Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		3.5
Overall		2.5

Wild Beasts Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 14, 2017

For those who feel they may have seen the most outré possible film featuring wild animals and humans after having viewed Roar, guess what? There’s a little competition in the Blu-ray universe now that Wild Beasts has (have?) meandered into the fray. Wild Beasts has a fairly simple set up, which is followed by a similarly simple execution, detailing the carnage that ensues when a dangerous psychoactive drug gets mixed into a municipal water supply, animals (and, later, humans) get a gulp or two of it, and all hell breaks loose. There are any number of “killer animal” or “nature strikes back” films that Wild Beasts may seem to emulate (or even have inspired), but the film has a unique atmosphere that is perhaps appropriately hallucinogenic. Kind of interestingly given the recent controversy surrounding A Dog's Purpose, Wild Beasts comes from a somewhat infamous creative crew (which includes director Franco Prosperi), people who were already fairly notorious for depictions of animal cruelty in the so- called “mondo” genre, including such now legendary entries as Mondo Cane (the film that rather unexpectedly introduced the standard "More" into the pop music vernacular, resulting in an Academy Award nomination), that film’s follow up Mondo Cane 2, and Africa addio. These films, along with Prosperi’s Goodbye Uncle Tom later at least partially influenced films with even more troubling depictions of animal cruelty, including Cannibal Holocaust and its quasi follow up Cannibal Ferox, two films which seemed to almost delight (for want of a better word) in extremely graphic depictions of animals meeting their fate. Prosperi seems to want to revisit that exploitational aspect, if only tangentially (as will be discussed below), but the fascinating behind the scenes fact about Wild Beasts is that the big animals on display throughout the film were actually part of a circus, and their regular handlers were either in the film itself or close by, monitoring events.

There’s very little fat on the minimal narrative elements at play in Wild Beasts, with an opening series of scenes documenting various characters who later show up, often in peril. Chief among these are a zoo veterinarian named Rupert Berner (John Aldrich), who, in a sort of presaging of a similar plot conceit used years later in Jurassic Park, complains about “newfangled” cage gates not functioning properly (guess how that one ultimately plays out). Also there is a woman named Laura Schwarz (Lorraine De Selle), snapping photos of a tiger until things threaten to spiral out of control. In what may be a tip of the hat (and/or cleaver) to those aforementioned “cannibal” films, there’s a completely gratuitous and disturbing image of a zoo employee bisecting a donkey or horse head with a gigantic blade, supposedly to prepare it as food for the big cats. Meanwhile some unexplained but later understandable footage of various kinds of pollution, including something spilling into a water supply, have been seen, and at the zoo a blind man’s German Shepherd seeing eye dog takes a little drink from some water bubbling up from a pavement drain in an obvious foreshadowing gambit.

Once the characters are introduced, the film is content to merely trot out a series of vignettes that feature these same folks either trying to solve the mystery of what’s going on, or (more ubiquitously) getting attacked by the rampaging animals. There is a whole series of outlandish interactions between beasts and humans, but suspense levels tend to be fairly low most of the time, despite the fact that there are huge critters like polar bears roaming through building halls and gigantic creatures like elephants using airport runways to wreak havoc. Part of this disconnect may be due to an ineffective soundtrack which in either English or Italian offers copious evidence of everything having been post dubbed, and not always to felicitous effect.

Wild Beasts also tends to go pretty Grand Guignol in its closing moments, with more carnage that comes courtesy of non animal participants (so to speak). It’s a silly and hyperbolic development, one made almost unbelievably annoying by (again) overheated dubbing that makes interchanges between Laura and her hysterical daughter (a girl who in fact spends virtually the entire film in various states of hysteria) downright comical. The good news is, as the ASPCA likes to make filmmakers state, no animals were reportedly harmed in this production, and unlike the unfortunate crew who suffered gruesome injuries during Roar’s production, no humans were, either.

Wild Beasts Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Wild Beasts is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Severin Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.67:1. This film was obviously shot on the fly under somewhat problematic circumstances, with (as mentioned in the supplements) the vast bulk of the sequences set at night, something that probably unavoidably leads to a lack of detail and especially fine detail at times. While colors are still vivid, there's slight fading which skews tones toward the brown side of things. A healthy grain field is in evidence in the more brightly lit moments, but is less evident in the many darker scenes, and I wouldn't be surprised if some judicious filtering has been applied. Occasional age related damage intrudes, but nothing out of the ordinary. The entire transfer has a soft look which is perfectly in keeping with what I assume the original theatrical exhibition (which I never saw) looked like.

Wild Beasts Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As mentioned above in the main body of the review, Wild Beasts features both English and Italian audio tracks, with the English track in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 and the Italian in Dolby Digital 2.0. While there's a genuine uptick in amplitude and fidelity in the lossless track, especially with regard to the score, both tracks suffer from boxiness and are obviously the result of post dubbing (a staple of Italian cinema, of course). The result is I personally found both tracks a little odd, for slightly different reasons. The obvious mismatch between lip movements and words spoken on both tracks would seem to indicate this was a multilingual cast doing the best they could (I frankly expected the Italian audio to match the lip movements more consistently, but it really didn't for whatever reason, and it does appear that at least some of the actors were speaking English, though the dubbing is pretty inartfully accomplished a lot of the time).

Wild Beasts Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Altered Beasts: Interview with Director Franco E. Prosperi (720p; 15:33) is an enjoyable and often funny sit down with the director, who gets into some of the tribulations this shoot faced, which included everything from terrorists to animals running amok. In Italian with English subtitles.


• Wild Tony: Interview with Actor Tony Di Leo (1080p; 12:54) also contains some amusing anecdotes about the difficulties of the shoot. In Italian with English subtitles.


• Cut After Cut: Interview with Editor and Mondo Filmmaker Mario Morra (1080p; 34:54) offers quite a bit of background on Morra's interesting history. In Italian with English subtitles.


• The Circus is in Town: Interview with Animal Wrangler Roberto Tiberti's Son, Carlo Tiberti (1080p; 10:25) is for my money the best interview on the disc, offering the memories of this latest generation of a legendary Italian circus owning family. In Italian with English subtitles.


• House of Wild Beasts: A Visit to the Home of Franco E. Prosperi (1080i; 12:42) is some interesting footage culled from what was supposed to be a 2007 Severin documentary which was intended to reunite Prosperi with Gualtiero Jacopetti.


• International Trailer (480p; 2:24)

Note: Offered only as a (hopefully) humorous aside, keep your eyes peeled during these interviews for just how often animals (presumably family pets) enter the frame, as if to say, "watch out, I'm listening."

Wild Beasts Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I can't imagine anyone ever being very frightened by Wild Beasts, despite several supposedly visceral attack scenes. The most discomfiting sequence for me involved rats attacking amorous couples, but even that was kind of darkly comic rather than scary. Had the whole "man raping the environment and getting his comeuppance" angle (something the trailer mentions up front) had been handled a little more effectively, the narrative may have had more impact. As well staged as some of the animal attack sequences are, I personally was never frightened by anything, and in fact found some of the goings on unintentionally comic. This lo-fi effort is odd, to say the least, and as with many of these cult offerings, it may well be the excellent supplemental material assembled by Severin that sways interested consumers. Video and audio both have certain inherent limitations, but nothing that would (if I might borrow an idea from the film) cause home theater aficionados to attack.