Day of the Animals (1977)

The animals are mad, and for some unlucky campers, it's not their day.  Day of the Animals is one of many films about animals gone wild to come out after the huge success of Jaws.  A whole slew of specific animal movies were released in the years following Jaws, but with this movie they just went and decided to make every single animal go on murderous rampage.

SOON

So the movie opens with not just a crawl, but constant background talk also about the harmful UV rays caused by human's polluting the planet.  Awww, the movie has a message.  Kinda.  Not really.  Anyways so this is essentially the premise of why every animal goes crazy and some folks chose a bad day to go hiking.  Prepare for tons of stock footage of animals and more walking than a Lord of the Rings movie.  Oh and shirtless Leslie Nielsen!

Scariest thing in the movie

Before we begin the carnage, we meet our large cast of victims as we are introduced to a bunch of city slickers who are flying up the mountains for a guided camping trip.  Mostly a bunch of whiny people who you are hoping get eaten soon, but sadly the movie decides to make us wait way to long for that.  Oh and there is a Native American character, because we need someone who seems to know whats going on with nature and to look constantly concerned for the white folks.  Leslie Nielsen is a douche bag the entire movie, and that seems to be a trend in any movie he's in that's not a comedic role.

Eventually the animals decide to attack some people (finally), but it's all very tame and the movie fails to ever really build any type of suspense, or even shock a person with violence.  Even when they have real animal attacks happening, you can tell the animals are well trained and not really attacking anyone.  The most vicious attacks occur by puppets, but I do have to give the movie credit in that they usually do well to mesh the real with fake animal sequences.  The animals do score several kills, but the movie plays up the classic trope of humans being the real enemy to themselves.  During the chaos, the humans begin turning on each other, and Leslie Nielsen cranks up the douche factor.  Our friendly campers all become their own worst enemy and make everything worse.  Leslie is the true villain here, he wants to fight with everyone and even has something against his own shirt.

Leslie SMASH!

Day of the Animals never really achieves anything of note, the movie is pretty predictable and it lacks any type of iconic scenes, violence, or gore.  Most of the movie is watching people complain about their situation and argue.  I just was hoping a Puma would just pop out and eat some faces finally, but it never comes.  Every once in a while a group of animals will pounce on one of our dumb campers and someone will say afterwards "they are gone", or something to that effect since the movie is really shy on showing any actual violence.  The kills are mostly off screen, and the movie lacks any type of tension to even make implied violence scary.  Wet shirtless Leslie Nielsen is at scary as it gets.

Check out this sweet Italian poster for the movie.  Far more exciting than the actual movie.

The movie just kind of decides it's over and that the animals had their day, time to move on.  Did it try to have a message about protecting our environment?  Not exactly, and the movie doesn't seem to know if it wants to try telling a dramatic tale about humans messing in nature's domain, or if it just wants to make a horror movie.  The whole movie just kinda floats in the middle not knowing really what kind of tale it's telling.  The other more cheesy B-movie creature features of the time like Grizzly, Piranha, or Alligator all had much higher entertainment value.

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