonsense was a nightmare (and not in the good way you'd hope for from this sort of movie). Still, I confess, I actually like how they made use of low-rent CGI for their creature effects. If you can't make your otherworldly creature look convincingly physically *there*, why not go the other way and have it look intentionally *not* quite there, semi-spectral, suggesting your beastie's not fully of this dimension of existence. Makes perfect sense to me, to where it's a wonder someone didn't think of it sooner. Stephen Sommers should take notes.

So, I have a thing for Naveen Andrews, and I love monster movies. When I saw this film in a video rental box, I thought I had to see it. Some notes about the cover: I never saw a hot red-head in the movie, and the scene on the cover has nothing to do with anything. That's fine: it reminds me of Evil Dead's cover. This, however, is no Evil Dead. I love a good B-movie as much as the next gal, but this film was riding that line where it was neither good enough nor bad enough to be worth watching. It reeks of mediocrity, and the "plot" just seems to be some pointless and badly acted conversations or killings interspersed with the very awkward and unconvincing sex. Suspension-of-disbelief was not invoked. I would only watch it again to hear Andrews say the word "Darling."

Is there a C movie category? While I know movie people have to start somewhere, this movie started at the bottom and worked its way down. The story never told why these people turned into animals, or ghostly-smoke-demon-animals, or if they did, it was so ridiculous I didn't pay attention to it.

The lead, Marc Blucas, played his part well, though how he did it with a straight face, I have no idea. Naveen Andrews played the baddest of the animals, and after learning to love him on Lost, I had a hard time with him in the role of unrepentant bad guy who eats people apparently for the fun of it. He's also abusive to his girlfriend Nicki Aycox, who had her clothes either falling off, or off for the entire film. I would have relabeled this soft porn with a better plot that most, rather than a slasher-type film.

Susan Surandon's daughter, Eva Amurri was also in the film and while I don't want to give away what little plot there is in this film, I will say that she was a little stiff as an actress. But, she's attractive and knew all her lines and isn't trading in on her mother's name so kudos to her.

I have to confess that the only reason I watched this movie was because our daughter worked on it. I don't think I'll let her father see it.

I ended up watching "Animals" because it had Marc Blucas from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and Naveen Andrews from "Lost," so I figured there had to be something here to attract both of them, besides a paycheck. Blucas plays Jarrett, who is one of those nice guys who meets up with a bad girl, in this case Nora played by Nicki Aycox. What drives most of the plot in story, which was adapted by Craig Spector from the novel by John Skipp, are the two big things that Jarrett does not know that the audience does. The first is that Nicki's bite is turning him into an animal just like her, which would be a werewolf-like thing (the hyphen signifies that it is neither a wolfman like in "The Wolfman" or a big wolf like in "New Moon"). We are have an inner beast yadda-yadda-yadda, and now Jarrett's gets to come out and play. The second is that our hero is involved in a love triangle, because Nicki has been taking a break from Andrews' Vic, and now Vic wants her back. Actually, there is a third thing that Jarrett does not know, and that would be that he has the love of a good woman, namely Jane (Eva Amurri), back at the local watering hole.

In the final analysis, "Animals" falls prey to the fate of many horror movies in that when you finally get to see the monsters in their full glory, you are more inclined to laugh than to shake with fear in your boots. So the rule of thumb here is the less you see of the actors, the less you enjoy the film. Of course, that means the reverse is true, and with regards to three of the four main characters you are going to get to see pretty much all of them. One of the strengths of this horror film ends up being the sex scenes, which are pretty much on a par with late night cable soft core porn. When it comes to gratuitous nudity and sex, it is hard to beat horror films and usually the sight of a woman's naked breasts are a clear indication that she is about to be dead and they are about to be covered in blood. But these sex scenes were well integrated into the storyline.

Speaking of blood, my favorite scene in this movie was when Vic encounters one of those convenience store clerks who would rather talk on a phone than wait on a customer and he unleashes his inner animal to teach her the error of her ways. The payoff for this scene is a nice example of how you can be more effective suggesting what happens rather than showing everything. So director Douglas Aarniokoski (credited as Arnold Cassius) gets credit for doing more with the material than you would expect. The rating on this one ends up where it is because two stars means I wish I had not bother to watch the movie (one star means the people who made it should be hunted down and hurt badly), and three stars means I will probably never watch it again but it had its moments, which aptly describes "Animals."