Night of the Wild

Night of the Wild is a very bad movie. No actual plot, just a chance to have dogs attack & eat humans in a massive mess of craptastic gore & blood. This would be a bad movie if SyFy made it; that it was not makes this one truly unwatchable

By Asylum's standards, this movie is a triumph. Since almost all Asylum films feature terrible CGI and brazenly atrocious acting, this film sets itself somewhat apart as it is a bit higher quality.

I didn't say it was good. Just better than the average Asylum feature. Asylum movies are characterized by a formulaic construction using an outlandish plot, poor acting, egregious errors in common sense, and insultingly horrific computer animation.

So what did "Night of the Wild" bring us? Outlandish plot. Check. We got it here. A meteorite crashes, causing all the canines from every quaint little hamlet in the county to converge upon one little town and maul every happy citizen with a sleeve. Great, I love it. It's nice to see that the townsfolk won't let a few glowing rocks from the heavens stop them from going about their town-ish business.

Then comes the acting. Absolutely sub par, but not to the point of being distracting from the movie's action. I'm traditionally very easy on the actors of such films since I don't think anyone can really save a bad movie movie by eloquently delivering poorly written dialogue. What it comes down to is staying in character, and the actors managed it well enough. I'm sure others here will be happy to rip the acting apart, but frankly I don't see much to comment on here one way or the other.

Next, we get some absolutely ridiculous distortions of common sense. I mean of course that the characters, when faced with disaster, seem to choose the most obviously insipid course of action available to them, every time, without fail. For many viewers of this genre, herein lies our blessed entertainment.

Lastly, the aforementioned terrible CGI. I'm happy to report that for most of the movie, this element is lacking almost entirely. It seems that when faced with a plot line that does not involve mutated fusions of various reptiles and sea creatures, hideously gooey and slimy otherworldly visitors, spectacularly impossible or improbable natural catastrophes and/or large robots, the Asylum studio has enough presence of mind to actually reject hastily constructed and unconvincing computer animation.

Or so I had hoped.. Unfortunately by the end of the film it became apparent that the budget was running short and they had to finish the movie in a hurry, so they filmed the car ride and the plane ride in a studio (you never get to see the vehicles moving), recycled and misplaced a scene or two (the blood and makeup mysteriously vanished for about 8 seconds), and then finally surrendered to the urge to do what they do best: add some hastily constructed and unconvincing computer animation. A patchwork finish if I've ever seen one.

(Spoiler, the ending credits are apparently ashamed of themselves because they zip up at a truly confounding speed. I knew I should have taken that speed-reading course in college.)

Altogether the movie was still entertaining, and in my humble opinion a good move in the right direction for the Asylum studio. It earns one of my higher Asylum movie scores.

More please.

The plot line, what little there is, could be a amalgamation of Cujo and any virus infected meteor flick you've seen. The characters are flat and without personality, so much so that you really don't care who lives or dies and are hoping and praying that some of the more annoying ones die immediately after they are introduced. The introduction of many of them appears to be just so they aren't nameless individuals being attacked and killed. Script dialogue is minimal, and appears only to be there so that there as a punctuation between the dog/wolf attack scenes. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing was written in a single lunch break. I was actually going to stop watching until I noticed the incredibly large number of continuity errors and goofs, after which it then became a fun game of spot the mistake, in nearly every scene. If there was an award for continuity errors then this movie would be at the top and winning an Oscar.

This was less of a Movie and more a game of spot the error and goof.

After the seeing eye dog goes nuts he is in almost every attack scene. He is seen attacking people in the town, in the apple orchard, at the mom's house and back in the town. Look for the yellow lab with the harness. How that dog covered so much territory in one evening is amazing. And then, at 1:14 the mom and little girl take the neighbor's extended cab Ford Ranger and when they find dad and Roz they pull up in a single cab Chevrolet Silverado. Then as they all leave and are shown riding in the truck it is a single cab Ford F-150. As they pull into the airstrip and he "guns it" they are back in the extended cab Ford Ranger - then when they immediately stop they are back in the Chevy Silverado!

There are simply too many continuity errors to list here - those were the funniest ones to me.

I'm actually an hour and fourteen minutes into this movie while writing this. A brief summary; a meteor lands in a small town turning all the dogs into crazed killers and the people into mindless idiots. This movie is not scary, only annoying. Horrible plot, horrible acting and horrible characters. I really don't care if any of these people survive. I'll watch it to the end only because it's been a long day and I'm too tired to care. But please don't make the same mistake I've made and stay far away from this one. Watch the Green Inferno instead, at least it had some laughs.

It mercifully just ended, one of the worst movies ever. Pray there will not be a sequel.