Raging Sharks

Raging Sharks (2005) Directed by Danny Lerner

Is the world ready for a Sci-fi/Horror/Action/Submarine/Spy/Shark Movie? Sure, why not? Raging Sharks is not that movie.

Let’s start at the beginning: I knew Raging Sharks was not going to be a great film. I’m not an idiot. It’s not like I thought this was a cross between Jaws and Raging Bull. In fact, I thought that this would be some sort of Deep Blue Sea knockoff. If only.

The first big surprise that director Danny Lerner had for me was the opening sequence—which is in space. Yes, space—the final frontier. I thought for a second that my disc had the wrong film recorded on it, but I wasn’t about to complain because maybe the movie that was actually on the DVD would be a rollicking space opera--and that might be better than a rollickless shark operetta. Then, for a brief second I dared to dream…of space sharks. How cool would that have been? Very cool.

Cooler than what I actually got—which was an exterior of some spaceship cruising along in space followed by a foggy interior of another ship where a pair of space aliens are sitting around and doing something with a big set of glass tubes. (Upon closer examination of the packaging I discovered that the back cover shows a pair of scuba diving space aliens exploring underwater. How did I miss that?) Suddenly the other ship rams their ship and both ships explode sending a glowing orange-red canister hurtling through space and then all the way to earth where it crashes into an indeterminately Eastern European freighter sending it to the bottom of the ocean after a violent (and trailer-worthy) explosion.

Flash forward to five years later at the impact zone which just happens to be in the Bermuda Triangle. Why is it in the Bermuda Triangle? No good reason.
The research ship Paradiso is waiting on the undersea research station Oshona to send their chief up to catch a helicopter—which turns out to be an unnecessary complication since geography seems to mean nothing in this movie. According to the Physics of Raging Sharks a helicopter can get to Boston from Bermuda fast enough for someone to get there in time to be called back to Bermuda for something that happened minutes after the helicopter took off in the first place and a submarine taking off from Boston back to Bermuda can make the same trip in the other direction--only faster. Now, maybe the helicopter was ferrying the passenger to a jet—but still. Why bother including that complication? Isn’t there a better way to introduce the chief villain of the story as well as getting an attack submarine into the mix?

But wait a minute—aren’t the raging sharks supposed to be the main antagonists? Nope. Because this isn’t a shark movie; it’s a sci-fi/submarine/spy thriller shark movie. So, our main characters are the crew of the Oshona—a ramshackle mobile undersea research platform (MURP?) that is full of “80’s technology” that is falling apart because of the shoestring budget and ragtag crew: which is a good description of Raging Sharks, too. Dr. Mike Olsen (Corin Nemec—you know, Parker Lewis from Parker Lewis Can’t Lose) is the man behind the Oshona and yet he keeps telling his wife Linda (Vanessa Angel) that he’d rather start a family and live in a real house in a place whose name “doesn’t begin or end in ocean.” So, why does he bother doing undersea research if he doesn’t care? Why am I even curious about this? And why is Corin Nemec’s name on the cover? How many Parker Lewis fans are there out there? Why isn’t Vanessa Angel’s name on the cover? She was in Spies Like Us. And what about Corbin Bernsen? Why isn’t his name on the cover? People might actually want to see a movie that has Vanessa Angel and Corbin Bernsen—which of course may have been enough reason for those two to hide and give way to Corin “Who the heck is this guy?” Nemec.

Meanwhile, back in the movie: As soon as Dr. Olsen leaves the Oshona, the lab loses two of its expendable divers to the raging sharks. Linda goes out to see what happened and is swarmed by the sharks and barely manages to make it back on board alive. The sharks, at their most rage-y, proceed to chew off the Oshona’s air and power lines prompting the big crisis of the movie. All attempts to fix this are met by the same clips of sharks raging—a combination of real shark footage, digital sharks, and an animatronic shark—and, of course, some very vague shark’s eye POV shots—presumably from the lead raging shark, because there are never any other sharks in those shots.

