FrightFest Halloween review – Coyotes
Many horror films ask you accept unlikely premises – that a refrigerator could be a portal to hell, that anyone would sympathise with an estate agent being pounced on by vampires, that Michael Myers learned how to drive a car while sitting catatonic in a padded cell, that birds would suddenly turn en masse on humans. Coyotes asks you to believe that an indie comics creator in the 2020s earns enough to buy a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, even if it is jerry-built and has a rat problem (and was filmed in Colombia). In a universe where creators of characters appearing in billion-dollar movies are posting GoFundMes to pay for their healthcare, that’s not likely – and it isn’t suggested that Scott (Justin Long) has, say, sold his indie comic to become a massive franchise or inherited a pile. Instead, he’s been in his room writing/drawing, neglecting wife Liv (Kate Bosworth) and daughter Chloe (Mila Harris) … just like the people in his life, the film doesn’t take what Scott does seriously as creative work, though Coyotes introduces all its characters with comic art and captions.
Director Colin Minihin – of the Vicious Brothers (Grave Encounters, Extraterrestrial) and outstanding solo efforts (It Stains the Sands Red, What Keeps You Alive) – doesn’t stress any of the possible big themes in the film, in which coyotes attack the residents of an upscale neighbourhood after a storm knocks out the power (they have a motive which harks back to ‘Devil in the Dark’ from Star Trek and even Gorgo rather than serving as a metaphor for the excluded underclass or abused nature). An issue with the film is that the coyotes all have a CG look, as if some programme were trying to give them a range of expression which canines just don’t have – it’s a fundamental rule of all terror-by-beast films that to get the best effect and the most uck you need real animals on the set: those rats eating Ernest Borgnine in Willard are exponentially more horrifying than the pixels slithering over Samuel L. Jackson in Snakes on a Plane. There are good shocks, deaths and suspense sequences in Coyotes, but mostly they work better when the unreal coyotes aren’t onscreen.
The main family are a sit-com bunch, and sweetly played (Long and Bosworth are actually married) as the non-competent handyman and immature Dad has to overcome a phobia about blood and perform all sorts of practical tasks to keep his little group safe (you don’t want to hear what happens to his copies of Fantastic Four #1 and Journey Into Mystery #83 though). The rest of the cast, with one exception, are caricature angelinos who deserve to get eaten – a shallow dog-walking insta bighead, a stoned slob, a maniac exterminator, etc. Brittany Allen, who was in It Stains the Sands Red and What Keeps You Alive, is a hoot as the hooker who outlives her john and latches onto the family, always ready with a conspiracy theory or a half-good idea which leads to more disaster. Allen, who also wrote some of the songs, digs deeper than the one-scene victims and makes her character engaging and sympathetic without covering for the fact that she’s a complete flake.
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