Live Animals

Live Animals is in the same category as Saw and Hostel; independent, torture films, which portray the lowest level of humanity; this feature is not for children or those easily offended. College students make the mistake of having a little party in the woods. They are abducted by a group of slave traders and held captive, chained, and in cages, as the title implies.

The holding place almost looks like a prison, with adjacent cells holding the human cattle, and they are tortured mercilessly by their overseers. I guess the point here is our nasty treatment of animals for our food supply. The acting is nothing special, and the story watchable for the short, eighty six minute running time. If you need to kill an hour and a half on a rainy afternoon, Live Animals is an entertaining diversion.

The premise had promise (human capture and slavery in middle America) unfortunately the execution was off. Stilted characters that reeked of horror movie clichés and an overly long tedious opening that almost made me turn the movie off in boredom did not help the film (and continuity issues with blood covered ripped up shirts don't help either).

Buckets of blood do not make a good movie, no matter how many teenagers tell you it does. Perhaps given better actors, editors, writer and director, this would have been a decent film, but in this case, it was poorly executed by the cast and crew that were in over their heads from the very start. And the goofy twists in the last fifteen minutes are simply that…goofy.

And as a note to the writer: if you are going to make a point of the main protagonist saying that he can break a human in a mere three days...please follow through with it. Nothing happened to even remotely break anyone.

A group of lively college kids are on break, dancing and romancing and generally fooling around when they are hunted down by burly, menacing Edgar (Patrick Cox) who shoots them full of tranquilizers. The young people awake chained in horse stalls. These would-be yuppies realize that they are now the property of human trafficker Wayne (John Still). With his white hair and beard and roly poly big belly, Wayne appears a kind of perversely demonic Santa Claus. More concretely, he comes across as a psychopathic business executive when he announces to the young people in the stalls, "You are my property!" The ruthless capitalist aspect is underlined when he is depicted at his desk, filling out forms and keeping track of funds like any efficient executive. But he is as ruthless as they come as poor Josh (Scott Fletcher) soon discovers. Letting out a series of loud cries at being chained, he faces Wayne's wrath, which is, of course, expressed in torture and mutilation.

The primary protagonists of the film are brother and sister Nick (Christian Walker) and Erin (Jeanette Comans). Nick is the youth with, as Wayne notes, "spirit," who desperately seeks a way out of enslavement, Erin is the sister of whom he is protective and who, in her turn, is protective of her friend Vicky (Scarlet Williams), the first to be toyed with by Edgar, and the first to be sold. Almost as striking as a torture or mutilation scene is the scene in which this pretty twenty-something female is locked inside a wooden box with the words "Live Animal" on it. We are told she is to be shipped overseas where she will be imprisoned in a brothel.

Perhaps the most interesting character is Kathy (Stacy Still) who is not one of the college kids but whom they are surprised find already there in one of the stalls. She appears to have been kidnapped some prior but has not been sold and instead gone insane from the sheer boredom of her surroundings. She spends her days reciting children's nursery rhymes, repeating phrases she hears from other people, and talking ambiguously about a husband who might be about to rescue her.

Directed by Jeremy Benson, with a screenplay he co-wrote with Mark Williams, "Live Animals" is a fast-paced, interestingly nasty piece of work. I enjoyed watching as these unfortunate young people sought so desperately to find a way out of their horrifying situation and fight against their heartless captors. Although others have faulted the acting, I found it satisfactory, particularly by John Still, Stacy Still, and and Christian Walker - the three performers who really count. A lot of blood is splattered around and the cinematography gives the whole thing an appropriately gritty and sleazy look to it. There is a startling twist toward the end. Does it make sense? Maybe. Maybe not. But it hardly matters because it ramps up the horror and fits perfectly in a film that wallows in the grisly.

How someone can pull such a bunch of crap and believe there was "writing" involved. Take all the clichés avoided by even the most amateurish wannabe, cram them into a night-shot film with one of the most dreadful lighting for night I've ever witnessed, throw in some sloppy characters without soul or possible empathy-connections, spend a large sum of money in film, lighting and post, and you have -mileage may vary- this "film". I feel sorry for the poor actors that might thought this was an opportunity to do a nice job.

If you teach whatever you teach, you can use this thing to show your students how not to do things in life.

By success I mean it succeeds at showing prospective future film producers and directors how not to make a movie.

It showcases some great ways to save $$$ on movies too:

1) Make a low budget movie by showing the same scenes over and over with different dialog played over them each time. This will serve to nauseate your viewers while also giving you what appears to be an hour and a half of movie.

2) Hire small time, unknown actors for the roles then film then for just 20 minutes each so you have the footage to replay multiple times.

3) Don't pay to see this movie, that's the best money-saving tip of them all!