FrightFest review – Hyena (2026)
It’s difficult to explain what the big problem with Hyena is without spoiling its twist – though just mentioning that it has a twist will probably make forewarned viewers see through it even quicker than anyone who goes in cold. I always wonder why would a filmmaker commit to doing again something which has been done so often before? And, in this case, done once in a famous film, and a bunch of other titles. Even the major innovation, making this a female-skewing story, isn’t exactly original, since there was a version of that well before the famous film in an episode of a well-remembered anthology movie … actually, in separate episodes of two well-remembered anthology movies. Plus it has an irrelevant title which makes this too easy to get mixed up with Gerard Johnson’s 2014 cop movie – last year, Johnson made a film called Odyssey, so he’s putting up with a plague of passing off.
So, what else have you got?
Writer-director-actor Matthew Ninaber, known for the title role in Psycho Goreman, plays Dan, one of two male-model look cops on a serial killer case. Along with Hugh (Jeremy Ninaber), Dan is grilling camgirls Nicole (Kristen Kaster) and Rachel (Storm Steenson), who have apparently got a sideline in murdering men. Or are they just in the wrong car crash with a couple of corpses at the same time? And which, if either, is the primary killer? Their stories keep shifting and flashbacks tell different versions of the past. The film has patches of really good writing, mostly with the women, and Kaster (playing quiet and traumatised) and Steenson (doing ‘pixie sociopath’) are interesting, though the Basic Instincty cop-hooked-up-with-a-suspect angle is undercooked.
The camgirl business is 2020s-ish but the rest of the film has a throwback ‘80s/’90s feel with lots of purple-lit club scenes and gore killings. It occasionally has a parodic edge, but also turns serious for revelatory monologues – it’s neat that a camgirl gets her ‘tokens’ by gradually exposing herself and saying what the unseen customers want to hear, which is also the process of a police interrogation and a key strategy of a screenplay which hinges on monologues which seem to explain backstory or motivation but could also just be characters telling other people what they’ve paid to hear or an attempt to justify murder or corruption or sex work to themselves.
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