Live Animals is a flick, like another recent release, Gnaw, that holds a ton of promise for fans of horror in general and gore in particular. The premise can't honestly be considered to be completely fresh, but I've long that new ideas or setups were the most overrated aspect of evaluating movies. What's the old saying, "There's nothing new under the sun."? Maybe not entirely accurate, but more than a kernel of truth there, in my opinion. Anyway, I thought the premise and set up of the story was pretty good, but the flow of the story and its myriad holes in the plot keep me from telling you I thought this one was real good.
Look, its not a total swing and miss. Not even close. Some of the acting is pretty good, which is hard to do when the script is somewhat lacking. Gore fans will love the principal bad guy (John Still)-a dead ringer for Gunnar Hansen by the way-and the matter of a fact way he controls the abductees during the "breaking process". Horror fans will love the simmering, psychotic aura of a bad guy who can turn on the charm and talk about how nice it is to be married.
He's not alone, Patrick Cox does torture and understated lunacy as "Edgar" the chief assistant of the operation who, honest to goodness, gets a paycheck for his work.
There's some gore, too, though I don't know if it is enough to satisfy the most blood thirst of fans, but a tongue extraction is nothng to sneeze at.
My main issue is, its just hard to buy the story. How did these folks get abducted so easily? Is it really believable that all of these people could be held against their will-not to mention the collateral damage in the form of other bodies-in broad daylight while their captors shop in town and not have anyone be the wiser? Also, there is somewhat of a twist towards the end, involving the survivors last gasp at freedom, but there are just a couple of holes much too big for me to tell you its as effective as it could have been.
I know we horror fans have to suspend disbelief even a little more than other genres of film, but, to me, part of being scared or at least made to feel uncomfortable is the thought at some level that this could really happen. When that is not there, you'd better have some element of the supernatural or something like it if you want to hit it out of the park.
But, I want to make clear that this is a smaller budget film that makes one hell of a good effort to do something of quality. This isn't your normal "B" level horror flick where they producers and director get some naked girls to run around, splatter a lot of blood, try to gross us out one or twice with some gore and hope to catch lightning in a bottle. Nope, Live Animals tried to tell a horror story, one with some basis in real life events, but fell short in my view. Nothing to be ashamed of and I do hope the filmmakers go for it again.
Give it a shot, particularly if you are into small budget horror. Maybe I'm being a little too harsh on it and, if I am, please let me know.
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