Rise of the Animals (2011)

Director: Chris Wojcik

Screenplay: Chris Wojcik

Cast: Greg Hoople as Wolf; Stephanie Motta as Rachel; Adam Schonberg as Jake; Nikki Preston as Samantha; Charles Bigelow as Grandpa

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

Around the seventies, there were a lot of killer animal films. Sharks, bears, lepus, bees, piranha, supernatural bears and just every animal going nuts. Beyond the seventies, the Italians tried with Wild Beasts (1984), directed by one of the co-directors of the infamous Mondo Cane (1962), but beyond that the idea of the killer animal film these days usually have a whiff of Sy-Fy original film or a Sharknado sequel, a genre which appears mainly in shark films but is more common among the lower budget productions nowadays.

Rise of the Animals, envisioning this tale in Rochester New York, is however a micro-budgeted production which leads to immediate questions of how director-screenwriter Chris Wojcik was able to pull off a genre which, if clips of Night of the Lepus (1972) and its giant superimposed bunny rabbits say anything, wasn't easy to pull off back in a Hollywood film let alone here well. Some CGI animals, and many puppets is the answer. A gleeful amount of puppets are involved, to the point even someone who might find this all to be cheese, in which a pizza delivery guy with a male friend and a tough young woman find themselves in a zoological apocalypse, will still admire the chutzpah and fake blood being liberally split here. From the moment the film properly kicks off, in a scene of dear puppets attacking a house in the middle of the woods, it kick-starts film which already had its tongue in its cheek and charm fully.

It's a ridiculous film, but the experience of Rise of the Animals is of a micro budget film that, whilst isn't one of the most remarkable, does deserve a pat on the back for facing an obvious paramount obstacle (its budgetary restrictions), and manages not only to succeed over them but become more rewarding because of how. The film doesn't try to hide its silliness, not ironic but with humour set out when you see the first scene. A middle age woman having to fight her own cat, flinging a visible plush toy into a sink, alerting you that a lot of fake blood is going to be sloshed everywhere when the in-built trash compactor is used. Trying to rescue her son after this, there's the amusement of a Labrador dog, clearly gentle and playing in the scenes, covered in fake blood and being edited around to look like a killer chasing a child at the end of it. It sets you up for the restrictions at hand but how resourcefulness isn't going to stop the production. It's why these type of films win over fans.

The film doesn't try to hide the CGI either - a gorilla who is from a nineties edutainment video game if he went feral is a major set piece after all - but when used in this context, it works with a charm. And the amount of puppets and fake animal props, even though a surprising number used actual animal materials to built them, are great leading to some of the funnier and more rewarding scenes between a deer bellowing a death scream to killer turtles assaulting a canoe. There's a sense of cleverness and resource at hand happening parallel to absurdity, so that when the protagonists' go on a road trip to local a crush the lead has, there's enough to keep the attention of the viewer. Sometimes it's really captivating too, like the a horse attack that even if it uses a CGI one for the female lead to martial arts kick off its hooves, involves an actual horse riding alongside the actress in a surprisingly bold creative choice for the film.

Plot wise, its simplistic but in a quirky way. Our adventure starts with a pizza guy, having gotten to a party and meeting a very attractive young woman, having probably one of the most awkward and considered takes on a sex scene involving a premature conclusion, not played as a laugh at his expense but a surprising sympathy involved. I will say the film does have a moment where it gets a bit sexist in some of the comments, but it also has a female lead, another woman at that party, whose the most reliable and dangerous person in the midst of the animal apocalypse, someone who when manure hits the fan will fight to protect herself and gladly eat cooked rat off a stick if need be, a tough as nails character who is done without overdoing it as it common in significantly more high budgeted films, just an ordinary person able to strike a horse out cold in a way Arnold Schwarzenegger would be proud of. Even our lead's sometimes creepy lad friend obsessed with sex eventually becomes sympathetic as just a jokey guy in the midst of the lunacy.

Due to the budget, a lot of the film is restricted to empty country roads and woodland, following our trio, but thankfully there's both a cast who are likeable and have good banter to work with, and the location in New York state is very cinematic, so it fits for a film where every animal is dangerous to there to be some dread in wandering desolate countryside environments and fields. When it does get ambitious, it's something like the suburbia sequence which has cops dragging along a post covered in squirrels they've had to cull, a significantly good layer of the blackest humour to the film's open silliness. Even if the logic of the film, where one wonders if the insects have turned too among other things, is vague as a film, it has enough to make this premise work for a splat stick comedy.

Also in Rise of the Animals' favour is that it's only an hour or so long, which is a huge virtue for the film, managing to still have a fully formed narrative without any chaff. Considering disaster films, like Roland Emmerich's 2012 (2009), are notorious for padding and dull exposition, that this without the end credits manages to economise on its length in telling a story better is a blessing. That's also in knowledge that some micro-budget films, even though padding can be a virtue for fans of the work, can just drag even at one hour. Maybe this film was a one-off, but there's a delight in how with such severe limitations, you can still turn out a film like this high concept premise with the economy the restrictions face, and significantly more prudence in using said resources even in terms of not being a two hour film and straining itself.