So I’m rolling with one of those occasional kicks we all (I’m assuming) go on where we catch up on seeing a bunch of shit we’ve been hearing about for X number of weeks, months, even years, and last night said kick took me to 2011’s Rise Of The Animals, a flick shot in and around Rochester, New York for the princely sum of $7,000 by a guy named Chris Wojcik who may be short on what passes for “skill,” but clearly thinks he possesses just enough to crank out one of those “so bad it’s good” pre-fabricated “cult” numbers that outfits like Troma and The Asylum have made their bread and butter for literally decades now. That being said, if any one film can be considered a direct thematic and stylistic predecessor to this one, it would be James Nguyen’s Birdemic, but there’s a very crucial difference between the two — Nguyen was actually trying to make something he thought might turn out to be “good” (at least his first time around), and Wojcik clearly suffered no such delusions and kept his tongue firmly in his cheek throughout his bargain-basement production.
Points to him having his head screwed on straight, then, I suppose, but here’s the thing — recent-vintage “midnight movie” favorites like Birdemic and The Room became grassroots mini-sensations precisely because they’re such earnest films where the various principals involved were working so hard to produce something that could pass for “art,” while a flick that knows it’s a steaming pile of horse (or moose, or bear, or cat, or squirrel) shit and just hams it up as much as its budget allows for can never come close to matching the wondrous ineptitude of those who try and (spectacularly) fail. I guess what I’m saying is that bad movies that were trying to be good are inherently more interesting than bad movies that were just trying to be bad.
I’ll tell you what, though — even with all that in mind, Wojcik almost won me over in the early going. The premise here is amazingly lame — teenage virgin pizza-deliver boy Wolf (played by Greg Hoople) and his equally never-been-laid buddy, Jake (Adam Schonburg), finally get lucky one night when they crash an all-girl slumber party, but Wolf’s lady-love, Samantha (Nicole Salisbury) heads clear across the country the next day. There’s no time time to be depressed, though, because out of the blue the animals (as in, like, all the animals) have turned homicidal and are slaughtering anyone and everyone in sight. And so Wolf, Jake, and Jake’s newfound girlfriend, Rachel (Stephanie Motta) decide their best bet is to hit the road and make sure Samantha’s okay. Cue the madness.
And even that’s kinda fun at first — stock footage of house pets, horses, etc, is mixed with amazingly bad puppetry (yes, you read that right) and even more amazingly bad CGI (my favorite being a gorilla with a red mohawk) to create some of the most clumsy animal “attack” scenes ever committed to to film (or, in this case, hi-def video) where actors seem to be moving in no relation whatsoever to the direction the “threats” against them are coming from, but here’s the problem — once the shtick wears off (which doesn’t take long), there’s just nowhere for this flick to go. And so it doesn’t.
There’s plenty of (phony in the extreme) blood and gore on hand here — in many cases people are absolutely drenched in the red stuff for little to no apparent reason even though they were pretty clean a second before — but that, and the hope for some more cringe-worthy dialogue, is about all that can keep you interested for the back half of the film’s scant 70-minute runtime. Wojcik doesn’t even fall back on the tried-and-true trick of consistently one-upping himself with his on-screen kills, some of the better (or at least weirder) ones happening early on, with the boring shit coming later on. The script essentially runs in place (even though the characters are headed toward a destination) until its big finale, and if you’re still any more than, I dunno, 25% more interested in what’s going on by that point, then congratulations on having a much greater attention span than I do.
Still, if there’s one thing I know, it’s my readership, and I’m sure that no matter how hard I might try to warn you off it, this is going to sound like the kind of movie that a lot of you feel like you just need to see. Fair enough. But please do yourself a favor and don’t hunt down Rise Of The Animals on DVD (if it’s even available in said format, truth be told I’m not sure) or pay to stream it, not when you can just check it out for free on YouTube by following this handy link :
Trash Film Guru 