This has all of my favorite elements of a low-budget below B-movie horror flick - a cast of unknown actors and actresses, a rookie director, a budget of however many bills and coins said director could fit in both jeans pockets, and a film poster/DVD cover that quickly triggers a WTF reaction. The tagline, The Island of Dr. Moreau meets Hostel, should have had me running for the hills but I couldn't resist the cute and cuddly hillbilly porker with the pitchfork. Until tonight, I was a hogsploitation virgin and there's no purity in that.
It seems those crazy scientists are doing the Devil's work again. This time, they're performing sick and twisted experiments, slicing and dicing up swine and then splicing their DNA with humans' for the sole purpose of... entertainment? The viewer is never given comprehensive details as to why there would be any intelligent purpose to create a porcine-human mutant and it's probably for the best, considering there is no reason convincing enough. Lo and behold, the lab's dubious creatures end up slaughtering their creators and abandoning the compound they'd been confined to in favor of a nearby abandoned farm. He-pig and she-pig and their mischievous midget son have quite a mean streak, taking delight in abducting poor folks who have the misfortune of traveling through them their parts.
A trio of band members, Mark, Travis, and Tom, Travis's ditzy and well- endowed groupies, and Valerie, the band's manager, are kidnapped and made to await their demise in chickenwire prisons. The movie is tolerable up to this point, thanks to some good suspenseful, nail-biting scenes, and of course, healthy doses of blood-soaked innards and dismembered limbs. What destroys Squeal is the insufferable screaming, bawling, and the God-awful, over-emphasized hyperventilating from all but one of the characters. At some point, the director has a duty to step in and squeeze two fingers together in a gesture that says, "Tone it down, waaaaay down."
Other than that, the make-up (aka a pig nose and body hair) is decent, the acting is not that bad, and the DIY special effects are okay. A lot of the gore and violence is shot right outside the camera's view and, besides a brief sex scene and a pair of naked knockers, this is something one would expect to see on the Chiller channel late at night. Even though I rated it low, this was a hundred times better than I expected it to be and is actually more watchable than most of the drivel on the SyFy channel. I've seen worse movies, horror or otherwise, with a much higher budget. Michael Bay, anyone?