So, Dr. Olsen has to come back from his fundraising trip to Boston—but how can he make it back in record speed? With the attack submarine U.S.S. Roosevelt, of course, under the command of Capt. Riley (Corbin Bernsen). So, the Oshona is running out of air near Bermuda and their rescuers are booking it down from Boston and the sharks, they are a-raging. A diver from the Paradiso is sent down to a certain death prompting an old bearded sailor on the bridge to pull off his knit cap and weep silently. Who was that old guy? Who knows? We never saw him before that moment and we never see him again. I think he might have been one of the financial backers of the film watching the final product.
Then the coast guard sends a seaplane to—well, who the hell knows what the seaplane was going to do to help—and the diver from the seaplane falls off the float of the plane, cartwheels along the surface and is then torn to pieces by the sharks, who are still a-raging. And the silliest part of that sequence? The mountains behind the seaplane. Let me get this straight, you have enough of a budget to make digital sharks, but you don’t have enough time/money/inclination to wipe out the mountains behind the rescue team. That can mean only one thing: the producers must have assumed that no one would actually be watching this movie. (They were wrong because obviously they didn't know what $2 and a momentary lapse of reason will do to a man.)

Although there are movies that are more shoddily made than this one, many of them betray a certain quirkiness and complete lack of ability when it comes to details that make them (unintentionally) hilarious. Raging Sharks, though, is a movie that is carefully scrubbed of anything that approaches character, and which is, conversely, relatively solidly acted and produced. It's just like a solidly produced bowl of plaster. Sure, it fills you up, but it has no taste.

It’s the writing here that really stinks. The screenwriter in this case is named Les Weldon. (Less Well Done?) If there was some justice in the world he'd have to take a defensive writing class to make up for this movie. At one point Vera (Elise Muller) says “It’s not our faults. It’s not.” I don't think Les Weldon wrote that line. It was too genuine. I don't think it was part of the movie. That line sounded to me like a plea for understanding—understanding which I am happy to provide, even to the weakest link in the chain. (I’m looking at you, Bernard van Bilderbeek aka “Binky.”)

Yes, according to IMDB Bernard (or Binky) van Bilderbeek is the real name of the actor who plays Harvey, the cowardly undersea technician whose only character trait beyond cowardice and idiocy is saying “bloody ‘ell” every time he speaks. He’s awful, but on reflection it’s not his fault either. I doubt he ever said “you know, I think Harvey would say ‘bloody ‘ell’ here.” No, that sounds like some bad writing to me. Just like the part where the lab technician looks at something and just says “interesting…fascinating.” That’s a whole scene. It’s no wonder the sharks are raging. I am too, at this point.

Meanwhile an opportunistic camera crew is attacked and killed by the sharks for no reason. Either before or after that (I can’t remember which, and I assure you I don’t care anymore) the sharks go on a tear on the beach at Bermuda and eat a whole mess of people. You see, the sharks (a coalition of 12 species) are hunting as if they’re all part of a unit. They’re coalescing, they’re cooperating, they’re coordinating, they’re organizing, they’re…unionizing. Why? Something to do with the alien fuel that they have apparently been eating. One of the sharks gets caught in a net after the Great Bermuda People Eating Excursion and it gets cut open revealing the little red-orange alien fuel.

Meanwhile the USS Roosevelt has another passenger, Ben Stiles (Todd Jensen) supposedly some sort of agent for the Marine Oceanic Agency but actually an agent of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) who’s there to make sure that no one else finds out about the alien fuel source, which, it turns out is some sort of cold fusion version of extra large pop rocks that “the government” doesn’t want to have to share with the rest of the world. Shadowy government within a government that is willing to kill people to hide secret technology in the name of national security? That’s the one part of this movie that actually seems believable.
For a brief second it looks like this movie will attempt a message.

Vera: You don’t own the goddamn ocean.
Stiles: We own whatever we want.

