HUNGRY: More "Aww" Than "Ahh!"

HUNGRY (DVD)

2026 / 93 min

Decal Releasing

Review by Josey, the Sudden Cat🙀

Of course, the title is intended to evoke memories of the popular kids’ board game, Hungry Hungry Hippos, suggesting a goofy good time. But since they are herbivores, it’s essentially meaningless here.

Hungry is indeed about a disgruntled hippopotamus that stalks and terrorizes a boatload of tourists who wander into its territory. In this case, it’s a remote section of the Louisiana bayou. And don’t worry kids, one character explains how this malevolent mammal got there in the first place.

The same guy also informs the worried cast that hippos are vicious creatures responsible for hundreds of human deaths every year, which is actually true. But even if they were capable of committing genocide, hippos are simply too damn cute to be truly terrifying. You’d probably have better luck scaring the viewer with otters. At least they have claws and sharp teeth.

Done eating marbles.

But these fellas, with their big snouts, kloppy feet, round tummies and wiggly little ears? I watched Hungry with my daughter, and when the homicidal hippo finally appeared (after a long wait, I might add), our reaction was a collective “Aww!”

Still, writer-director James Nunn certainly gives it a good college try, and to his credit, Hungry reflects some genuine effort on both sides of the camera. Storywise, we’ve seen this kind of thing plenty of times before with a variety of critters. But despite a title that suggests a self-aware campfest, the overall tone remains fairly serious, and believe it or not, the special effects are actually pretty good (with only sparring use of CGI). This might actually come as a disappointment to bad movie connoisseurs. 

Save for Joaquim de Almeida as an amusingly cantankerous charter boat owner (and the aforementioned hippo expert), the characters and performances are merely serviceable. That’s perfectly okay, too, because we’re just waiting for this hippo to fuck people up anyway. And when she finally does get down to business, Hungry is an agreeable way to kill 90 minutes. 

EXTRA KIBBLES

THE MAKING OF HUNGRY - An entertaining doc with behind-the-scenes footage and cast/crew interviews. As B-movies go, this was actually a fairly big production.

DEEP WATER and a Cause for Optimism

DEEP WATER (Blu-ray)

2026 / 108 min

Magenta Light

Review by Mr. Bonnie, the Chumbucket😼

Nobody needs to be told that shark movies are a dime a dozen these days. They also don’t need to be reminded that most of them are cheap garbage. And only the truly delusional hold out optimism that any new shark movie is gonna be another Jaws. That will never happen.

But it's reasonable to be optimistic that at least some of them will turn out to be decent, and we’re occasionally rewarded with some good ones, such as 1999’s Deep Blue Sea. Directed with workmanlike skill by Renny Harlin back when his name was still (sort of) revered in the action genre, the film was a lot of wild, ridiculous fun. 

Deep Blue Sea remains a pretty highly regarded slab of sharky cinema, so even though he’s hardly made a movie worth enduring since then, one probably can’t help but be equally optimistic over Harlin’s return to shark infested waters with Deep Water. This one doesn’t reach the same heights, but with tempered expectations, it’s an enjoyable chompfest.

Part shark thriller, part disaster movie, Deep Water certainly boasts an irresistible premise (for genre fans, anyway). Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley star as the pilots of a commercial airliner that crash lands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, which kills most of the passengers. Kingsley earns his paycheck in the first 30 minutes, leaving Eckhart and the remaining survivors to contend with a swarm of hungry sharks encircling the crash site. Some get eaten, some don’t.

Aaron Eckhart & co-star.

Taking a cue from the old Airport franchise, Deep Water frontloads its story with a gaggle of stock characters, along with their prerequisite side stories. Most are standard issue, though Angus Sampson is highly amusing as a cartoonishly obnoxious passenger. In fact, so much effort is put into making the audience hate him that the (enormous) team of screenwriters neglect to develop other passengers beyond potential fish food. 

Elsewhere, the action sequences are pretty enjoyable, starting with the plane crash, which is lengthy, destructive, well edited and surprisingly violent. The bloody shark attack scenes, of which there are plenty, run hot and cold. While fairly convincing beneath the surface, the spell is broken whenever these beasties burst from the water, rendered through GCI that’s no more convincing than it was in Deep Blue Sea 30 years ago. 

With a bigger budget and better overall performances than the typical straight-to-video shark flick, at least Deep Water more-or-less justifies our initial optimism. Nobody’s gonna walk away thinking they’ve seen a great film, nor will it dispel the consensus that Renny Harlin’s best days are behind him, but tireless fans of this stuff should have a good time.

THE SAVAGE BEES: How To Pay For Your Expensive Stadium

THE SAVAGE BEES (Blu-ray)

1976 / 90 min

Leomark Studios

Available at MovieZyng.com

Review by Mr. Bonnie, the Buzzkill😼

New Orleans’ Superdome was completed in 1975. At the time, it was the biggest domed stadium ever built (for all I know, it still is). I assume it also cost a pretty penny, which had to be somewhat concerning since the NFL team that called it home was the worst in the entire league…and would remain so for most of the next decade.

