DAY OF THE ANIMALS
Also known as "When Leslie Nielsen's Love Handles Attack"
All right, another "When Animals Attack" movie. I really shouldn't let my rabbit see these. I swear, between this and The Wild Beasts, he's looking at me kinda funny.
A band of hikers arrive on a mountaintop too late to hear that altitudes above 5000 feet have been quarantined (sucks to be from Denver that day) because the ozone layer has caused animals everywhere to glare menacingly at people, and then eat them.
This is not exactly a movie with a goal of subtlety. When a guy loses his girlfriend to a flock of hawks (hawks come in flocks?), he cries out across the valley "MAAAANDY!!!", which echoes back "...maaaandy!!! ...maaaaandy!!!!" You must bear witness to the same guy's Shatneresque delivery when he reaches a deserted town and, arms spread wide, cries out "I've got a sick child, you've got to help me! Please!" You almost expect him to cry out "Khaaaaaaaaaan!"
"When I was a boy," says the Indian guy played by Michael Ansara, "My father couldn't wait to get off the reservation. He even changed his name to Mr. White." He says this with a straight face. There's no way I could pull that off, because intentional or no (I can't tell), it's one of the funniest lines I've ever heard. It's kind of sad to see Ansara, who was so cool as the medicine man in The Manitou (regardless of how cheesy the rest of the movie was), wearing a baby-blue "western" shirt and a tiny little white cowboy hat. You just know he's hoping and praying for the blissful release that the sweet caress of death will bring. Well, at least we get to see him bitch-slap a German Shepherd.
But the goofiest of this lot is definitely Leslie Nielsen, as the kind of guy all these movies have (who just have to take charge, but of course they're always wrong). He actually calls somebody "lily-livered". Leslie Nielsen as a figure of menace (we see entirely too much of this guy's love handles) is almost as silly as Alan Alda. Lots of great animal-on-man action though, and I don't mean the kind you'll see at The Love Zoo.
The news of ozone depletion was pretty fresh when this movie was made, and must have seemed like more of a far-out idea to 1982 audiences than, say, Y2K is to us. But it's so unnecessary and silly - like the Venusian probe in Night Of The Living Dead. No explanation is really needed, so when a bad one is tossed in instead of a good one, it just makes it all seem that much more lame. (NOTLD, however, recovered by being a killer horror movie in its own right. In this, however, it just adds to the overall cheese.)
Gems of dialogue like "155 million years ago, there were no animals. Just insects and reptiles, that's all" are not to be missed in this one. And the super-convenient War Of The Worlds ending is just perfect for this kind of thing - it'd seem like a copout in a better picture, but here, it fits.
Day of the Animals is almost as pure specimen of schlock as I've ever seen - all it needs is tits. Recommended to schlock connoisseurs. It most definitely contains your recommended daily intake of cheese.