Dick Cheney couldn’t have said it better. And if this wasn’t a movie where sharks made sounds like lions, hyenas and wild pigs that last exchange could have had some impact. Instead, it just falls as flat as a flapjack and before you know it Stiles is machine-gunning the crew of the Oshona. (Except for the lab tech, who gets stabbed in the back at his desk. "Interesting...fascinating...sharp--ahhh!") I was curious as to how Stiles managed to sneak his HK onto the Oshona when his method of entry was scuba diving without so much as a fanny pack or a messenger pouch, but maybe the HK was disassembled, or maybe it was in the sleeve of his wetsuit or maybe he hid it Papillon-style. And the parts work well after being brought through salt-water because it’s a “sub” machine gun. Ha ha ha. (Please kill me now.)

I actually felt bad when Stiles riddled Vera in the back, and not just because Elise Muller is kind of cute, but because in the course of an hour of film we knew nothing about her character. It’s as if the writer didn’t even care enough to create a character there. Then again, maybe that’s just as well given how ham-handed the attempts to make us care about other characters end up being. The phrase “It’s my little boy’s birthday” might as well be replaced by “I am a human being about to be eaten by raging sharks, please care about me accordingly. I am not expendable.” Oh, but you are. You all are.

And so are the sharks. At one point the submarine is called upon to fire a torpedo into the swarm of sharks killing many of them. (Roy Scheider never thought of that, did he?)It's that easy? Why didn't they just finish off the rest of the sharks that way?

So, the evil government agent kills off the crew members who weren’t eaten by sharks leaving just Parker Lewis and the girl from Spies Like Us. Cue "Soulfinger." That’s when everything becomes mysterious. The aliens show up in an operatic musical sequence—one of many times where there’s actual opera music in the score (Verdi, Catalani)—and they recover their fuel as the Oshona implodes. Corbin Bernsen mourns (in a manly way) even though he'd only known Dr. Olsen for a few hours. But wait! Dr. Olsen manages to get his scuba gear on after semi-consciously watching the aliens through the picture-window as he and his wife run out of oxygen—just like the movie. Stiles, who also miraculously survived the implosion, tries to stop the Olsens, but he is torn apart by the still raging sharks leaving the way clear for Arnie Becker’s submarine to rescue Parker Lewis and his wife. Linda, though, wasn’t conscious and didn’t have her scuba gear so the last bit of suspense is the fifteen second drama of “is she drownded or will she breathe?” and you can imagine how that ends. Happily ever after, of course, though no one on the submarine believes the story about the aliens that Dr. Olsen saw.

So, what the hell happened here? Was this a shark movie? Not really. The sharks are still there at the end. Some of them probably still have bits of alien fuel in them. Will they keep raging and keep getting smarter? Probably. Was this a spy thriller? Not really. The entire thriller angle consisted of one government agent showing up and killing some people only to be eaten by sharks. Not really a John Le Carré story. And isn't the government still going to come after the fuel and anyone who might have known about it? Was this a sci-fi movie? Not even as close as The Abyss. This is the kind of movie that gives hybrids a bad name. It pleases no fans of any genre. It probably doesn't even do much to please people who just enjoy moving pictures with no regard to content at all.

Raging Sharks is a homunculus of a movie cobbled together from several genres or ideas of genres and thoroughly bleached of any character.

So, is there anything of value in there?

There’s the (most likely) unintentional humor of Harvey lighting up a cigarette several minutes after it was announced that the station is running out of air. There are some decent miniature sequences and some of the action sequences in the Oshona are okay. The interior scenery of the Oshona is good and there’s a dream sequence with a shark in the picture window that is completely inexplicable and unnecessary and yet one of the better crafted moments in the movie.

Probably the best thing I can say about this movie is that it doesn’t have the obligatory exploitation moments that you might expect in something like this. You never watch anyone taking a shower. There’s never a boatful of college students having a wild drunken spring break orgy interrupted by killer raging sharks. Even the beach scene in Bermuda is remarkably chaste. Is that a good thing? Well, it’s refreshing, I must say. It evinces a lack of desperation on the part of the director and producers that is to be admired--if only for the audacity of it.

