BAD MOVIE REVIEW: Rise of the Animals (2012)

If I were to make a movie…it’d probably look a lot like Rise of the Animals. When I envision making a movie, I know I won’t have any money. I know I won’t have any talent. I know that the effects/lighting/sound/camera quality will be utter shit…but since I know that ahead of time I can use those things to my advantage. Play on the bad to make it good.

That is Rise of the Animals.

Take this scene for example. A cat is hissing violently at a clearly shaken up woman holding a frying pan. The cat ATTACKS! Aaaannnndddd somebody off camera just throws a stuffed cat at her, she bats it away, stuffs it down a garbage disposal and turns it on…then a ridiculous amount of blood explodes out of the sink.

That happens like 20 times in this movie. Whether it be stuffed animal/horrible hand puppet/or just some terribly rendered CG animal, the badness just never stops coming.

The story basically goes like this: Animals have lost their shit. Somewhere else a Pizza Boy and his trusty friend are on their way to see Babies with Rabies 3D. (OH GOD YES!) They come across a cabin filled with drunk hot chicks so they decide to stay and party with them instead. The next morning the animals start attacking them and then a whole heaping pile of hilarious awesomeness happens.

As I was watching this movie, somewhere around the midpoint I noticed a Dawn of the Dead poster in the background. That got me to comparing the basic plot of this movie to that one. Well, more Night then Dawn. Like, the animals are the zombies and they attack people holed up in a cabin. They get out and must defend themselves against the unending horde of murderous animals. Why are they crazed? No idea. Is the world ending? No idea. All that matters is survival…and if that means blowing up squirrels and rabbits then so be it.

I liked that. It’s like this movie was made for me. Rise of the Animals knows what I want to see and it just keeps delivering. And that’s what makes this movie so great. It has everything…the Jaws Shot (Where the camera zooms in on an object while the background is fading away), there’s crazy unneccary shaky cam, high body count, Wilhelm Scream (any movie that uses a Wilhelm instantly wins me over), and just so much more.

The direction is very impressive. Whoever is behind the camera has obviously seen a lot of movies. They don’t hold it on any one shot for longer than needed (unless there’s some intent at being funny). When the action picks up, so does the camera. They took every fun little trick that Fred Dekker ever used in Night of the Creeps and just applied it all here. I loved every god damn minute of it.

Now, when I made the comment about not having “talent” for a movie like this…I’m going to take that back. This movie has a remarkable amount of talent. You’d think that at least most of these actors would have poor line delivery…but they all did quite splendidly. That has to be a result of a laid back and easy going production. I can just see that they are all good friends in real life so they know each other well enough to just be themselves…and that really translated well to film.

I can’t recommend this enough. You’ll want to have a taste for bad cinema if you’re going to enjoy this. DO NOT TAKE IT SERIOUSLY...and you'll be fine. Take this for example: Some douche on IMDb started a post about how terrible this movie is....and I gotta ask, "After seeing the poster and the trailer....what were your expectations?" Here is a member of the crew's response:

It just makes me love this movie even more. Because that is totally how I would have done all that too. (And the douche that posted the thread immediately retracted his statement after this HAHAHA)

If you need the big CGI, big explosions, big name stars, then you’ll probably hate this. But if you can sit back and enjoy hand puppet deer dragging slutty teenagers to their doom…then you need look no further than Rise of the Animals.

Rise of the Animals is currently on DVD and you can buy it on Amazon or from Brain Damage Films.