Still, ya gotta pay the bills. Maybe that’s one reason the city immediately allowed the place to be prominently showcased in a couple of made-for-TV movies. One of ‘em was a soapy little drama, simply titled Superdome. Before that, it was the setting for the climax of 1976’s The Savage Bees, an amusing horror-disaster flick starring Michael Parks and Ben Johnson.

If you were around back then, you might recall ominous predictions that the dreaded African killer bees were making their way north from South America, and it was only a matter of time until they reigned terror in our own backyards. While that never really happened, it was great potential horror fodder, so we were inundated with the likes of The Bees, Killer Bees, Terror Out of the Sky (which is actually a sequel to The Savage Bees), and most notoriously, Irwin Allen’s daffy debacle, The Swarm.

Bugs on a Bug.

Here’s how old I am…I remember tuning in to watch The Savage Bees on NBC when I was a kid because, in the wake of Jaws, flicks featuring killer critters were hard to resist, even the made-for-TV variety. While I didn’t end up fearfully looking out my bedroom window for the inevitable swarm of Africans, I recall enjoying it in the moment. But afterwards, I never gave the movie another thought for 50 years. 

Revisiting the film on Blu-ray, the Superdome climax was all I actually remembered of the movie, and even that sequence seemed a lot bigger - and less silly - when I was a kid. The rest has coroner Jeff DuRand (Parks) and Sheriff McKew (Johnson) trying to locate the deadly swarm after it has killed several people during Mardi Gras. There are a couple of decent attack sequences here and there, but it mostly plays like a quickly made TV movie of the era (including a superfluous subplot involving DuRand and his estranged girlfriend). Though not quite as goofy as The Swarm, it’s also not as much wacky fun. While still watchable with expectations in-check, its primary appeal today would be to those nostalgic for a decade when movies-of-the-week were a staple of network schedules.

Keep in mind that the movie slapped onto this disc (with no discernible attempt at restoration) opens with German credits with the title, Mörderbienen Greifen An, which suggests this is the only available version. Other than that, it’s the same old Savage Bees I tuned into back in the day…and looking a lot worse for wear. The picture and sound quality is terrible. There are also no bonus features, chapters or even a main menu.

MONSTER ON A PLANE: Cancel This Flight

MONSTER ON A PLANE (Blu-ray)

2024 / 90 min

Uncork’d Entertainment

Available at MovieZyng

Review by Josey, the Sudden Cat😾

Hoping for a little cheap, trashy fun in the sky? Look elsewhere. While I periodically enjoy a bit of exploitative junk as much as the next guy, Monster on a Plane mostly fails to even reach those lowly standards. 

Ironically, overall cheapness isn’t the movie’s problem. In fact, it dutifully includes plenty of the gratuitous sex & nudity, splatter & gore, cut-rate CGI and phony monsters that have made similar films a lot of shameless fun. And of course, it’s got the usual silly story and overwrought performances, capped off by the prerequisite title that explains the plot in a nutshell.

However, this one doesn’t even rise to the level of so-bad-it’s-good, for a couple of key reasons. First off, the dialogue is not only terrible (hell, that can be forgiven, even embraced), there are numerous distracting occasions when it doesn’t even make sense…and I’m talking grammatical sense. Monster on a Plane is a German production but filmed in English, and if I didn't know better, I’d say the script was originally written in German before being fed through Google Translate and handed to the cast. Some of it even sounds like it was clumsily written by AI (as a former teacher, I’ve seen many examples of AI’s butchery of the English language). Here’s just one stellar example:

Man: You know who I love more than you? Your tiny boobs.

Woman: You idiot. My boobs belong to me.

This little fellow is in charge of guarding the script.

The entire cast delivers their lines as if they aren’t always exactly sure what they’re actually saying, their efforts to recite everything verbatim coming across as a struggle. Elsewhere, I found myself wondering if “writer”-director Ezra Tsegaye has ever been on a plane (or if he knows how they work). Not only is the cockpit free of any steering control wheels, the cargo hold (where much of the slaughter takes place) is the size of a small warehouse. Then there’s the creature itself, which so-closely resembles the little Krites in Critters that someone should consider suing. 

It also seems to have been edited with a chainsaw…most scenes sloppily slapped together, often with little or no transition. If a bonkers German creature feature is what you seek, might I humbly suggest something like Sky Sharks? At least that one feels like the work of professional schlockmeisters. The only vibe Monster on a Plane gives off is contempt for the expectations of its audience.

PRIMATE: Monkey Business In My Dream House

PRIMATE (Blu-ray)

2025 / 89 min

Paramount

Review by Josey, the Sudden Cat🙀

Maybe it’s my age, but while watching Primate, I kept getting distracted by the house where the film takes place. Damn, it’s awesome, maybe the greatest house I’ve ever seen in a movie where it isn’t trying to kill its occupants. 