Does that make Raging Sharks worth seeing? Jeez, no. Please, I have sacrificed myself here so that no one else will need to.

On the other hand, I might say that the best acting on this DVD is in the “Behind the scenes” piece: The Terror Below: Making Raging Sharks. Here is where the most earnest performances and deepest characterizations can be found. Just look at the way Vanessa Angel wrings her hands in her interview. There’s some real anguish there—most likely about the horrible script and its impact on her career. When she says “But ultimately it’s really a story of survival and trying to get out of this really horrific situation they’re in,” I think she’s actually talking about the actors on this movie. “It’s about how different people deal with adversity,” says another actor. Yeah, I believe it. Look at the smarmy way Les Weldon says “I think the audience will respond to the story because we’re not just giving them sharks and/or aliens but we’re actually bringing together what has previously been two different and distinctive genres.” Those two genres being: crappy movies and painfully crappy movies. The editor of the movie, Michele Gisser says proudly, “The sharks in Raging Sharks are not your average sharks because they’re just extreme.” Extremely what? I bet you don’t even know what extreme means. Corbin Bernsen describes the set as a “One hundred million dollar submarine.” Really? Would that be in Bermudan Dollars? Todd Jensen goes out of way to ingratiate himself by saying that someone should write a book about the director. “He’s the encyclopedia—the dictionary—of filmmaking.” I think I’d prefer to find the thesaurus of filmmaking. Meanwhile Danny Lerner, the director, inflates the importance of the movie. “People been asked what is the most fear subject in the world—including terrorism—and number one was come the shark.” Yes, number one was come the shark, indeed. And finally Michele Gisser closes out this mercifully short cruise into the abyss: “It’s a roller coaster ride that will keep the audience on the edge of their seats ‘til the end.” Yes, it sure kept me on the edge of my seat all the way ‘til the end, because I was always on the edge of getting up and leaving my own house to avoid watching the rest of it.

Somewhere out there is a good sci-fi/submarine/action/shark/thriller/buddy-cop/comedy movie. I hope we find it someday soon.

Smoking and Singing

Romance & Cigarettes is a different kind of musical and by “different” I mean “better” and by musical I mean…I don’t even know what I mean. This is not a pure musical, that’s part of the charm. For some reason, all of the things I can’t stand in a regular musical I actually enjoy in this film. Why is that? What makes it so much better? Maybe it’s the music. Like Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, John Turturro’s Romance & Cigarettes uses pop songs instead of some of the atrocious noise and idiotic lyrics that often clutter Broadway and its environs. (I’m talking to you Lord Webber.) And, since it’s not all songs by the same artist there’s a lot more variety than you would get if the entire soundtrack was drawn from, say, The Spin Doctors’ Pocket Full of Kryptonite. Nobody dislikes hearing Dusty Springfield singing “Piece of My Heart.” Nobody. Don’t even try. But then again, when was the last time you enjoyed kicking back and listening to some Engelbert Humperdinck? For me, it was when I was watching this film. I’m not knocking Engelbert Humperdinck (okay, maybe a little) but seriously, it took me until the credits to realize what I had just listened to—and enjoyed. Engelbert Humperdinck—who would have guessed?

Mr. Turturro’s little movie is full of surprises like that. You know you’re in for a quirky film from the first line of the film when Kate Winslet’s Tula says, “When a woman bends over a man sees a jelly donut. Her brain expands, his explodes…dead on arrival in her powdered jelly donut.” Yeah, how many musicals start out like that? What does that even mean? Well, I know what it means…but why say that? And of course, how many musicals have Eddie Izzard and Christopher Walken? Did I mention Mary-Louise Parker and Amy Sedaris?

The biggest surprise is that this is not a schmaltzy saccharine musical about love. Amor does not vincit the omnia here, if you’ll excuse the horrific Latin grammar. It’s a lot more complex than that.

