Mark Reviews Movies: FERAL

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 31, 2018

It's safe to say that the screenwriters of Feral were trying for some mystery. The movie opens with an unpleasant scene of a woman bound to a cot, trying to get free, while a man with a pistol prepares to shoot her. The questions abound. Who is this woman? Why is she tied to a bed? Who is the man with the gun? Who thought this disturbing image, absent of any context, was a good way to introduce a story?

The questions continue throughout the movie, written by director Mark H. Young and Adam Frazier. Most of them involve the intelligence—or, better, the lack thereof—of a group of characters who are hunted and attacked in the woods by some zombie-like creatures. The mysteries continue, too, but they're not the ones that Young and Frazier put forth.

They want us to wonder what these creatures are, how they came to be, and what their attacks do to their victims. By referring to them as "zombie-like," I essentially have answered the first and third of those three mysteries. That should save the audience about five minutes' worth of minor speculation—between the moment of the first death and the moment that an apparently dead body rises from the ground.

Yes, this is basically a zombie movie, set in a forest and featuring a handful of grisly scenes of people being bitten, disemboweled, or otherwise attacked. The people being hunted are surprisingly devoid of any notable characteristics. They have names, and each one has some sort of relationship with the other characters. That's about it. We learn so little about them that, when there three men who have become undead running around, we really can't tell them apart.

It doesn't matter at that point, I guess, but then again, it hardly matters when the characters are alive. That's the biggest problem here: We can't have any sympathy for or fear about a group of characters if we don't even know the basics about them.

Here's the extent of the characterization we receive: Alice (Scout Taylor-Compton, whose general, tough attitude is the highlight here) is a country girl, and her girlfriend Jules (Olivia Luccardi) is a city girl. They're in the woods with their friends as a vacation before graduating college. Some of them—although it's unclear how many—are looking to go to medical school. Jules is a history major, and the rest, well, exist.

There's some drama: Before embracing her sexuality, Alice had a short-lived fling with Jesse (Brock Kelly), who's now dating Gina (Landry Allbright). There's another couple with them: Brienne (Renee Olstead) and Matt (George Finn). He proposes to her in their tent that night. She accepts, and then he goes far deeper into the woods than necessary to relieve his bladder. Some creepy, crawling figure appears in the near distance, sprints at Matt, and rips out his intestines. Thus ends Matt, and when Brienne goes to investigate her fiancé's absence, she more or less is finished, too. All of that drama is complete, except that Alice and Jules seem to have it out for Gina when there are far more significant things at stake.

At this point, the setup pretty much concludes. We've learned little of any worth about these characters. Now, they're just on screen to run, hide, get torn to pieces, and be suspicious of the initially helpful Talbot (Lew Temple), a guy who lives in a cabin in the woods (firmly established—along with an oddly unused axe—with three lengthy shots). He's the key to understanding how the zombies came to be here. More importantly, he's here to give the zombies a different name ("ferals," natch), just so we're not going around willy-nilly, calling the creatures what they actually are.

We don't know the characters, although they seem to have a knack for getting themselves lost and otherwise debilitated in the woods. Jules accidentally pushes Jesse into a bear trap and then leaves the guy to be mauled. She later falls asleep and lets the now-hostile Talbot get ahold of a rifle. The climax allows all of the survivors to get in on the bad decision game.

The only advantage these not-too-bright kids have is that the zombies spend a lot of time posing and growling while standing over or next to their intended victims. No amount of grotesque makeup can make up for the inherent ridiculousness of these zombies' lack of simple effort. Feral itself becomes quite silly as it progresses, thanks to the combination of equally incompetent humans and zombies.

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