Backcountry (2014)
Let’s switch gears for a while and go from a big-budget blockbuster with a tropical setting to a low-budget indie flick in a forest environment. Backcountry is a straightforward story: a young couple named Alex and Jenn go on a weekend camping trip. Alex is secretly planning to propose and wants to take Jenn to a lake in the woods he loved as a kid. But, of course, Alex makes a bunch of macho bullshit mistakes and they end up badly lost in the woods. It seems like a bear may be stalking them and soon the bear attacks and mauls Alex to death. Jenn struggles through the woods back to civilization and survives.
And that’s it, really. There are no generic corporate bad guys, which is refreshing. It’s a straightforward survival story with only two main characters. Alex and Jenn do meet another guy in the woods, an Irish tour guide named Brad who has dinner with them. Brad and Alex don’t like each other and Brad flirts with Jenn, which pisses Alex off. There are some weird vibes from Brad and in a different kind of movie Brad would have stalked them through the woods and tried to violently murder them, and he would probably be from a family of inbred cannibals living in the woods like something out of The Hills Have Eyes or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
But Backcountry is not that kind of movie. On the contrary, Brad helps Jenn at the end of the movie when she manages to find her way back to civilization, which is a nice subversion of expectations. Jenn is a very likable protagonist, and her trek through the wilderness is harrowing and visceral. Alex is a bit of a frustrating character since the predicament he and his girlfriend find themselves in is entirely of his own making. He doesn’t take a map with them into the woods, claiming that he knows the area so well that he doesn’t need one, only to discover that the lake he wanted to take Jenn to isn’t where he thought it was and they are lost. On top of that, he took Jenn’s cell phone out of her backpack and left it back in their car, so they can’t call for help. Along the way, he tries to act like he’s a great outdoorsman by showing off to Jenn like he thinks he’s Bear Grylls or Les Stroud, which he very much isn’t.
IFC Midnight
Still, it’s not like Alex is cartoonishly evil or anything. He’s a normal guy who makes some boneheaded decisions, but, I mean, don’t we all? And the poor guy pays for his sins big time during the terrifying bear attack scene. The bear attack is filmed entirely from Alex and Jenn’s perspective inside the tent, which puts the viewer right into the scene. It’s every camper’s worst nightmare. I’m not an outdoorsy person myself, and Backcountry perfectly encapsulates the reasons why. The bear attack scene is probably the single most frightening sequence in any of the monster movies I’ve written about lately since it feels like something that could actually happen. For all his flaws, Alex didn’t deserve such a grisly demise (the bone-crunching sound effects are hard to get out of your head, as is the sight of Alex’s eviscerated remains).
Backcountry is also based to some extent on a true story of a couple named Mark Jordan and Jacqueline Perry, who were attacked by a bear while kayaking in Canada. The bear mauled Perry and Jordan managed to stab it with a Swiss Army knife to get the bear off her. He then took Perry back to their kayak and attempted to take her to the nearest campsite, but sadly she succumbed to her wounds in the boat. Jordan was later given a medal for bravery by the Canadian government. It’s a tragic story and Backcountry doesn’t sensationalize it (although it does fictionalize it). Bear attacks on humans are fortunately rare, a quick Google search reveals that the odds of being attacked by a bear are one in 2.1 million, but they do happen.
It is a bit disingenuous to call Backcountry a monster movie, it is primarily a survival thriller. It’s not an action movie with big explosions, it’s a slow-burn suspense movie. It’s very well-directed and well-acted, and maintains a tense atmosphere throughout. There’s only one death in the movie and it is a deeply harrowing one, not the kind of cool or fun one where a mercenary gets his head bitten off, and there is no satisfying cathartic moment where the monster is killed in a gory explosion. The film is a chilling reminder that nature is not to be messed with, and while it may not be as entertaining as Deep Blue Sea 3 or Meg 2, it is undeniably a better movie overall and is tied with Crawl as the most purely frightening killer animal movie I’ve written about so far.
Beast (2022)
The 2022 Idris Elba thriller Beast finally gave me something I have been wanting for years. The trailers for the 2011 Liam Neeson movie The Grey strongly implied that there would be a scene in which Liam Neeson fights a wolf in hand-to-claw combat. But if you have seen The Grey (or maybe you read my post about it that I wrote many years ago), you will know that there is no such scene in that film. The screen cuts to black just as the battle is about to begin. I still think of this as being one of the cruelest rug-pulls I have ever experienced in a movie, and although The Grey is still a very good film (albeit one that is very hard to watch), I never quite forgave it for that.
Which is why it thrills me to no end to report that in the movie Beast Idris Elba fights a lion, and it is glorious. I finally got the action-hero-vs.-killer-animal fight that I have wanted for years. Elba plays Dr. Nate Samuels, a recently widowed man on a safari vacation in South Africa with his daughters Meredith and Norah. Nate is attempting to reconnect with his daughters, with whom he became somewhat distant while his wife was dying of cancer. Nate confesses to his old buddy Martin (played by Sharlto Copley, an actor I am always happy to see) that he feels guilty over not having been there for his family when they needed him most.
Nate, Martin, and the girls soon run afoul of a vicious man-eating lion and it doesn’t take long for a ruthless gang of poachers to get involved too. I liked the inclusion of the poachers; they’re solid secondary antagonists and it makes sense to include them since poaching is a real-life problem. It also helps that you don’t feel bad for them when they get eaten. There are a lot more animal attacks in Beast than there were in Backcountry, and while the latter film’s bear attack is the most frightening and impactful, the lion attacks in Beast are still suspenseful and bloody.
Universal Pictures
Beast was directed by an excellently named Icelandic director named Baltasar Kormakur, who films much of the movie in continuous long takes in which the camera is constantly on the move. I like this very immersive filmmaking style and it increases the tension a lot when the lion is on the rampage. Idris Elba is a very good actor and Nate is easy to root for, and when Martin is gravely wounded by the titular beast Nate has to take charge, even though he is not an animal expert like Martin. But Idris Elba is a big guy and Nate proves to be more than capable of taking care of himself and his daughters.
And then there is that final man vs. lion battle, which is great. I have no idea if such a scenario is even remotely plausible, but something tells me that even a guy as beefy as Idris Elba would be promptly eviscerated in such a confrontation. So it might not be very realistic but to be fair to the movie Nate is not the one to strike the final blow against the murderous feline. The lion is on the verge of killing Nate when a different pride of lions (that Martin helped raise) intervenes and kill the man-eater.
Beast isn’t a perfect film or even a very original one, but it’s well-made, it looks great, has likable protagonists, is tense, bloody and has a satisfying, if a bit far-fetched, conclusion. Backcountry and Beast make for a solid killer-animal double feature and offer a nice dose of more grounded thrills after the over-the-top silliness of movies like Deep Blue Sea 3 and Meg 2. I’ve got one more killer-animal movie I’m going to write about soon, and it’s my favorite of all the movies I’ve covered recently. It’s so good that it deserves its own individual write-up, so that is going to be my next post. See you soon.
thezombieroom 