theater of guts: Wild Beasts

Wild Beasts Directed By Franco Prosperi. Starring Lorraine De Salle (1983)

Review By Goat Scrote

Well, this is not a very flattering depiction of whatever city this is. There are piles of used needles in the gutters. The drain water froths with pharmaceutical contamination. Pranksters have talked about putting LSD in the water supply since the 1960s. What if something really leaked in the water that caused crazy behavior, ha ha, that’d be pretty trippy, right?

Our Animals are on PCP guaranteed!

Cut to: The city zoo.

There’s a quote on the screen from someone named Francis Thrive, but the text is Italian. I'm so glad Google Translate exists. Let's see now, "...our folly overflows on things and infects innocent victims such as children or animals....” Okay, that’s grim, so of course I’m right on board with the sentiment but I’m not familiar with the source. This Francis Thrive person doesn't have a Wikipedia page, and therefore might as well never have existed at all. Is the internet making me intellectually lazy, or would my brain have turned into gelatin by this age no matter what? The movie keeps coming back to that sign with the cheetah. I should really be doing my homework, not watching obscure Italian trash. Huh, my mind is wandering already. Hey, look, a horse... horses are my favorite animals, they’re totally awesoMEAT CLEAVER TO THE HEAD! WHY WOULD THEY DO THAT?!? Freakin’ Italians. Okay, the horse was already dead, and yes the zoo animals eat meat which has to come from somewhere. Everyday work with predators at a zoo is going to expose you to some pretty gross stuff, and I bet the filmmakers had plenty of this kind of material that they could have included.

Mr. Ed's greatest last role

The animals at the zoo are acting funny, but that’s okay because they’re still secure in their cages… oh, until a bunch of PCP-crazed elephants bust through the walls and all the cage doors open. Well that makes perfect sense. The zookeepers wired all the doors together this way so that whenever there is a disaster, all the animals will be able to get out and use their special animal powers to aid in rescue efforts. I think this film highlights what might be a serious flaw in that otherwise-excellent plan. What if the zoo animals turn evil? I know, it’s hard to imagine a snuggly polar bear closing its jaws around the eggshell of your skull and crunching into the brainy goodness inside, but they have been known to do that sort of thing. It’s just a suggestion, I’m no expert, but if you’re going to build a super-fancy electronic door control system for your zoo, it might be better to design it so that the cage doors remain locked when something breaks.

Marshmallows would be delicious with those BBQ'd rats

A couple making out in a little car are set upon by a horde of rats that are hungry for human. Now, I happen to be a survival expert because I play tons of roleplaying games, I watch horror movies, and I was a Boy Scout. This is how I am qualified to make the statement that there is exactly one perfect weapon for this situation. Conventional firearms are useless. You could fire a pistol until its empty and then throw it at the rats, screaming as they rip the flesh from your bones. An assault rifle is going to make a lot of noise and chew up some of them but it won’t drive them back, and you’ll soon be overrun by a furry tide of bloodthirsty critters. A grenade will kill some of them but it’s liable to fling the plague-ridden vermin like shrapnel, and no one likes an angry rat coming toward their face teeth-first at 200 miles per hour. A molotov cocktail is better than a prayer, but those things are a serious hazard and you’re liable to set yourself on fire. No, there is only one perfect solution when several thousand rats are trying to kill you. Apparently the people running this city play Call of Cthulhu as well, because they are right there on the scene with flamethrowers. Hell yeah! Flamethrowers! Every movie gets better when there’s fire… oh no! I keep forgetting who made this. Real rats, real fire. So, yeah, animals were harmed during the making of this movie. I feel guilty but I keep watching anyway. It’s not like boycotting the movie at this point is going to change anything.

High Octane Orkin Man

Freakin’ Italians.

There's a pretty swell cheetah vs. car chase. This would really make a lot more sense if the animals were on meth, you know, but who cares. "Hey, look at that! She's not crazy, she's being chased by a cheetah!" Your shitty VW bug will not outrun this mighty predator of the savannah. Ouch, brutal motorcycle wreck. Hey, this is a pretty cool action sequence for an Italian movie. But where did the cheetah go? I wanted to see it go in for the kill.

Magnum P.I. Pet Detective

Soon we learn the answer to an age-old question which has troubled the hearts of humankind. If an elephant got into a fight with a commercial airliner, who would win? Answer: PCP elephant is victorious!

The animals spread terror in their wake. Disasters are unleashed. The power goes out. Commuters are trapped in the subway while a tiger stalks them. Children at a dance class are hunted through a darkened building by a bear. People get crushed by elephants. Jackals and lions attack pigs, cows, and horses, which break out of their enclosures and stampede through the streets. The kids at the dance class start to freak out a little bit, and they have access to knives. Just as the animals start to come down off their “bad trip”, the kids attack the adults. The end!

Oh yeah, there is a little bit of story drizzled throughout all this. It involves some scientists who work at the zoo, who are trying to understand why the animals have gone insane. There’s a subplot about the single mother scientist and her emotionally distant relationship with her precocious daughter, which is conducted mostly through tape-recorded messages to each other. I’m a sucker for a scientist-hero in a horror movie, but the scientist-heroes of Wild Beasts are unsympathetic. There are some reasonably well-made scary sequences, but much of the movie is terribly dull and nothing in it ever redeems the actual animal cruelty. It’s never fully explained how the PCP came to affect the zoo animals and the kids. I don’t really expect these movies to make much sense so that’s okay. I’m taking suggestions for good eco-horror schlock along the lines of Grizzly or this, but, y’know, better.

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