Being Film #23 for Hooptober 2025
I’ve never been one to revel in bad movies. I know folks that do, and dedicate copious amounts of time and words to the pursuit of the bad, the cheesy, and the exploitive. I need a little more, certainly more than a shirtless Leslie Nielsen wildly fighting a bear. That’s such a bizarre scenario though, it at least got me to the door of Day Of The Animals, an incredibly dumb movie that nevertheless found a level of fun I was not expecting. And that was before Nielsen fights the bear.
THE QUICK SUMMARY: All this talk about climate change and the hole in the ozone layer…everyone worries about the glaciers melting, but what about turning all the animals into crazed killers? You’d think that would be the lead, right? Well, one small town is going to find out the hard way when a bunch of obnoxious hikers are caught unawares as they hike up a mountain. It’s hot, there’s no food, one guy’s a racist, and the bears, wolves, birds…basically anything with a heartbeat (or who is racist) soon falls under the oppressive ultraviolet rays, raising temperatures to the boiling point!
My goodness, Day Of The Animals is a stupid movie. One that could only have been made in the late 70s, feeding off the rash of disaster and animal attack films that were all the rage for much of the decade. But here’s the thing about this deeply dumb film: it believes in its own logic, and somehow I found myself enjoying it more than a few of the “serious” movies on this list.
The direction from William Girdler, no stranger to exploitation or animal attack films (he did Grizzly with his Day Of The Animal stars Christopher George and Richard Jaeckel the year before) is pretty unremarkable when he doesn’t have animals attacking people, and with the exception of Nielsen the performances are about what you’d expect from a low budget sleazy horror picture.
And yet…when those animals do attack, it’s glorious in a giddy, kids blowing things up kind of way. After about 30 minutes of mindless wandering around to “establish” the characters and the animals skulking around we finally get our first attack, and it’s a doozy of violence and chaos as a woman is pecked by birds to the point she falls off the side of a mountain. Later, there’s a scene where the sheriff, being called in the middle of the night to evacuate the town, is attacked by rats who inexplicably leap into the air to bite him. Every animal is batshit insane; apparently Girdler wanted the animals mixing with the actors. This isn’t quite Roar with folks getting their faces ripped, but it sure seems close. There’s a mountain lion attack that made me hold my breath for a moment.
So yeah – dumb movie. But Girdler certainly knows how to shoot a scene that gets your heart pumping.
Day of the Animals is like that for the remainder of its runtime, abandoning any sense of danger for jump scare thrills that work like gangbusters. And it STILL doesn’t come close to what you get out of Nielsen’s performance. As the heel of the group, he’s a constant source of annoyance throughout the film, but as he climbs higher the UV gets to him, and the climax where he kills a man, attempts to rape a woman only to get to that moment where he decides he can fight a bear is amazing in how insane a concept it is.
Come for the Nielsen. Stay for the insanity.
Cinema Dual 
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