Feral (2017)

directed by Mark Young
USA
90 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I watched this because Olivia Luccardi was in it and I loved her in Channel Zero. Other than that, this film's exceedingly generic title and synopsis didn't reveal much about its plot. I'm going to talk about its creatures a bit in this review, and I'm not sure if that constitutes a spoiler because there's nothing special about them and they aren't kept a secret, but they are plot-relevant so you might want to skip details about them anyway.

This has an extremely formulaic set-up that differs from every other "people get killed in the woods" movie only in that one pair of its cast of characters is a lesbian couple. I really enjoyed seeing this and even though the other characters did seem to gossip needlessly about them, it was super cool to finally have some representation in a genre film. It may have still been a cliche, but seeing the soppy I-don't-want-you-to-die drawn-out kiss scene they usually have at least one of in slashers happen between two girls instead of a straight couple made me really happy. I like the part where Olivia Luccardi's character shoves a guy so hard he falls into a bear trap because he said her girlfriend was going through some kind of "d*ke phase".

Anyway, the creatures in this aren't bad as far as zombies go, and it's interesting that one of the characters outright says "what, like zombies?" when it's explained to her what the creatures are, so this film is set in a world where people have seen zombie films and understand what they are and that they're not supposed to be real. I think the characters believe what's happening is more along the lines of an epidemic of some rare disease than a typical Zombie Virus™. This is an unpopular opinion, but I think zombie movies are much scarier when they establish that they're happening in a world where everybody already knows that zombies are a fictional trope, because it means that whatever viral outbreak occurs is basically something out of everyone's worst nightmares.

This is actually a really boring film though and I wish it had done more to break the mold. This director also made a film called Tooth & Nail which I saw a very long time ago and I think I remember feeling the same way about it, that it didn't do enough to make itself distinct from other, similar films. The characters spend too much time on questions of "what's going on?" and "what could be attacking us?" to the point where it hinders the progression of the plot. The leader of them also has such an aversion to killing that it becomes unrealistic, especially so when none of the others just take the matter into their own hands and kill the infected themselves. Although I guess you don't really have much choice when somebody with a gun tells you what not to do. This is a textbook three-star, not-bad-but-not-good horror movie and I don't have a lot of feelings about it overall.