Nick Murder (James Gandolfini) is cheating on his wife Kitty (Susan Sarandon) with the foul-mouthed fiery red-head Tula (Kate Winslet). Cue the domestic disturbance and more singing. Nick talks over his troubles with his coworker Angelo (Steve Buscemi) who is always quick with the grand and hilarious truisms as any best friend should be.

“I’d like to fuck a woman with a backside as big as the world,” Angelo says, and “I’d like to fuck a woman tennis player—with the outfit on, a tennis ball stuck in her panties…” and you have to think yourself: Maybe I’d like to fuck a woman tennis player, too. Maybe I want to fuck a woman with a backside as big as the world. Maybe I’d like to fuck a woman who looks like Cary Grant in drag. Okay, maybe not that last bit, but still. No one in Phantom of the Opera mentions fucking a woman tennis player or a jelly donut and it’s a poorer work of art for it.

So, Nick gets circumcised to please Tula who rewards him by eating fried chicken in bed with him—after the sex, of course. This is the part that shows that John Turturro has his finger on the pulse of American fantasies. You see, it’s not just about the wild heart-attack inducing sex with a dirty hot redhead who works in a lingerie shop. No, that’s a pedestrian fantasy. It’s really about the post-coital fried chicken. Now that’s true dirty lust.

Love, meanwhile, is a stranger thing. You have young love, like Baby Murder (Mandy Moore) and Fryburg (Bobby Cannavale) whose ridiculous make-out session is punctuated by the following exchange:

Baby: You’re the best kisser in the world.
Fryburg: I wanna make out with your whole family.

And they go on making out. Really. That last little statement wasn’t a deal-breaker?

Maybe I really don’t know anything about love. Maybe no one knows anything about love. And maybe that’s the point of the film. It’s about how complicated love is, and how lust complicates things. It’s about how a first love can go awry and screw up your life like Cousin Bo (Christopher Walken) whose first love Ro (Cady Huffman) haunts and taunts him. “Ro was my first love. I traced her name in cowshit.” Tracing her name in cowshit--I wish I had thought of that with my first love.

The plot really isn’t the thing here. Even the characters, delightful as they are, aren’t the point of the exercise. This is a meditation about love, and what it really gets you. Also, it’s about how smoking your brains out will get you black lungs and your mother, in this case Elaine Stritch, will show up to call you a whoremaster before you die. Life is grand, isn’t it? Smoke up.

The film takes a turn in the last half hour and things get a bit serious, but no less bizarre. If you need straightforward plots and simple easy to understand upbeat stories that always end happily and the same two people always end up in love and together—then why have you even bothered to read this far? This is a bizarre little film with a heart of gold. And if you’re afraid of letting things get serious, then at least watch the bit with Christopher Walken and Tom Jones’ “Delilah.”

But if you've ever wondered what love is really about, then this is a movie for you. It's about fear and love and getting tired of love and looking for passion and trying to feel alive. It's about dreaming of taking a big jet somewhere and never getting the chance. It's not the ordinary musical pap, and that's a good thing.

There are those who would envy the lusty fried-chicken lust that Nick gets with Tula, and that’s great, certainly, but I think what I really envy is that long-term love, the kind that Kitty talks about. It would sure be nice to have that kind of love, too. I'd like to think that if Susan Sarandon was cooking me lambchops and trimming my nosehairs that I wouldn't go looking for fried chicken elsewhere. But maybe I'm a hopeless romantic that way.

“Love is the vaguest word in the human vocabulary. It’s terrible and beautiful,” says Kitty Murder. Romance & Cigarettes is one of the better attempts to make love less vague. It’s terrible and beautiful.

Zoo Commentary

“Us humans are overconditioned from the time that we’re born to start categorizing. And even if we’re unconscious, or even subconscious, we start categorizing. Animal’s just not going to do that. You’re either a good person or a bad person.”

Hmm. Good Person or Bad Person. Aren’t those categories?

“Before I ever had the concept of being zoo, I had the feeling that traditional family life was something that I’d never do. I don’t need a high level of emotional interaction, with a human or otherwise. I function fine, I think.”

