"Speak not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. " - AhabBut to paraphrase Slim in To Have and Have Not, "what happens if it slaps you back?" The answer is that the undying savage beneath the hotty toddy veneer of Leslie Nielsen emerges, an Ahab born anew for a Moby Dick spread across ozone-depleted sunshine into the minds of the beasts of the American mountains. The entirety, the Beast with a Million Eyes, slaps him back. But first, a little background:
There was another leviathan that splashed the nation in the mid-70s: Jaws, which itself came initially as part of a seventies eco-awareness trend, i.e. whaling was out, and even sharks could only be killed in self-defense. The ozone layer hole had been discovered, aerosol cans were banned; a Native American was crying by the side of the highway; the tab on soda and beer cans was changed to stay attached rather than be tossed into the bay to cut up the feet of pelicans. We kids were keen on Cub Scouts and 'Indian Guides;' TV had Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, Grizzly Adams and The Waltons, Apple's Way, and Little House on the Prarie; in school we read My Side of the Mountain; at home a magazine called Ranger Rick. Mom took us to see matinees like The Adventures of the Wilderness Family. We were in the wilderness. All we needed was a beast to fear, a bad grizzly, to make the good grizzly seem even nicer.
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This was still before VHS or cable, so if an exploitation pioneer wanted to get funding from the major networks in advance of production, he had to entertain the entire family, all at once, in the same room, looking at the same screen. PG didn't just mean kids can come with the adults, it meant grandparents too. And Hollywood was dealing with a surplus of stars who had drawn huge salaries 30-50 years earlier and would now work for scale in just about anything ---so ensemble cast disaster films sprang up, with casts of older stars, younger newcomers, and Charlton Heston or some other granite jaw bringing up the rear. Meanwhile, the American western outdoors beckoned as a cheap, union-free locale for monster movies. The great west spoke: "Hell, we got dozens of unemployed western stuntmen and character actors out here all ready, and hell you don't even need a fake monster on account of we got trainers with grizzlies, wolves, and mountain lions." And if you want vermin (Kingdom of the Spiders, Empire of the Ants, Food of the Gods, Damnation Alley, Night of the Lepus) which could be rear projected to look freakishly large, that was easy too. We kids never ratted out the fakeness of the effects and there was no way to rewind or repeat play since DVRs and VHS were still a ways off. As long as it was attacking folks of all ages, and it was big, nothing else really mattered. It was the seventies, man, even the monsters were au naturale.
There was nothing else to worry about --no blue state / red state divide, we were all purple, like the mountain majesties. And into these mountains strode an eagle-eyed copycat director named William Girdler, a mountain man whose monster films were mountain man-made. He saw there was a way to make a PG monster movie that could combine the children's nature film craze's fondness for grizzly attacks and the monster craze's fondness for shark attacks, and he made that movie. And it was Grizzly (1976), a huge hit. He could now afford an ensemble cast and to empty the cages at the Hollywood animal trainer park, for 1977's Day of the Animals.
Up until the blu-ray that just came out I thought Day of the Animals was a TV movie. Thanks to Scorpion Releasing though, a gorgeous 'Walden Filter' widescreen vista of an anamorphic aspect ratio has appeared, majestically dwarfing the relatively incompetent action we're used to on the small square screen of the earlier DVD. Did I mention I love this dumb movie? You want to know the plot? There's humans on a hike high in the mountains, and then there's animals and they fight each other. The end. There's one hawk, three vultures, a carload o' rattlesnakes, a tarantula, wuxia mice, a wolf, three panthers, a gang of German shepherds presumably fresh out of a hole in the K9 Academy fence, and Leslie Nielsen, shirtless, as nature intended. It's all because of the ozone hole. Can you prove it didn't happen?
Like all its devotees, I remember the night Day premiered on CBS' Friday Night Movie, but I missed their whole dog attack climax because it came after my bedtime. Sometimes I wonder if this blog's real origin story lies in my dad's declaration of kids' bedtimes, a strict law which he enforced regardless of how riveting the movie we were watching was. I missed the end of a horde of great films that way: The Poseidon Adventure, Telefon, Day of the Dolphin, Orca, The Cassandra Crossing --I still don't know how some of them end. I would be in bed furious and crushed, but I dreamt my own wilder crazier endings. For Day of the Animals when I heard at next Monday's recess that the humans had survived by riding a raft down the rapids with rabid dogs snapping at their hands every yard of the way I envisioned a pretty wild ride.
Naturally it's not that wild in reality, but 'naturally' is the key word here, that's what saves it. Animals was filmed as far away from the age of CGI, mentally and spiritually, as film would ever get. Girdler feels his way along in real time, you see, in real nature, with semi-real actors, one foot in front of the other, and the key signifiers of amok nature horror movies, such as animal mauling, really can't be shown unless you're a dickhead whose going to really kill animals for his movie in which case fuck you, Ruggero! Girdler doesn't do such things, I presume, and that's where the juice is. Quick edits between what is clearly just well staged play wrestling with tame animals, close-ups of baring teeth, pink foamy blood, actors and stunt men yelling and running, an animal's teeth resting on someone's arm, and then the hawk looking down signals an end to the scrimmage with his hawk cry like a gym coach's whistle. Girdler's films aren't meant to be great gore pieces, but they are great for sick freaks in search of Cecil B. DeMille-levels of under-direction. Actors stand around in a 'funeral processions and snakes' kind of Cinemascope chorus line and wonder what to do, receive no guidance, and improvise.
