Feral – review

Director – Mark Young

Release date: 2017

Contains spoilers

You’d be forgiven for wondering whether Feral is a vampire film or not, after all the blurb on the DVD calls the creatures in this “rabid, rampaging cannibal zombie(s)”. One might be forgiven for suggesting zompires, but, in actual fact, they seem more akin to the vampires found in films such as Stake Land and Redwood.

The set up is really simple and the characters thin but it makes for an entertaining watch. The opening sees a woman, bloody and tied down whilst a man, face unseen but later revealed as Talbot (Lew Temple), sits by with a gun. She awakens and, despite being tied, starts twisting and snarling. Gunshot…

camping

Six friends (mostly) are trekking through the forest. There are couples Matt (George Finn) and Brienne (Renee Olstead), and Jesse (Brock Kelly) and Gina (Landry Allbright) – all know each other and are med students, along with Alice (Scout Taylor-Compton, Pearblossom, Captive & Bury the Bride) who has brought new girlfriend Jules (Olivia Luccardi). We get some character building around Alice including her bible belt father (and fear of coming out to him) and her learning to hunt as a child. As for the others virtually none – bar Jesse used to be with Alice and he wants her, despite being with Gina, because he can’t have her and refuses to accept her queer sexuality. They don’t even build stereotypes for the characters, to be honest.

Matt attacked

Anyway. First night camping and Matt proposes to Brienne, goes for a pee and is attacked by something. She goes to find him and sees a squat figure over him, eating from the stomach that has been ripped open. It attacks… the others hear her scream and find her on the floor, alive but bitten – Matt is dead. In the morning they meet a loner called Talbot (he of the opening) who takes them to his cabin. Matt’s body is gone (we’ve seen the dead man sit up).

turned

From then on it is a survival horror. A bite or scratch turns and it involves a virus that devastates the body, killing the host and then animating it. It causes the teeth to fall out and be replaced by sharp ones, the eyes to go a cloudy yellow, sharp nails to grow and the hair to fall out. Talbot calls them the rabid ones – and they are dormant during the day. Brain trauma kills them and they show little in the way of sentience. But for me, the physiological changes and the day dormancy push them into the vampire space.

Scout Taylor-Compton as Alice

Despite the lack of characterization the film works. Scout Taylor-Compton gives a solid performance as the only rounded character, the lack of trust in and duplicity of the Talbot character causes more peril than had they been working together properly. There is the splitting up trope aplenty. But this is a competent little flick for me because it did manage to build a tension – though it won’t set the world on fire. 5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK