Animal (2014) Directed by Brett Simmons

The odd thing about this movie is that it's an extremely formulaic one but yet it somehow has lots of talents involved with it. Not really sure what they were thinking, since there is absolutely nothing about the story of that the movie that's different or stands out with anything.

And it's not just a very formulaic genre movie but also a very poorly executed one. The one main problem with it is that the build up is absolutely terrible! It doesn't first set up some good tension and mystery but it pretty much throws you right into the action. You just don't really know what going on, who all of these characters and why you should care about any of them in the first place.

The whole movie feels lazy to me. It relies on all of the usual genre clichés and it doesn't really ever care to explain anything. It just goes like; 'here's a random freaky monster and he's after these random nameless people, for no good reason at all. Enjoy!'. Well, nothing enjoyable about any of it unfortunately. Of course some things get revealed as the movie keeps progressing but it's never anything that comes across as very relevant, surprising or shocking.

It unfortunately is also one of those movies that seems to believe that dark equals atmospheric. Absolutely nothing appealing about having to watch a movie that's almost entirely set during the nighttime. Half of the time it's also really too dark to tell what's going on exactly, which especially goes at the expense of the gore of the movie.

Guess that the creature still is an OK enough one but the movie is a too dark one to tell with absolute certainty. It's also weird how the movie at times is trying to hide its creature but at others it's fully showing him, also very early on in the movie already. It should be one way or the other. This way it feels like the movie just couldn't make up its mind about it!

Really not worth seeing.

4/10

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