Live Animals (2009)

The Premise of this movie is pretty simple.  A group of four young adults are kidnapped by a couple of twisted evil farmers who treat them like animals, breaking them and training them.  They are kept in a large barn in separate stables.  There is already another girl there when they arrive who seems to have had her spirit broken and pretty much gone insane.  There is a bit of torture and rape as they are shown by their new “owners” that their place is now that of an animal who is to obey without question.  There is a bit more revealed about the business of their captors as one of them is sold to a European and is to be shipped overseas as a sex slave.  Eventually those that remain get the chance to escape and the rest of the movie is them making the attempt.  There are several twists and turns in the plot at this point and you are never really sure if they will make it to freedom or not. 

It's not a real long or involved movie.  The plot is pretty simple and the unique aspects of the plot are not thoroughly explored at all.  I expected to see more “training” in it than I did and was hoping that it would be a bit more of a psychological horror movie than it was.  I wanted to see the characters wills slowly broken and a gradual change of their attitudes as some succumbed to the torture and began to act as their new “owners” wished.  Instead it just had a little torture and quite a bit of brutality throughout it.  None of the characters mindsets changed in the least and none of them was “broken”.  The gory special effects weren't bad, but there weren't many really good ones.  The acting was consistently good throughout the film and some of the actresses were quite attractive.  I think they might have actually been able to pull off more in depth acting than they were called upon to do.  The characters were never really that filled out, which may be part of the reason I never felt that much empathy for them as they went through their horrid ordeal.  I did like the setting.  It was simple and cheap, but effective.  I grew up on a farm so it was somewhat familiar to me.  Surprisingly even with the familiar setting this movie didn't creep me out that much.  It just didn't seem to have that much depth behind it I suppose.

It wasn't a bad movie and did some things well.  Overall, however, I think it missed the point and could have been much better than it was.  Perhaps budget and time restraints added to it's mediocrity, but I think the real problem was the focus.  Too much time was spent on the capture and escape and not nearly enough time was spent to the unique situation that the characters were put into.  If you are looking for anything out of the ordinary you will not be fully satisfied with this flick.  You get a taste of something different, but really it just ends up being another excuse for random violence and cat and mouse games.  That said it's not bad to watch and it does have a few twists that makes it a decent movie of its kind.

2 ½ out of 4

Reviewed by Scott Schwarzwalder

© Copyright 2009 John Shatzer