Director: Franco E. Prosperi
Cast: Lorraine De Selle, Antonio Di Leo, Ugo Bologna

Ever since I was very young, animals have always generated in my mind a good amount of fascination. From the aardvark to the zyzzyva (bet you had to look up the latter animal), every animal I have encountered either in person or in some kind of media has at least at one point given me a little pause to think about them. One of the many interesting things I have noticed about animals is that they seem to be divided into four certain categories when it comes to encountering humans. One of these categories is near to total indifference to an approaching human. For example, if you were to stand next to an ant hill, the various ants entering and exiting would simply go along their business without apparently giving you any kind of acknowledgement. While ants and other animals have managed to stay in existence despite their utter indifference to mankind, there have been a few animal species (such as the dodo) that have been made extinct by their seeming indifference whenever humans approached them. Lesson to be learned from the dodo: Everybody on Earth should study really well in school and afterwards, so if there should ever be some kind of attack from an advanced alien species, we'd be able to put up a good fight. On the other hand, there are some animal species that have managed to keep from being extinct by being in one of those other aforementioned animal categories. One of these ways is by being shy. The birds right outside your window are just one example of how some animals are conditioned to immediately get away should a human start to get near them. Though personally when this kind of activity happens, I cannot help but question if it could be my breath or body odor that's really making them flee from me.

As for the other two kinds of animal categories I am thinking of, they are each two extremes that are much different from each other. One of these categories is being impossibly friendly. There are many animals, from man's best friend the dog to the dolphin that really seem fond of humans and freely approach them. Since these animals are so friendly, many people feel warmth to them and don't want to harm them, so the animals don't have much to fear from humans apart from a few occasional quirks like restaurants in Korea and tuna fishermen. But the last category of animal is the one that I really want to talk about, and that is the kind of animals that often approach humans with a lot of hostility. Bears, hippos, snakes such as the black mamba... I could make a long list of such animals, which I don't think is necessary, since you surely have a mental list of such animals in your mind. Such animals that can be very dangerous to humans have always filled me with fascination. These animals certainly make me wonder why they are so often cranky when humans get near them. But it also gets me thinking of other things about them. For example, if these animals can be so hostile to humans, do all other animals have the potential to lash out at mankind? For most animals, I think the answer is yes. Dogs have become hostile on occasion and attacked humans. I also remember many years ago in my city, when there was an aquarium that kept some killer whales, one day one of the whales grabbed with its teeth one of its human trainers and whipped her around in the water until she drowned.

However, it does seem that many animals that could become potentially dangerous to humans seem only capable of doing so under extreme conditions, conditions that they normally wouldn't experience. For example, in my neck of the woods, cougars have attacked humans when there have been slim pickings of other creatures in their territories. Many of these conditions are due to those pesky humans, however. Let's face it, humans have inflicted a lot of unnatural abuse, intentional or unintentional, on the animal kingdom. And there's bound to be some kind of push back from animals under those circumstances. That's kind of the idea behind the movie Wild Beasts, which could have been made into a sober and thought-provoking exercise. But knowing that the movie was made by the Italians in the early 1980s, I knew that the treatment of this premise was going to be a lot more exploitive. How exploitive the movie gets is something I will get onto later, but for now, here is a brief plot synopsis. The movie takes place in the European city of Frankfurt. The city has a run-down zoo filled with many wild animals who are obviously not given the best kind of treatment. A zoologist at the zoo named Rupert Berner (played by Antonio Di Leo) is one night called by the police to investigate a report of rats outside of the zoo killing two people. While Rupert is inspecting the scene of the killing, back at the zoo the electronic caging system for the animals gets destroyed when the elephants break out of their space, and all the zoo animals manage to get out. That would definitely be a problem by itself, but all these zoo animals have been driven mad by some still unidentified source, and the zoo animals (also including tigers, cheetahs, and polar bears) go on a rampage and start killing every human they encounter in their path.

