Review of Furry Vengeance (2010) by Chads. — 01 May 2010

Say what you want about William Girdler's "Day of the Animals", the 1977 camp classic about a group of hikers confronting High Sierra critters that attack, the capricious fallout due to a thinning ozone layer as being grade-Z dreck and retroactive liberal propaganda: an environmental torture porn film, just the sort of thing Al Gore might have directed had he gone to the USC Film School instead of Harvard.

At least there was a deductive axiom, albeit speculative, behind the blitzkreig of flying rats and Hitch-schlockian birds. "Day of the Animals" was a cautionary tale about the hazards of aerosol spray cans.

Radiation had denatured the mountain beasts into cold-blooded killing machines, but they lacked a consciousness as to why the humans must pay. "Furry Vengeance", on the other hand, offers no such ecological explanation for the woodland creatures' aberrant comportment, in which these animal rebels display antrhopomorphic behavior without a scientific cause, still, whereas the afflicted creatures from the Girdler film ambushed its human opponents without calculation, the fierce raccoon and his furry minions are fully cognizant to the concept of home, family, and rezoning ordinances for the development of upper-class tract housing.

A montage which shows the animal wars with mankind throughout he ages, rules out any possibility for a "Day of the Animals"-inspired subtext, since the fighting commenced well before the Industrial Age.

"Furry Vengeance" is just a dumb kid's movie, which is far less ambitious than a dumb political one like "Day of the Animals". And it's sloppy. As Dan Sanders, Brendan Fraser plays an ambitious real estate developer who, after getting his ass kicked repeatedly by the wildlife, inevitably has second thoughts about deforestation once he learns that "animal relocation" is corporate-speak for "liquidation".

But the filmmaker provides an inadequate suture for the mover and shaker's rehabilitation, since "Furry Vengeance" never deals with the beaver holocaust, in which Dan ordered the construction foreman to blow up the dam.