Italian horror and exploitation directors from the 70s and 80s often approached filmmaking like a guy assembling IKEA furniture blindfolded while on mescaline. Enter The Wild Beasts, a 1984 animal-attack oddity directed by Franco E. Prosperi, a man best known for co-directing Mondo Cane, which should tell you everything you need to know: exploitative, unhinged, and allergic to coherence.
Let’s set the scene: the water supply in Frankfurt (played, dubiously, by a few anonymous European streets and a zoo that looks like it was built for tax write-offs) is contaminated with PCP. Yes, that PCP. The kind that made 80s afterschool specials warn kids about jumping off buildings because they thought they could fly. Only in this movie, it doesn’t affect people—it affects the animals. And boy, do they go berserk. Lions, tigers, cheetahs, rats, elephants. Even a polar bear. PCP. I’m not making this up.
This isn’t so much a movie as it is a deranged montage of animal mayhem stitched together with ADR and Italian dubbing that sounds like everyone is phoning in their lines from a dentist’s office. There’s no real plot, just a vague premise strung together with animal attacks and confused humans staring blankly at the chaos around them. It’s like watching a National Geographic documentary re-cut by a chainsmoking lunatic who’s angry at zoos.
The main characters—if you can call them that—include a zoologist who seems constantly annoyed at having to be in the movie, a blonde reporter whose defining character trait is “nervous glancing,” and a group of schoolchildren who might as well be wearing “PLEASE KILL ME” t-shirts. The acting ranges from wooden to petrified. Nobody seems all that alarmed that panthers are leaping through car windshields or that a cheetah is chasing a Volkswagen. It’s all shrugged off with the same intensity you’d reserve for a delayed bus.
One of the most talked-about scenes—and by “talked about,” I mean whispered with concern by cult film fans—is the rat attack in a subway. Hundreds of real rats were apparently used in a sequence so poorly lit, you’d think the power went out in the editing room. The scene goes on forever, and not in a suspenseful way. It’s just rats climbing on things while the camera cuts to people screaming and flailing like they’re being tickled by furry demons. The rats are supposed to be on a drug-fueled rampage. In reality, they look confused and mildly annoyed to be part of this production.
Then there’s the big cat sequence where a tiger stalks a school hallway, and a cheetah chases a car down the freeway. This is what happens when you shoot wild animals on a budget: long shots of big cats walking slowly while actors pretend to panic. You can practically hear the trainers offscreen shaking meat in one hand and their contracts in the other.
The film reaches its absurd apex when an elephant stomps through a parking garage like it’s auditioning for Fast & Furious: Jungle Edition. There is zero explanation for how the elephant got there. Was it teleported? Did it use the elevator? Nobody knows. The film just cuts to it like, “Yeah, elephants do this sometimes.” The same thing happens with a polar bear that somehow ends up roaming the halls of a hospital. The bear, likely sedated and depressed, trudges through the scene like it’s looking for the craft services table.
What makes The Wild Beasts truly bonkers is the sheer seriousness with which it delivers all this nonsense. The score is melodramatic synth hell, as if Vangelis was drunk and trying to score a nature documentary about murder. The cinematography can’t decide if it wants to be gritty or stylish, resulting in shots that resemble student film projects gone rogue. And the pacing—oh God, the pacing—lurches between animal attack and exposition with all the grace of a rhino on roller skates.
But let’s not ignore the real elephant in the room: the ethical catastrophe. This film was clearly shot during an era when animal rights meant “don’t hit them on camera.” The animals are real. The fear is real. And not in a “wow, what immersive filmmaking” kind of way—in a “someone should be in jail for this” kind of way. There’s no CGI. No animatronics. Just real animals forced into chaotic situations, sometimes visibly distressed, while actors stumble around like they just lost their glasses.
It’s exploitative in a way that makes you feel grimy just watching it. Not just for the animal stuff, but because it doesn’t even try to be clever about it. This is a movie that thinks it’s making a statement—something about pollution, or drugs, or mankind’s fragile grip on nature—but it’s just a guy throwing a camera at a lion and hoping for the best.
Even the ending is a non-ending. There’s no real resolution, no climax. Just more animals wandering around, more stock footage, and a vague feeling that the editor gave up and went out for a smoke. You don’t walk away from The Wild Beastsfeeling entertained. You walk away wondering if you’ve just witnessed a crime.
Final Verdict:
The Wild Beasts is the cinematic equivalent of poking a tiger with a stick while shouting, “It’s for art!” It’s dumb, chaotic, ethically dubious, and completely unaware of how ridiculous it is. Italian horror has given us some great, sleazy gems—but this ain’t one of them. This is a cautionary tale about what happens when you give an Italian exploitation director access to a zoo and no adult supervision.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 PCP-laced rat swarms. Watch at your own peril—and maybe shower afterward.