Girdler was the Seventies.
With smaller animals this mellow mood can be undercut, as when mice on fishing wires come flying across the rooms backwards onto the head of the fat old sheriff, or hordes of snakes sun themselves inside of cars. Dogs try to mute an instinctive wag of their tales as they snarl, as if afraid of breaking character and losing a biscuit. I don't consider these negatives. In fact if this were an Italian or Japanese film every animal in the film would probably be dead by the end of each scene. Why waste money on a trained cinnamon bear for a wrestling match when you can just stab and drug a real, and let him bleed out like Joaquin did to poor Comodius in Gladiator? Sic transit gloria mundi! But film is forever... and no animal murder will ever be forgotten, Ruggero! And if William Girldler hurt any of these critters, he paid the ultimate price, dying in a helicopter accident scouting locations in Indonesia after making The Manitou.
If you're too young enough to remember Airport you may not have the same giddy rapture for the Poesidon Adventure-Grand Hotel-Stagecoach type ensemble cast trapped in a bad situation films that were all the rage in the seventies, as parodied in Airplane! (1980). But either way let me give you some background on this too:
Once upon a primetime, The Love Boat and Fantasy Island ruled the weekends. They had a steady cast of hosts and a sea of b-list celebrities of all ages wandering aboard the boat or onto the island for their mundane adventures. Some people managed to become celebs by doing nothing but showing up on these shows, like Charo! Girdler rides this zeitgeist too, so on this hike in Day of the Animals we have the disaster movie cross section:
CHECKLIST OF 70s ENSEMBLE DISASTER CASTING
1. The Shelly WintersCheck ("She KNOWS what she's doing!"- only this one doesn't - to the point of dressing for an overnight hike in her Sunday best).
2. A tiny 25 year-old stunt man posing as her 12 year-old son (BONUS!)
3. 70s bombshell career woman contemplating her lack of a love life and children while eyeing the hero's ring finger - check -70s mainstay Linda Day George
4. Christopher George or David Jansen? Former
5. A Richard Dreyfus in Jaws-style dweeb? check
6. Famous athlete considering retirement / disillusioned preacher? - Former
7. Native American or black sidekick - Check
8. The insane challenger of the rugged hero's leadership? Check Mate!
9. The Newt or little girl alone and wandering the wasteland ala Sandy Desche in Them. - check
10. Attractive young couple dealing with recently learning about her unplanned pregnancy - Check
11. Fat sheriff roused out of bed in the middle of the night to investigate?
Yes (Bleeding Skull, I defer to you)
It's a glorious "Girdler Dozen" i.e. one donut short.
A midnight evacuations of the towns above 5,000 feet is given a few shots, hazmat suits, you know, it's The Crazies but for animals... humans slow on the uptake that they are in danger; you'll have deeper resonance to the phrase "Watch you like a hawk" cuz there are some shots of hawks watching stuff on here and honey you are glad what they watchin' ain't you. Hawks' cries signal the start and stop of attacks and Nielsen going shirtless signals his de-evolution into a Putin-like celebrant of masculine power. He pokes a big stick into the belly of a young man so he can make caveman gruntings at the cowering girlfriend: "I killed for you! You're mine now!" and to the 25 year-old widdle boy, "Shaddup you little cockroach or I'll shove you off the cliff!"
But that's not even his most memorable line, it's this:
"If there's a God left up there to believe in. My father who art in heaven you've a made a jack ass out of me for years. Melville's God, that's the God I believe in! You see what you want you take. You take it! And I am going to do just that!"And by it, you know he means that girlie...
It's hard to remember if I had a point to all this or if I even recommend Day of the Animals, though of course I do, if for no other reason than Nielsen and the amazing near-Morricone-level cacophonous percussion score by Lalo Schifrin. But take a knee and let me tell you one last story:
There was this townie up in Syracuse in the 80s who stole all my Tom Waits albums but he had the best dog in the world. This dog, a mutt of yay height, was super smart and sweet, a brilliant actor. When I was filthy drunk in the Syracuse snow, this dog and I would roll around and I'd scream like he was tearing me apart while he jumped all over me making these terrifying growls. We'd go on and on, rolling around growling and screaming, the dog managing to seem like he was tearing my arm off while barely even getting fang marks on my coat. We sounded, I thought, like someone was being mauled to death. One night, someone finally yelled out a window "hey, you and the dog - please keep it down!" and I was like how the hell can that guy tell I'm not really being hurt? Why isn't he calling an ambulance? How can we as humans just instinctively tell when someone is really being hurt vs. just pretending? I remember we stopped in mid-attack, both looked up at the window, looked at each other, and resumed the attack quieter. How that damn dog knew to go quiet, that really floored me. Some great dog. I miss him the way I love Day of the Animals because even kids can tell the animals aren't being hurt or hurting anyone for real, and it's comforting to pretend, its like an exorcism of interspecies animosity. To paraphrase John Lennon in Yellow Submarine, "if you must roar, roar quietly!" Girdler, the mountain man monster maker in the era of Carter and Grizzly Adams, roars quietly. Melville's behemoth bedtime god demands no less.
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