Although you probably saw of this plot description for Wild Beasts that it's essentially an excuse for gratuitous bloody mayhem, you probably also know that even in a movie like this, you need some sort of story to hang everything together and not make the mayhem boring. Unfortunately, the screenplay by Franco E. Prosperi (who also directed this movie, as well as the notorious Goodbye Uncle Tom) is quite often remarkably dumb. Right at the start, we get onscreen text saying, "A Northern European city" over the cityscape, and a few seconds later we see a sign saying "Frankfurt Zoo". Well, maybe a few people don't know what continent Frankfurt is in, but I think even they will be groaning at later idiotic scripting. There's a city power station located right next to an airport runway so that a landing plane can crash into it and cut the power. At one point, the phone system of the city is down, but shortly afterwards someone comments that all the lines are busy... and then shortly afterwards, people manage to telephone each other. While the animal rampage is going on, after Rupert saves his girlfriend Laura (Lorraine De Selle, Cannibal Ferox) from a savage tiger, both Rupert and Laura forget for a long time that Laura's young daughter Suzy is not in a secure place and may be in danger from other mad animals. But the most stupid aspect of the script is when the explanation is revealed as to why the animals went mad in the first place. I won't reveal what it is, but the explanation doesn't make sense since logic dictates that many humans at the same time of the animal rampage would also have been affected. Also, although we get an answer as to what is causing the terror, we get no clear explanation as to what exact circumstances caused the terror element to get into the Frankfurt area. It's a very unsatisfying explanation, to put it mildly.

But the story elements are not the only dumb element to be found in Wild Beasts' script. The characters are written to be not with a great amount of believability or depth, not just with the aforementioned moment where Suzy is forgotten about for a long time. Rupert, for example, is indicated to be used a lot by chief police inspector (Ugo Bologna). Why on earth would a police inspector need the frequent use of a zoologist? It's never answered. It's all made worse by the fact that even when the stupidity dies down momentarily, the characters still lack great appeal. Rupert and Laura for the most part take the grave situation much more lightly than you'd think, at times almost coming across as jovial about the threat that's already built a body count. Laura's daughter Suzy is an annoying brat, which may explain why in the first hour of the movie, she doesn't get to do or say very much. Also, moments like when someone uses a flamethrower on (real) rats, the observing Rupert says at the sight of the rats running around aflame, "Yeah, that's the way!" (There's also a real cat shown being savagely attacked by the rats, by the way; both these examples make me severely doubt that this movie is available in the UK.) Other characters that make appearances often don't get to do that much. There's a blind character that makes a few appearances, and at the end of his final scene, it's clear that he served absolutely no purpose except to be slaughtered by his dog. The zoo's inept security guards also seem to serve no other purpose as well, and that also goes for the young couple near the beginning that get chewed up by rats. As for the animals that are cast in the movie, while they do look appropriately unhappy, it seems to be instead from their dismal and dirty surroundings, so seeing these animals being pushed around by their trainers to do deadly things to humans is not terrifying, but instead kind of sad to watch.

With the animals looking like they are suffering to a degree, it should come to no surprise that director Prosperi can't seem to build any shocks and frights when the animals are attacking various Frankfurt residents. It certainly doesn't help that Prosperi more often than not directs the attacks ineptly. Most of the animal attacks are shot extremely close-up and with fairly rapid editing, with the use of stunt doubles for the attacked human characters being quite clear. Other attack scenes have just as little impact, like when a cheetah chases a woman in a car for a lengthy amount of time; for over 90% of the chase, we don't see the cheetah and the car in the same shot. As for the level of gore the animals manage to make, although we see a few bloody and mangled bodies that look passable, there actually isn't as much blood and gore than what you may be expecting. It feels like Prosperi is intentionally holding back, which is a little frustrating. The rest of his direction, by the way, isn't all that much better. Several car crashes (and a plane crash) the animals make happen have no impact. But the really big mistake Prosperi makes with directing Wild Beasts is that it has very little punch. The movie for the most part is directed in an extremely casual manner, so much so that when the fecal matter hits the fan and the city is supposedly dropped into chaos, the mood isn't much darker than before things went wrong. Although the movie moves from scene to scene fairly briskly, all the same there is a kind of slow and tedious feeling to this story. There is very little to indicate Prosperi, or anyone in front of the camera, was sufficiently enthusiastic to gain an audience's interest. The movie ends up being without claws or bite.

(Posted Februrary 13, 2024)