You like to have sexual relations with animals and you don’t like to have a high level of emotional interaction and you think you function fine?

“I talked to people out of Poland and Germany and Japan. I even talked to solders that are currently in Iraq. This gives them a chance to kind of connect back with the old world that they knew back here, even if it’s the same old world that sent ‘em out there to survive that environment.” – “The happy horseman”, truck driver

I don’t know what part of this is more disturbing—the part where we sent over some of our best and brightest animal lovers in a misguided invasion and occupation or the fact that getting them in touch with zoophiles back home is supposed to be comforting? Is Barbaro the Betty Grable of Operation Iraqi Freedom? “My dearest Bossy, I’m doing my best here to protect you and the rest of America, to protect democracy and our way of life. Don’t believe all the bad news that you hear. We’re doing the right thing and really making a difference. I can’t wait to feel your hooves when I get home. Save me some oats.”

“They were my so-called friends for twenty-some years. When this broke loose, the last thing he said to me, he told me I was a very bad person. We were friends all those years and all of a sudden I’m no good just because I loved the horses?” -- “H”, ranch hand

Did you tell them exactly how much you “loved” the horses for those twenty years?
No? Then you can understand their shock. And yes, “H” you are a bad person.

“Trying to balance religion and being zoo—a lot of that is faith. Growing up Baptist in a fairly religious household, I hold certain beliefs to my heart: God doesn’t hate anyone. You treat your fellow man right, you don’t hurt other people, for the most part you’ll be okay.”

For the most part...until you start having sex with animals.

“I always treated my animals as part of my family. They ate before I did. Look at the videos that they took of the horses. Did they look neglected? No. It’s the love of animals. That’s what zoophilia is. It’s like if you love your wife or your kids. It’s the same thing. I took better care of my animals than I ever took care of myself.”

How can I even begin to dissect that statement? Of course it would be worse if you neglected the animals that you’re having sex with. But it’s also not okay to “love” your kids the way this person was “loving” his animals. That’s one seriously 3871 family. And the least you could have done was take better care of yourself while you were at it.

“See, I grew up in the city. I was a city boy and I always wanted to be a farmer. Well, the job gave me what I wanted.”

That’s just sick. You didn’t want to be a farmer. You wanted to have sex with animals.

“I started when I was sixteen right after my mom died. For some reason it just happened one day. I kind of liked it. I didn’t even know it was zoophilia until I got on the internet. I’ve been on the internet since 2002. That’s the first time ever. I had AOL server. It was really interesting to meet all these different people, and to this day they’re still friends of mine.”

One line’s worth of psychological introspection followed by the most pathetic example of what the information superhighway has really accomplished for mankind.

“There was never any money that changed hands. There were people that offered money. I wouldn’t accept money from anybody because then it’s prostitution. That’s against the law.”

Oh, well, as long as it’s not illegal. You wouldn’t want to become some sort of horse pimp.

“I knew that bestiality wasn’t against the law in Washington. A lot of them just wanted to come out and see. We wanted to see if it was possible. Maybe I just wanna grab a horse by his nuts and feel his balls—how they feel—well, they’re warm.”

Oh, they’re warm. I didn’t know. Now I know. Who could have known that horse testicles would be warm? Well, this has been very…informative.

“I’d invite you to my home. I’d treat you like any other person that was in my house.”

Any other person would not be coming over to have cocktails and then go out to the barn and have sex with animals.

“I did summertime barbecues, Thanksgiving. I did Christmas dinner one year. We did turkey and a ham.”

Whoa! Dream big! Turkey AND ham? That’s almost as wild as having sex with animals. Please tell me you didn’t have sex with the turkey and the ham before you cooked them.

“He was basically curious, like everybody was curious.”

Everybody? Not everybody is curious about what it feels like to have their colon perforated by a horse prong.

“There was no special flashy nothing going on that was all that strange or unusual. I mean this goes on hundreds of thousands of places all over the country.”

