Animal

"Animal" is actually a fairly decent creature feature. Sure, the movie doesn't offer anything new to the genre. In fact, everything here has been seen before in other similar creature features.

But still, the movie was entertaining and thrilling. And when the movie offers nothing new and is essentially fully a movie much similar to every other creature feature, then what makes it stand out? Well, because the movie follows the "how to make a creature feature" to the point. But it is the creature itself that makes the movie so interesting.

The creature in the movie is unique in appearance and the special effects team did manage to pull it off quite nicely. The creature looked like a strange mutation between a rodent and human of sorts. It did look realistic and was adding a great sense of terror to the movie.

While the creature alone would make for a boring movie, then the people on the cast were doing great jobs with their given roles and characters. And it is especially great that no one is safe and out of harms way. The movie does offer that sense of unpredictability, which adds to the suspense of the movie.

The movie is visually great, but also audibly great. The score is nice and very appropriate to the movie. But the sounds that the creature was making proved to be quite interesting, not to mention unnerving.

It would be great to have another movie made with this particular breed of creature. I can recommend "Animal" if you enjoy a good old fashioned styled creature feature horror movie.

They're in the house not holding ANY weapons in their hands whatsoever when the creature is scoping it the first time. Not even a sharpened stick. How totally stupid and unrealistic. Only later on did they grab anything. So you're telling me in that house there's no kitchen with knives or anything? The tiny boards on the windows look 100 years old and don't look like they'd hold out a five year old.

A group of five twenty-somethings head out into the deep woods for what seems to be a hundred mile hike. When night falls, they realize that something big, hairy, and extremely dangerous is in the forest with them. Blood-spraying death soon follows.

Finding an occupied, barricaded cabin, the hikers take refuge with the three already inside, while the beast terrorizes them. Of course, all is not as it appears to be, and secrets are being kept.

ANIMAL is a monster movie, plain and simple. The plot is basic. The characters are disposable. What makes this movie watchable is the -practical effects!- creature of the title. Underused, it is a welcome sight whenever it shows up to grab another tasty human to snack on!

For lovers of the genre...

Animal doesn't have much substance as a horror movie. It's your typical "teenagers lost in the woods and are getting picked off one by one" story, except instead of a machete wielding maniac chasing them it's an Alien-Predator-hybrid animal that has a taste for human meat. For what it is, it's a fun watch - it's exactly what you'd expect from a B-movie called "Animal".

I can't score it any higher because it gets zero points for originality and I can't score it lower because it doesn't try to be anything more than a schlocky monster movie. It's surprisingly cohesive writing-wise, and is definitely more watchable than half the F13 entries. Elizabeth Gillies' ear-piercing screams are annoying yet hilarious and add some extra zest once her friends become fodder to this unstoppable beast.

Overall Animal achieves exactly what it sets out to, but its sights weren't aimed high in the first place. It's a clear homage to old-fashioned monster movies with lots of campiness, cheesy special effects, blood and guts aplenty, and a handful of scares that catch you off-guard. All you can ever want in a B-movie romp-fest.

It's not that it is really bad, it's that it is a cliché from start to end. You've got the group of young people in the woods, all the archetypes in: manly guy, gay guy, black girl, smart person, bitchy person, insane person, etc, their characters barely sketched. And then a nondescript monster, bipedal, bald head, with really long and probably ineffectual teeth, a mane!, nobody bothering to even explain where it came from.

And then it starts, the story I mean. Only there is no story. They all act like it's "just an animal" so their solution is not to trap it and kill it, instead to just go out and try to "run for it". Their only displays of courage is when they have to fight each other.

Bottom line: the same movie, the same lame effects, the same script, the same bad actors. You've seen it before unless you are really young. And then you should watch something better, just because there are so many better genre films.

The only possible reason one would watch this is to see Eve (yeah, the singer) being killed in the beginning of the film.