Live Animals (2008)

Perfect cast and a good story

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A-Z Horror Movie of the Day..."Live Animals" (NR - 2008 - US)Sub-Genre: Gore/TortureMy Score: 4.4Cast=3 Acting=2 Plot=6 Ending=4 Story=3 Scare=6 Jump=3 F/X=4 Gore=7 Torture=6A group of college kids must decide what price they will pay to gain their freedom after being kidnapped by a ruthless White Slave trader. This movie was low budget, horribly acted, and written on the premise that you will be drunk when you watch it. It's basically a bunch of scenes of the bad guys treating these kids like livestock...like watching those PSA's where they want $19 a month to help abused animals. There were some disturbing torture scenes and it was gory enough, but there was no substance to it.  I can't recommend this one, unless you just want gore for being gore.

how someone can pull such a bunch of crap and believe there was "writing" involved. Take all the clichés avoided by even the most amateurish wannabe, cram them into a night-shot film with one of the most dreadful lighting for night I've ever witnessed, throw in some sloppy characters without soul or possible empathy-connections, spend a large sum of money in film, lighting and post, and you have -mileage may vary- this "film". I feel sorry for the poor actors that may have thought this was a opportunity to do a nice job. If you teach whatever you teach, you can use this thing to show your students haw not to do things in life.

Live Animals is in the same category as Saw and Hostel; independent, torture films, which portray the lowest level of humanity; this feature is not for children or those easily offended. College students make the mistake of having a little party in the woods. They are abducted by a group of slave traders and held captive, chained, and in cages, as the title implies.The holding place almost looks like a prison, with adjacent cells holding the human cattle, and they are tortured mercilessly by their overseers. I guess the point here is our nasty treatment of animals for our food supply. The acting is nothing special, and the story watchable for the short, eighty six minute running time. If you need to kill an hour and a half on a rainy afternoon, Live Animals is an entertaining diversion.

The premise had promise (human capture and slavery in middle America) unfortunately the execution was off. Stilted characters that reeked of horror movie clichés and an overly long tedious opening that almost made me turn the movie off in boredom did not help the film (and continuity issues with blood covered ripped up shirts don't help either).Buckets of blood do not make a good movie, no matter how many teenagers tell you it does. Perhaps given better actors, editors, writer and director, this would have been a decent film, but in this case, it was poorly executed by the cast and crew that were in over their heads from the very start. And the goofy twists in the last fifteen minutes are simply that…goofy.And as a note to the writer: if you are going to make a point of the main protagonist saying that he can break a human in a mere three days...please follow through with it. Nothing happened to even remotely break anyone.