Nothing flashy…just simple no-frills bestiality. None of that fancy glittery drugged-up rave party bestiality. And this is going on in hundreds of thousands of places? Really?

“It was a pretty much classless society.”

Great. They were a utopian socialist group of zoophiles.

“Just be careful, because if you stand too long in one place, it’s gonna happen. If you just stand there he’ll walk up behind you, put their head up on your shoulder and talk to you. They’re gonna pick up that pheromone that your body’s putting out and they’re gonna mount you. If you don’t move, you’re bred. And I mean BRED.”

Yeah. Thanks for the details there, crazy man.

“I think at one time he was very conservative. After a while things started changing, things started opening up to him. Maybe he was saying, ‘this just doesn’t seem right to me. Something about this is just wrong.’”

So, basically the logic goes something like this. You’re working for Boeing on defense related industries. You feel like something is wrong with your life. Something is missing. What’s missing? What will make things less wrong? Sex with a horse. Yeah.

“You’re connecting with another intelligent being who is very happy to participate—be involved. You’re not going to be able to ask it about the latest Madonna album. It has no idea what Tolstoy is or Keats, can’t discuss the difference between Monet and Picasso. That just doesn’t exist for their world.”

This is the part that really enrages me. What’s wrong with having a relationship? What’s wrong with having a conversation? What’s wrong about sharing emotions?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be asked about the latest Madonna album either, but I like people. People have emotions. They communicate. You have to actually develop a relationship…most of the time, that is. In human relations there are times when the equivalent of a sugar cube and a bucket full of oats will get you a ride in the stables without talking about Tolstoy, too.

“One day I’m doing just fine, the next day I’m an evil person. There’s nothing evil about me. I wasn’t breaking the law. I had everything going for me and it all came crashing down around me.”

You had everything going for you? Sure, if everything consists of having a farm and a stable full of animals you and your friends can have sex with.

“How did they know the horse didn’t consent? How…can this happen without consent? We’re talking about a human being and a horse. If the horse didn’t consent, then none of this would have happened.” -- Rush Limbaugh

And you can count on the drug-addled-fornicating-outside-of-marriage mind of Rush Limbaugh to step in and completely screw up his chance of being on the right side of an argument. Here’s the gist of Mr. Limbaugh’s argument: The horse that accidentally killed “Mr. Hands” was not “abused” because it was a male horse and it was on top, so it doesn’t count as animal abuse because it was a consenting adult…creature. Does Rush Limbaugh actually believe in anything? Does he have a moral center? He’s in such a hurry to make sure that he scores points against animal rights activists who say that having sex with animals is abuse that he’s willing to forget the fact that it’s flat out immoral. Leave it to Limbaugh to take a moment of moral clarity where he could actually stake a spot on the high ground and come down on the wrong side.

“He wanted to be a farmer. He wanted to be like me.”

I don’t think he wanted to farm. You’re not a farmer, either.

“I was evil because I had a love for my animals more than other people do. I studied Buddhism for about three years. I still chant to this day.”

Which chant would that be? The one that goes “moo, moo, moo” or the one that goes “neigh, neigh, neigh”?

“The sex was just a small component of it. And by standing there talking to her—in a way, you’re connecting to her, going ‘I’m talking to you on the same level that you’re kind of staring at me—mammal to mammal.’”

I’m talking to you…you’re staring at me…why don’t we get mammal to mammal?
Yeah. Smooth.

Zoo, or What the hell is wrong with people?

What the hell is wrong with people? Seriously. That’s all I could think of while watching Zoo, a documentary about zoophiles and particularly about one zoophile who died after being philed by a zoo, specifically a horse. Again, I have to say, what the 3871 is wrong with people?

I understand curiosity. Curiosity is why I didn’t flinch when my friend Critical Darling handed this film over for my perusal. I knew what I was in for, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to go ahead and see exactly what I was in for. Everyone’s just a little bit curious. Fortunately, my imagination is satisfied by simply sitting through Zoo. Others, are not so fortunate in their inquisitiveness.

