Welcome to the Woods — Please Check Logic at the Door
Ah, the humble creature feature: that beautiful subgenre where attractive people wander into the woods, ignore every survival instinct, and get devoured by something that looks like it escaped from a Halloween clearance bin. Brett Simmons’ Animal (2014) tries to resurrect this time-honored tradition — but instead of claws and suspense, it delivers clichés and confusion.
With a cast that includes Keke Palmer (Scream Queens), Elizabeth Gillies (Victorious), and Jeremy Sumpter (Peter Pan, back when people still had hope in him), you might expect a sharp, fun, self-aware horror romp. What you get instead is The Breakfast Club meets Jurassic Park meets Who the hell thought this was scary?
This is a movie so desperate to be terrifying that it forgets to make sense. Watching Animal is like being chased through the woods not by a monster, but by bad writing — and just when you think it’s over, there’s another scene that bites you in the brain.
The Plot: A Forest Full of Dumb Decisions
The film opens with two married couples being chased through the woods by something unseen. Within two minutes, one of them is dead and the rest are screaming like they’re auditioning for The Blair Witch Project 3: Midlife Crisis.
Cut to a completely different group: five college students who clearly signed up for “The Hiking Trip of Death.” We’ve got Alissa (Keke Palmer), her boyfriend Matt (Jeremy Sumpter), her stepbrother Jeff, Jeff’s girlfriend Mandy (Elizabeth Gillies), and their friend Sean. They’re here to find a waterfall, because apparently “let’s not wander into the creepy woods where people keep disappearing” wasn’t on their itinerary.
Within twenty minutes, they stumble across a mutilated corpse, realize they’re being hunted, and — in true horror tradition — split up just enough to make their survival chances drop faster than this movie’s Rotten Tomatoes score.
When the creature finally shows up, it looks like a cross between a Xenomorph and a guy in a furry suit who lost a bet. It attacks, kills Jeff (because someone had to die first), and chases the rest into a conveniently placed cabin. Inside, they find three other survivors from the opening — Carl, Vicky, and Douglas — who have been holed up long enough to develop both paranoia and severe plot fatigue.
From here, the movie devolves into what can only be described as The Real World: Cabin Edition, complete with petty arguments, bad lighting, and questionable life choices.
The Monster: Part Animal, Part Disappointment
The titular “Animal” is a mysterious beast that lives to kill, stalk, and ruin your evening. What kind of animal is it? Nobody knows. It’s just Animal. Not “The Wolf.” Not “The Mutant Bear.” Just… “Animal.” It’s the laziest monster naming since Thingy in That One Horror Movie You Forgot About.
The design itself isn’t terrible — at least not when you can actually see it. The problem is that the film’s lighting is so dim, the monster could’ve been a guy in pajamas and we’d never know. Every time it appears, the camera shakes like it’s possessed by Michael Bay’s cinematographer, and then suddenly — whoosh — another person is gone.
What Animal lacks in originality, it tries to make up for in screeching noises and quick cuts. The creature has no personality, no motivation, and apparently no consistency in how deadly it is. Sometimes it rips through doors like the Kool-Aid Man on steroids. Other times it just… stands there, giving the cast time to debate their feelings.
At one point, the monster gets trapped in a house fire and dies — only for the film to reveal that there are more of them. Because of course there are. When in doubt, add a sequel hook no one asked for.
The Characters: Brain Dead in the Woods
Let’s be honest: we don’t come to slasher-woods movies expecting Shakespeare. But Animal’s cast is so aggressively unlikable that you start rooting for the creature just to clear the screen.
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Alissa (Keke Palmer): Smart, brave, and constantly surrounded by idiots. Palmer does her best with what she’s given, but the script gives her about as much depth as a puddle in Death Valley.
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Mandy (Elizabeth Gillies): The sarcastic one. Her job is to complain, roll her eyes, and survive long enough to deliver some emotional monologue about teamwork before lighting everything on fire.
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Matt (Jeremy Sumpter): Alissa’s boyfriend, whose main contribution to the story is running off alone and then screaming over a walkie-talkie.
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Sean (Paul Iacono): The “comic relief” who delivers jokes so unfunny they could be used as a weapon. He’s also sleeping with Jeff’s girlfriend because apparently this movie needed a subplot written by a soap opera intern.
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Douglas (Amaury Nolasco): The cynic. He’s so determined to be “the realist” that he spends the entire movie yelling “We’re all gonna die!” while actively making sure that happens.
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Carl and Vicky (Thorsten Kaye & Joey Lauren Adams): The older couple trapped in the cabin since the beginning. They exist mostly to die heroically and remind us that this forest apparently has zero cell service or rescue teams.
By the halfway mark, you start playing a mental game of “Who’s next?” like it’s Hunger Games: Cabin Edition.Unfortunately, the deaths are so repetitive that it’s hard to care who goes next.
The Dialogue: Written by a Committee of Squirrels
The script sounds like it was written during a particularly uninspired weekend writers’ retreat. It’s packed with horror movie staples like:
“We have to stick together!”
“No, we’ll cover more ground if we split up!”
“Did you hear that?”
“It’s nothing.”
Spoiler: it’s never nothing. It’s always “Animal.”
The characters constantly explain things that we can already see (“It’s coming through the window!”) and deliver melodramatic speeches about courage while standing ankle-deep in blood. It’s as if the scriptwriter couldn’t decide whether this was a creature feature or an after-school special about teamwork.
Even the big emotional reveals — affairs, pregnancies, betrayal — feel tacked on, like the movie thought it could distract us from the fact that absolutely nothing new is happening.
The Direction: How to Stretch 30 Minutes of Plot Into 90
Brett Simmons, bless his heart, tries to wring tension out of the script by using every trick in the low-budget horror handbook: handheld camera work, jump scares, and the occasional ominous sound cue. Unfortunately, none of it works.
The pacing is so uneven that entire chunks of the movie feel like filler. The “let’s stay quiet and wait for rescue” scenes drag on forever, and when the monster finally does appear, the editing cuts so fast you’d swear it was trying to escape the movie too.
The film’s idea of suspense is having people whisper for five minutes before something bursts through the door. It’s not scary — it’s just annoying, like being forced to watch someone else’s home video of their camping trip gone wrong.
The Ending: Now With 200% More Sequel Bait
After surviving fire, betrayal, and enough bad dialogue to fill a BuzzFeed listicle, Mandy manages to kill one of the beasts by running it over with a car. Just when you think she’s safe, the camera pans to reveal a third creature sniffing the corpses, growling ominously — because apparently the filmmakers thought, “What this movie needs is another chance to fail.”
The implication is clear: Animal 2: Even Animaller. Thankfully, that sequel never happened, sparing us all another trip into the forest of disappointment.
Final Thoughts: The Real Monster Was the Runtime
Animal wants to be a throwback to old-school creature horror — something gritty, tense, and claustrophobic. What it actually is, however, is a jumble of tired tropes, forgettable characters, and CGI growls.
It’s not frightening. It’s not funny. It’s just… there. Like a bad camping trip where everyone gets poison ivy and the marshmallows burn.
By the time the credits roll, you’re left thinking the title might be a warning to the audience — not about the monster, but about your own animal instincts telling you to flee.
Verdict: 1 out of 5 stars.
If you like watching idiots yell “What’s that noise?” before being eaten, Animal will satisfy your primal urge for pain. Otherwise, do yourself a favor: stay out of these woods.
