FrightFest review – Hungry (2026)
This shot-in-Malta, set-in-Louisiana terror-by-nature movie has a lot in common with the croc-centric Rogue and Black Water … only with the heavily-touted nature fact going around that the hippopotamus is the animal which kills or injures the most people annually we get a one-up game where a small group of tourists discover that the alligators they’re hoping to see have been wiped out by a hippo.
There’s a backstory which explains why an African animal is in the bayou, but you don’t have to buy it. Most of the film is stuck-up-a-tree-in-a-swamp squabbling and coping, with various stratagems for survival or escape or signalling for help not working out as the cast are whittled down one by one. It has one odd angle which is either casting-against-type or just-plain-strange as the ‘Karen’ type businesslady with impractical heels who says and does all the wrong things and is indirectly and even directly responsible for a fair percentage of her fellow tourists getting killed is played by a black actress (Tracey Bonner). The ‘final girl’ is Sistine (Madison Davenport – who had a memorable bit in It’s What’s Inside), who keeps having woes heaped on her and gets more and more capable as everyone else craps out.
As often in disaster scenarios, the supposedly competent hero types – ex-fireman Tim (Jim Meskimen), the tour guide (Michel Curiel), whiskery hunter guest name Walker (Joaquim de Almeida) – fall by the wayside, leaving the frail girl to fight on. The hippo itself works better when glimpsed or underwater – the effects are okay, but despite all the pre-selling of evil rampaging hippos (they’re vegetarian, so they kill people for fun – actually because they’re very territorial) the big beast just doesn’t read onscreen as terribly fearsome. Written and directed by James Nunn, who’s been busy since FF selection Tower Block with the One Shot films and entries in the below-the-radar Marine franchise (he did parts 5 and 6); Hungry does rework some elements from his earlier terror-in-the-water pic Shark Bait.
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