Director Robinson Devor’s technique is reminiscent of crappy mysterious alien autopsy documentaries. It begins with some mysterious lights in the darkness and some eerie music and proceeds with voiceovers telling cryptic anecdotes while shadowy reenactments are presented. If I hadn’t known this was a film about an incident of bestiality I would have thought this was a film about Bigfoot, The Bermuda Triangle and Hangar 18. It makes Equus seem like an installment of Schoolhouse Rock and frankly it’s annoying. It’s an annoying style for any documentary, but it’s much more understandable for the kind of topics that were covered by the creepy In Search Of…series that haunted my childhood. I’m not saying that the story of a man being humped to death by a horse should be filmed in bright colors with a John Philip Sousa soundtrack but—well, maybe I am saying that. What would be wrong with that? Nothing.

Devor’s film has no main narration, so the story comes out in mysterious bits and pieces through the lengthy personal narratives of various zoophiles and other characters involved in the incident. It takes several minutes before someone mentions something about “being zoo” which brings up another point of annoyance—A zoo is a park where animals are kept and exhibited to the public. It’s a violation of language to turn it into an adjective of identity. “I am zoo” isn’t just disturbing as a thought, it’s also just a dumb distortion of language. The least these cowfuckers could do would be to have enough of a sense of humor to refer to themselves as “zooish.” That would at least bring some humor to it. But no, “zoo” is a marker of identity. Next thing you know the “zoos” will want to have a Zoo Pride Parade. From a political standpoint, Zoo is the first piece of evidence I’ve ever seen that a conservative could point to as proving a point about the excesses of liberal identity culture and where it can go. Apparently the end product of excessive tolerance is to end up in a farm in Washington State being reared by a horse.

Robinson Devor may be clever in not turning Zoo into sensational yellow journalism, but the moral relativism of the film tends to lean toward excessive sympathy for the “zoos.” It’s certainly thought-provoking, but it’s also infuriating. Morals and ethics aren’t bad things. Having sex with animals is not a good thing. People who do it are not normal. This is not civilized behavior. It’s not even acceptably barbaric behavior. I have to wonder if Robinson Devor would consider doing a documentary about genocide from the point of view of the perpetrators and come out this sympathetic. How many howls of protest would that get at Sundance?

It takes eons before anyone in Zoo mentions “bestiality” and several more eons before the facts of the case of “Mr. Hands” come out—a man died from internal injuries sustained while being mounted by a horse. The words “perforation” “colon” and “horse” should never appear together in a sentence, much less on a death certificate. But while I have to agree with Cop #1 when he says that this is ultimately about the death of a human being and, thus, inherently a personal tragedy for that person and his loved ones I can’t help but add that this was a preventable death and that’s the point that the film seems to miss. Devor lets the “zoos” defend themselves and their behavior to such an extent that we can be tempted to forget that “Mr. Hands” would never have suffered this “tragedy” if he didn’t have the desire to be ridden by a horse.

I suppose there’s some benefit to hearing the zoophiles defending themselves and letting the audience form their own responses. And I suppose the only thing worse than Zoo would be to see the kind of exploitative crappy way a TV tabloid show or the Zoological History Channel would come up with to tell this story, but that doesn’t change the fact that Zoo is just an annoying film about a distasteful subject.

In the end the zoos don’t seem to realize that there’s a difference between love between people and love for other creatures—and that the desire to have a sexual relationship with a creature precisely because of their inability to communicate or complicate things with human emotions and relationship issues is not merely a different kind of the same love that people share, but a form of psychosis. If the makers of Zoo agree that zoophilly is a form of psychosis and not okay they sure as heck don’t show it.

Though this film has very little that can visually disgust or disturb viewers—there is one scene where reenactors are watching a tape of the “incident” but it looks blurry and sounds somewhat disgusting—this is not a film for people who are squeamish. That’s not to say that it IS a film for anyone. It may be a great conversation piece, but who the heck wants to get that conversation rolling.

Zoo, dir. Robinson Devor, is fortunately still unavailable on home video.