chubbydave This movie has been made and remade over and over again. A group of young people in the woods (or jungle or island or exotic land or wherever) stalked and attacked by a mysterious woodland creature. These are all low budget movies so the effects are pathetic.The only high points (and this is curious because they can do better than this) are Keke Palmer, Elizabeth Gillies and Joey Lauren Adams. Keke we've known for a long time from Akeelah and the Bee and True Jackson VP. Elizabeth was in the Nick show Victorious. Both young likable young actress who you hope would have good careers. Joey is a veteran actress who has been showing her breathtakingly beautiful face in films for decades. I don't know why any of them agreed to do this movie. The money couldn't have been very good, and it certainly isn't a career boost. All three of them could easily get other projects.Anyway, this is just a pathetic remake of a remake of a remake. If you like Elizabeth or Keke, there are plenty of other projects they've done where you can see them. Skip this.

Andrew Gold Animal doesn't have much substance as a horror movie. It's your typical "teenagers lost in the woods and are getting picked off one by one" story, except instead of a machete wielding maniac chasing them it's an Alien-Predator-hybrid animal that has a taste for human meat. For what it is, it's a fun watch - it's exactly what you'd expect from a B-movie called "Animal".I can't score it any higher because it gets zero points for originality and I can't score it lower because it doesn't try to be anything more than a schlocky monster movie. It's surprisingly cohesive writing-wise, and is definitely more watchable than half the F13 entries. Elizabeth Gillies' ear-piercing screams are annoying yet hilarious and add some extra zest once her friends become fodder to this unstoppable beast.Overall Animal achieves exactly what it sets out to, but its sights weren't aimed high in the first place. It's a clear homage to old-fashioned monster movies with lots of campiness, cheesy special effects, blood and guts aplenty, and a handful of scares that catch you off-guard. All you can ever want in a B-movie romp-fest.

The_Dead_See I found this on Netflix, saw it's low IMDb score (4.6 at time of this review) and thought I was going to be in for a SyFY channel phoned-in, cash-cow effort, but I was pleasantly surprised.The plot is ramrod straight - five friends venture into the woods and find themselves terrorized by a man-(and woman) eating monster. They eventually hole up with three other survivors in an abandoned house and spend the rest of the movie there attempting various occasionally fatally ill-conceived survival and escape strategies.The film has the expected tone of all woods survival horrors, throughout I was variously reminded of Evil Dead, Signs, The Descent, Demon Knight, and a lot of the old school animal attack features like Razorback, Alligator, The Edge, Rogue, Lake Placid and Grizzly.The characters are more interesting than the usual stock group of victims. While they start out clichéd, the script allows them to develop and have a few unexpected moments of humanity and development. You don't care for them as much as you care for, say, the boat crew in Jaws, but you do care for them a little, which is much more than I can say for 99% of creature features out there. They make all the stupid mistakes of course (poor scripting), but the fact that I was saying "that was stupid, why wouldn't they just ..." at least shows I was engaged enough to not check out.The most refreshing thing was the man-in-a-suit/animatronic monster. I love love love that the filmmakers went this route. They would have never had the budget for a convincing CGI creature and for most of the movie they keep their rubber monster suitably concealed in foliage and shadow that it's quite convincing and scary enough to be fun.In conclusion, it's flawed, in some places greatly so, but you can see it was trying hard to be a decent horror film instead of a thoughtless straight-to-video flick. The monsters are alright, the cast is alright, the script could be better but at least characters die who you aren't expecting to die. It definitely deserves more than it's current low IMDb score. If you like monster movies at all, you won't be wasting your time with it. 6/10.

gpeltz This is Animal (2014) Directed by Brett Simmons and Written by Thommy Hutson and Catherine Trillo. Spoilers most certainly ahead. No plot here; Group of assorted friends camp in woods, They are attacked by savage unseen thing. Holding up in a cottage in the woods, they get picked off. Have we not seen this before? The cast does what it can with a flat script, They are all monster fodder, The only question is which ones first, and then next on down the line. I found little to like in any of the characters. Bickering lovers, Gay lovers,selfish survivalist, and self sacrificing expiring hero. Their acting was on the emotive side.The editor did everything he could to try to make this ludicrous formulaic concoction scary. Without success. Holding back scenes of the "Animal" until the last reel, does not, in this case build suspense. It just alerts us to the letdown when we actually view the CGI shops version of what it is suppose to be.It looks like they farmed out the FX works to five different shops and got back five different versions of the beast. None of them convincing; I noticed no full body shots of the thing, how it moved was never shown either. It seems to jump from mammal to lizard to alien,I will admit straight out that I viewed a crappy upload, but the repetitive plot could not have been any better on the best of uploads. Once more I suspect that there was more to the movie then presented in the version I watched.In truth, I don't care that I left this attempt at a horror movie incomplete, There could be no surprise plot revelations that would make it any better. Two out of Ten Stars.