There are few B-movie genres I enjoy more than “people being chomped by a big scary animal”. The gold standard in recent years remains Alexandre Aja’s ‘Crawl’, a lean, mean and gloriously propulsive creature feature that gets its protagonists into serious trouble almost immediately and gets you out again in barely more than 80 minutes. ‘Hungry’, James Nunn’s new hippo horror, is rather more leisurely by comparison, taking its time to get to the chomping, but once it does, there’s just about enough to keep you entertained.
The set-up is simple. Sistine (Madison Davenport) and her friend Hannah (Olivia Bernstone) join a group of tourists on an alligator-spotting boat trip through the Louisiana bayou. Along for the ride are nurse Sally (Samantha Coughlan), her teenage son Mikey (River Codack), her retired firefighter father Tim (Jim Meskimen), and Dionne (Tracey Bonner), a spectacularly unpleasant businesswoman who has secretly paid their guide Rodrigo (Michel Curiel) to take them off the beaten track in search of the biggest gator around. When they discover that said gator has been thoroughly bodied (as the kids say), it quickly becomes apparent that something considerably larger is lurking in the swamp. Namely, a very hungry hungry hippo.
Nunn spends a fair chunk of the first act introducing his characters, and letting the audience get to know them. The extended build up however provides us with the film’s two primary pleasures: the dialogue, and Tracey Bonner’s hilariously awful Dionne. The screenplay for ‘Hungry’ is spectacularly committed to telling rather than showing, with characters repeatedly explaining what is happening, what they are feeling and what they are about to do. It is so relentlessly on-the-nose that it becomes unintentionally funny.
As for Dionne, she is the stock character from this genre of film that everyone hates, and then we can cheer when they get eaten. All of these films need a Dionne, but ‘Hungry’ takes it to magnificent new levels. Everything bad that happens in this film is essentially her fault, yet her utter commitment to being the most selfish person ever in a crisis is a true delight. The rest of the cast don’t make much of an impression, although Madison Davenport appears to have been cloned from Lindsay Lohan’s DNA. The resemblance is incredible.
There are some decent set pieces once the hippo gets properly involved, including a couple of genuinely quite tense moments. I could have done with a little less restraint though. I was reminded of ‘The Meg’ at times when watching this, in that the mayhem you’re anticipating is just a bit too tame. I know films like these need to appeal to wide audiences, but huge angry animals tearing through groups of idiots should really be a little less PG-13 in my opinion.
Look, ‘Hungry’ isn’t trying to reinvent cinema. It’s a film that includes Joaquim de Almeida gruffly declaring that “the only cute hippo is a dead hippo.” It knows exactly what it is. Whilst it doesn’t sit alongside the likes of ‘Crawl’, ‘Deep Blue Sea’, and ‘Lake Placid’ it delivers enough silly dialogue and tense attack scenes to keep you watching. If it turned up on television on a Saturday night, and you had a few beers in the fridge and a big bowl of popcorn within reach, there are certainly worse ways to spend 90-odd minutes.
HUNGRY is available exclusively on Sky Cinema from 4 September.
