The Circle of Life… or Maybe Just a Traffic Circle
If there were an award for “movie that most resembles a fever dream you’d have after eating gas station jerky,” Hyenas(2011) would take home the gold. Written and directed by Eric Weston—who must’ve made a bet to see if he could out-bore actual wildlife documentaries—this supernatural horror flick tries to combine Jaws, The Howling, and CSI: Roadkill. The result is a cinematic carcass that even vultures wouldn’t touch.
The premise sounds simple enough: a grieving man hunts down supernatural man-eating hyenas. That’s not inherently awful. You could make something terrifying out of that—something primal and unrelenting. But Hyenas instead plays like a Syfy Channel movie that lost its budget, its editor, and its will to live halfway through filming.
When Hyenas Attack (Your Sanity)
The movie kicks off with a woman driving on a dark road, a baby in the backseat, and what appears to be an entire film crew asleep at the wheel. She crashes, sees a mysterious light, and then gets eaten by CGI hyenas that look like they were rendered on a PlayStation 2 running on fumes. It’s supposed to be terrifying; it’s actually an accidental comedy. The creatures don’t snarl so much as vibrate angrily across the screen, like clip art with a grudge.
Enter Gannon (Costas Mandylor), the grieving husband and our ostensible hero. He’s a man haunted by loss, though mostly haunted by his own line delivery. Costas, best known as “that guy who looks like a knockoff Gerard Butler,” spends most of the movie glowering like he’s reading the script through a hangover. He’s joined by “Crazy” Briggs, a grizzled tracker played by Designing Women’s Meshach Taylor, who appears to be having the time of his life—or at least the time of someone else’s.
Together, they set off to hunt the hyenas, though it’s never clear whether the hyenas are actual animals, demons, or poorly paid extras in furry costumes. The film calls them supernatural, but given their screen presence, they might as well be metaphorical representations of the director’s unfinished career.
The Special Effects — Nature’s Cruel Joke
Let’s be fair: not every horror movie needs a blockbuster budget. But Hyenas doesn’t just look cheap—it looks counterfeit. The titular beasts appear through a mix of stock footage, rubber puppets, and digital effects that might have been cutting-edge when Windows 95 was still in beta. At one point, a hyena leaps at a character, and you can practically hear the After Effects timeline groaning.
The kills, too, are hilariously awkward. Victims flail in slow motion, blood splatters with the texture of red soup, and the camera cuts away just before anything resembling excitement occurs. It’s like watching a nature documentary shot by a blind man who’s terrified of animals.
And yet, the movie takes itself so seriously. Weston treats every close-up of a snarl like Shakespearean drama. You half expect the hyenas to break into soliloquy: “To maul, or not to maul, that is the question.”
A Cast in the Wild (and Out of Their Depth)
Costas Mandylor, to his credit, does try. But every scene he’s in looks like he’s waiting for someone to yell “Cut” so he can leave. His grief never feels genuine—more like the emotional equivalent of losing a favorite pen. Christa Campbell plays Wilda, a woman whose name sounds like a gas station snack and whose purpose is to occasionally look concerned.
Joshua Alba (yes, Jessica’s brother) shows up as Marco, a local with the investigative instincts of a potato. Christina Murphy and Amanda Aardsma round out the roster as women destined to scream, run, and die without ever realizing they’re in a horror movie about hyenas.
The most surprising face here is Meshach Taylor, who somehow wandered from sitcom fame into this cinematic safari of despair. His performance as “Crazy” Briggs is the only thing remotely alive in the film. He delivers his lines with gusto, clearly aware he’s in something ridiculous, and probably amused that the script makes him say things like, “These ain’t no regular animals, boy—they got a taste for man!”
Taylor deserved a better send-off than being upstaged by a digital furball that looks like a taxidermy experiment gone rogue.
The Script: Written in Blood, Sweat, and Bad Ideas
The screenplay feels like it was assembled from notes found on a bar napkin. Characters appear and vanish with no explanation. Dialogue alternates between clumsy exposition (“Hyenas don’t normally attack people… unless something’s changed”) and cryptic nonsense (“They come for the souls, not the flesh”).
The pacing is so uneven that it feels like two movies spliced together—one about a man seeking vengeance and another about people walking through bushes. Scenes drag on forever, filled with awkward pauses and random shots of the moon, as though the editor was paid by the minute.
Even the film’s attempts at lore are laughable. There’s talk of ancient curses, tribal myths, and reincarnation, but none of it connects. It’s all just spooky wallpaper pasted over a wall of boredom.
Sound and Fury, Signifying Hyenas
If you close your eyes while watching Hyenas, it’s hard to tell what’s happening—but if you open your eyes, it’s even worse. The sound design alternates between deafening growls and complete silence. The hyena noises are looped so frequently you start to suspect they were borrowed from a zoo CD.
The score, meanwhile, sounds like it was composed on a keyboard set to “ominous.” Strings swell for no reason, drums pound randomly, and then everything just… stops. It’s like the movie itself occasionally forgets it’s supposed to be scary.
Nature Fights Back (and So Should You)
By the time Gannon and Briggs finally track down the hyenas, you’ve long since lost track of who’s alive, who’s dead, and why any of this matters. The final confrontation takes place in near-total darkness, possibly because the cinematographer gave up. There’s a gunfight, a few CGI growls, and a resolution so abrupt it feels like the editor tripped over the “End” button.
And yet, even as the credits roll, Hyenas continues to haunt you—not because it’s frightening, but because you can’t believe anyone thought it was releasable. It’s less a horror movie and more a warning about what happens when ambition outruns ability.
The Hyena in the Room: Why?
Why was this movie made? Was someone at a studio obsessed with hyenas? Did Eric Weston lose a bet with nature? These are the mysteries that linger long after the film ends. What could’ve been a dark, savage exploration of vengeance and survival becomes a sedated walk through clichés.
There’s no suspense, no emotion, and certainly no terror—just long, awkward stares and hyenas that look like they were drawn by someone who’s never seen one.
Final Verdict: Laugh or Cry, You’re the Prey
Hyenas is the kind of movie that makes you reevaluate your life choices. It’s not just bad—it’s boldly, unapologetically bad. Watching it feels like being hunted, not by beasts, but by incompetence itself.
It’s too cheap to be thrilling, too self-serious to be fun, and too dull to even qualify as so-bad-it’s-good. Even Sharknadolooks like Citizen Kane next to this mess.
If you ever find yourself stranded in the desert with nothing but a DVD player and this movie for company, do yourself a favor: feed the disc to the hyenas.
Rating: 🐾 1 out of 5 cackles — and that’s being generous, because at least the hyenas laughed.