Back in my days of apartment living, I didn’t pay much attention to such things, even with the wife insisting I join her to catch House Hunters on HGTV so I could hear her dream out loud. Conversely, I was stubbornly pragmatic, seeing no point in watching other couples buy dream homes I couldn’t possibly afford. But now that I’m a home owner with equity, some of those fancy digs on TV seem a bit more tangible, therefore more interesting. 

As for the house in Primate…I was ready to put our split-level suburban dump on the market and moonlight as a rodeo clown to get it. But alas, one of this disc’s bonus features reveals that the house itself isn’t real. I shoulda known it was too good to be true. 

Still, it’s a great setting, even if it isn’t trying to kill its occupants. Something else is, though…a rabid chimpanzee. Primate is sort of a simian version of Cujo and the titular creature is named Ben, who lives with the Pinborough family. Oldest daughter Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) has come home from college, bringing a few friends along to up the eventual body count. After being bitten by a mongoose, Ben turns rabid and murderous while Lucy’s father is away for a book signing. Lucy, her friends and young sister Erin (Gia Hunter) flee to the swimming pool because Ben can’t swim. However, they’re trapped there.

Scariest of all...Ben is not housebroken.

With the exception of Adam (Troy Kotser), the dad who happens to be deaf, I had trouble distinguishing one character from another, their personalities being of obvious secondary importance. But to be perfectly honest, I was fine with that, even when a couple of laughably-conceived dude bros show up mid-movie for the sole purpose of getting slaughtered. What ultimately matters is that Primate delivers a wildly gory good time as Ben kills off most of the cast in a variety of hideously gruesome ways. These scenes are extremely well executed - even suspenseful at times - made more potent by good ol’ fashioned practical effects.

And speaking of which…I’m sure the temptation was strong to depict Ben through CGI, but thankfully, he’s a combination of animatronics and a small actor (Miguel Torres Umba) in prosthetics. For the most part, he’s as convincing as the house created for his rampage, and since everyone else looks and acts like refugees from a reality show, Ben ends up being the most interesting character in the entire film. Hell, I was rooting for him from the get-go.

Sure, plausibility is stretched a little thin here and there (especially regarding some of Ben’s abilities), but since the movie attacks its familiar premise with uninhibited, blood-soaked glee, who cares? Movies like this are never meant to challenge the intellect anyway. What ultimately matters is that Primate delivers unpretentious thrills and crazy kills…all set in a house that’s a lot cooler than yours.

EXTRA KIBBLES

FEATURETTES - Primal Terror: Directing Primate mostly features director/co-writer Johannes Roberts, as well as cast & crew interviews; New Blood: The Faces of Primate focuses on the cast; Creating Ben is the best of the bonus features and offers a revealing look at how Ben was depicted; Designing Paradise is about how they created that awesome house.

AUDIO COMMENTARY - By director/co-writer Johannes Roberts.

GRIZZLY NIGHT: More Bears, Please

GRIZZLY NIGHT (Blu-ray)

2026 / 87 min

Well Go USA

Available at MovieZyng

Review by Mr. Bonnie, the Bear Whisperer😼

Two genres I can’t resist are disaster movies and killer critter flicks. New and old, good and bad, epic and low budget, I generally have a good time with these things (if sometimes at the movie’s expense). It helps, of course, to adjust my expectations. No CGI-driven, direct-to-video cheapie is gonna match the epic thrills of The Towering Inferno, but still might be good for a few shits & giggles.

Similarly, there will never be another Jaws, and anyone thinking otherwise is delusional. Still, there’s been gobs of decent college tries over the years, including plenty that have attempted to create similar terror on land by replacing sharks with bears, arguably nature’s cuddliest carnivores. 1976’s Grizzly remains a highly enjoyable example of B-movie plagiarism, though the kitschy Cocaine Bear will probably go down in history as the Citizen Kane of belligerent bear movies.

But even with tempered expectations, Grizzly Night is not the movie I was anticipating, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. The film recounts the true story of a 1967 incident in at Glacier National Park, where a couple of bear attacks occurred on the same night, miles apart. In movies, “true story” is a term that’s often thrown around pretty liberally, but in this case, we get the impression that the events as depicted are more-or-less accurate. So on one hand, the film can be commended for its non-exploitative approach, maintaining a serious tone and an underlying theme of humans’ negative impact on animal behavior.

"Right behind me, huh? I ain't falling for that again."

On the other hand, not a hell of a lot actually happens in Grizzly Night, at least compared to your usual nature-run-amok flick. The animal attack sequences themselves are tastefully handled, but few and far between and not particularly exciting, with most of the mayhem occurring off-screen. The interim scenes largely consist of rangers and tourists searching for victims and treating their injuries while remaining wary of another possible bear attack. This may have indeed been how everything went down back in 1967, but that doesn’t always result in compelling viewing. Perhaps being more exploitative might have livened things up a little.

Still, while none of the characters are anything to write home about and the performances are merely serviceable, Grizzly Night is well made, makes good use of its scenic locations and at least features real bears (when it chooses to actually show them). There ain’t much in the way of animal action, but as an earnest account of true events, the film is watchable.