Space 1979 Apocalypse How 2: The one with the animal apocalypse

 

Title: The Day of the Animals aka Something Is Out There

What Year?: 1977

Classification: Runnerup/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Dear God WHY??!! (1/5)

 

For the next installment in the apocalypse lineup, I’m returning to a subgenre I’ve covered before, the “killer animal” movie. It’s a theme that can be traced to Medieval and Renaissance times, when artists like Hieronymus Bosch used vengeful animals as a symbol of divine wrath, outraged nature or just well-deserved comeuppance. It got an early start in modern horror and sci fi movies with The Birds, which was followed by ecological parables like The Frogs, Phase IV and Squirm. It all largely petered out with Jaws, which scaled the apocalyptic allegory back to the “straight” monster movie, as well as a resurgence of more conventional post-apocalyptic fare. But there was still one more egregious example from an offender we’ve met before. Here is The Day of the Animals, a film from the guy who gave us The Manitou.

Our story begins with a grim text crawl warning of the dangers of ozone depletion and what “could” happen. You might expect this to turn into a story about cancer or global warming, but in fact, we go straight to a party heading out on a nature hike. We’re quickly introduced to a cast of cliches and stereotypes, notably a newly divorced mother and her son, a bickering husband and wife, a wise Indian, and an ad man who’s already trying to act more macho than a Klingon gone native. As they make their way along, we get frequent shots of birds and beasts that seem to be trailing their party (of course including ominous “POV” camerawork). The party remains oblivious enough that they are completely unconcerned when they find an unoccupied campsite with coffee still brewing on the campfire. As the night passes, they find themselves under attack by wolves, cougars and other unpleasant creatures. Meanwhile, we learn that the world’s wildlife is going berserk and attacking people unprovoked, only at elevations over 5000 feet. As the new day dawns, the party must make their way back to civilization, now with a traumatized child in tow, but the ad man has decided he is in charge and would rather play by the law of the jungle. Will the party survive, or has man finally proved as deadly as the beasts?

The Day of the Animals was the second-to-last film by filmmaker William Girdler, who died in a helicopter crash shortly before the release of The Manitou in early 1978. The film was widely viewed as a followup to the 1976 film Grizzly, an arguable Jaws knockoff that proved profitable but entangled Girdler in legal battles for his share of the money. The cast included Christopher George and Richard Jaeckel (see The Green Slime) from Grizzly and The Manitou’s Michael Ansara (who played a Klingon on the original Star Trek), with Leslie Nielsen as the crazed Paul. The animal attack sequences were filmed mainly with live animals, including a trained bear, with optical compositing used for a sequence in which Mandy is killed by hawks. The movie made a very modest $2.8 million box office, which was still more than twice its $1.2M budget. The movie has long enjoyed a cult/ camp reputation, with a Rifftrax cut released in 2017.

For my experiences, I first heard of this one a long time ago. I finally watched it while working on the lineup for Repeat Offender week (originally slated to end with Prey). I went with other material, but was definitely interested. As I thought over the possibilities for the present list, it came right to the top, with only The Frogs really rivalling it. What kept this one more interesting is its deceptively late date, only five years after Silent Running and just one after Squirm, but beyond a canyon-sized gulf in terms of genre trends. This was literally the year when Star Wars was tearing up the box office, and a year before Dawn of the Dead started the late ‘70s-1980s zombie movie wave. After that double whammy, audiences wouldn’t come back to the grim ecological parable until well into the ‘80s (see The Nest). This movie was like the guy who doesn’t just come late to the party, but wanders in after the host has already gone to bed. With that disastrous timing in mind, it’s impressive enough this movie made twice its slim budget.

Moving to the movie itself, the unavoidable comparison is Planet of Dinosaurs, another movie from the same banner year that was a relic by the time it hit theaters. The formula is effectively the same, a group in a life-threatening environment who are all cliched, all dumb, and almost all devoid of any likeable qualities. Here, at least, the unqualified macho idiot who tries to take charge is cast as a villain, though the storyline still doesn’t really show the realistic and predictable consequences of his stupidity. Even so, this movie somehow falls short of that mindboggling low bar, perhaps all the more so with a cast and crew who clearly know what they’re doing. Planet of Dinosaurs was at least unintentionally amusing (not far from Maximum Overdrive), but this borders on willfully irritating. Anything of quality comes from Ansara, who keeps the same unaccountable dignity as a typecast non-Indian Indian that he did in The Manitou, and the completely surreal casting of Nielsen. The latter should have offered a good turn as a villain, especially considering his inspired performance in Creepshow just 5 years later, but this feels like finding out Frank Dreben is an alcoholic who murders call girls on the side, except that we could actually believe he had a dark side we don’t know about.

That leaves us with the animals, and that is where the movie fails at almost every turn. The pseudoscience about the ozone layer is obvious nonsense, and renders the movie far less effective than predecessors like The Birds (which still wasn’t nearly as good as the short story). What stands out to me is that any metaphors that could be drawn are wasted. Actual wolves and cougars are willy and elusive (and in the case of the cat almost entirely solitary), a potent analog for anything from the Apaches to the Viet Cong, but here, they practically come out and say howdy whether it’s the dead of night or broad daylight. An action sequence where wolves and at least two cougars seem to attack in unison is simply strange and oddly tame if you really know anything about the animals. It’s still not as bad as the ludicrous demise of Mandy, in which the woman has to be practically pulled aloft to appear to be in any danger, or an even lamer rat attack. The  one vaguely inspired moment is Leslie Nielsen’s last stand against a bear, who seems merely perplexed as he pummels it in rage while the survivors in his group run away. (Why they didn’t run away before is a whole other can of “cringe”.)

Now, it’s time for the “one scene”, and there was truly one that stood out all along. As the middle act meanders to a close, we catch up with a guy in the group who has been trying to take care of a nearly mute child. They finally reach an already deserted town, and the adult tries to find help. He senselessly leaves the child in the middle of a sidewalk with absolutely no cover or protection, and gets angry when she becomes distressed. He quickly repents, and takes her to a potentially secure vehicle where he locks her inside and promises to return. Of course, we know where this is going. He barely gets a few steps before the beasts are on his trail, and then tries to take cover where they are obviously waiting. He lasts long enough to scream for help, while the girl only stares.

In closing, this is a movie that left me conflicted. Judged on its own flaws and occasional strengths, it would get no more or less than a 2, and I came very close to leaving it about that. But there is something here that makes it far lower than the sum of its parts. It’s not as bad as plenty of movies I have viewed or reviewed (including, dear Logos, Grizzly), yet the more I scrutinize it, the more I feel personally annoyed. I see it especially in comparison with The Manitou, which whatever its flaws at least told a unique story in an interesting way, according to a bonkers kind of internal logic, and made us care about its characters to boot. This movie, on the other hand, is nonsensical in concept, dull and often incomprehensible in execution, and unable to make us want anyone except Ansara’s character and maybe the girl end up as anything but kibble. The fact that it is made with a minimum standard of competence only shows that those involved could and should have done better. The standing principle for my ratings remains that it is one thing to be bad, and another to be inexcusably bad. This is a movie that is not the worst, but has far fewer excuses than most not to be “good”, and that is what makes a film with no right to exist.