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Aquatic horror films have featured many foes, but not yet the most ferocious, ill-tempered land-and-water beasts: hippopotamuses. No, for real. Hippos are natural born killers; vegetarians who murder out of territorial rage. Sharks, gators, and anacondas are nasty hunters, but hippos—they’re a special breed. Writer and director James Nunn aims to outshine the “Fin Flicks” we’re used to, including his underwhelming Shark Bait, and does so admirably. The “hungry hungry hippo” flick, aptly titled Hungry, is enough to make Hasbro jealous about not cashing in on the concept first.
Nunn somehow transforms exotic Malta into muggy New Orleans for Hungry. Besties Sistine (Madison Davenport) and Hannah (Olivia Bernstone) drunkenly agree to a gator swamp tour, which they attend while severely hungover. They’re joined by a touristy family, and Dionne (Tracey Bonner), a workaholic mother who wants to snap some wildlife pictures. Their captain, Rodrigo (Michel Curiel), takes them into New Orleans’ boggy backwoods, but doesn’t find his trackable gator attractions. A gigantic hippopotamus overturns the vessel and sends everyone scrambling for high-reaching trees—lest the furious animal maul them.
By feastable, chomp-and-die aquatic horror standards, Hungry is a palatable dish. Nunn’s a bit sharper than on Shark Bait, which itself features gnarly kills, but falls into a storytelling trap that many filmmakers struggle to overcome. It’s one thing to strand characters with no escape, but it’s a bigger task to have us care about a cast of delectable snacks, especially when their predicament is utterly ridiculous. Hungry doesn’t overcome every hurdle, but it’s nimble enough to hook us with survival thrills and “inventive” enough to maximize the impact of using a hippo as the antagonist.
It doesn’t take much for a film like Hungry to please horror-loving audiences. Give us bloody deaths, rad creature effects, and a semblance of narrative cohesion to string things along. Where films like Chum insultingly try to sneak by with pathetic digital effects, Nunn invests heavily in practical hippo designs and smooth digital blending. Hungry boasts impressive creature effects as this rumbling, teeth-gnashing mammal hunts capsized vacationers for sport. Perhaps the swimming hippo movement is a bit fast, feeling unnatural for emphasis, but whenever its head surfaces or the entire hippo barrels into frame, Nunn ensures visual effects remain optimal, keeping Hungry from chasing off its audience.
If there’s a complaint, it’s the lack of elaborate kill sequences as humans are murdered one after another. Hungry is a low-budget affair, which means Nunn reuses the same trick of yanking victims underwater, only to turn them into a cloud of red liquid. For as vicious and breakneck Hungry appears, there’s a downgrade when violence erupts. Nunn relies on our imagination to fill in the blanks when the hippo claims another life, as wounds are inflicted coincidentally off-screen. That’s a ding against overall enjoyment in these types of animal-attack movies, because we’re here for the attacks and demand spectacular executions.
Performances are suitable, but all abide by traditional subgenre tropes. Joaquim de Almeida stands out as the badass hippo expert, Walker, who comes across as gruff and resilient while trying to rescue Rodrigo’s patrons. Davenport is a solid anchor as the film’s survivor girl, forced to watch innocent lives be devoured. But then there’s Bonner’s ruthless businesswoman, a mama who doesn’t care about anyone else because she’s the most important. It’s the selfish, abhorrent stereotype we’ve seen drawn past its dramatic limits plenty of times, allowed to wreak havoc beyond the rational threshold of moral tolerance. It’s fine; every one of these scenarios needs a bastard wild card—but Nunn lets the charade drag on far longer than the script can sustain.
And, still, Hungry is a servicably silly yet brutally charged creature feature that gets the job done. It’s not the nastiest body-count vehicle, which does cost Nunn’s flick some points. Nor does storytelling redefine the subgenre. Hungry succeeds on its confidence and commitment to producing a knockout hippo that characters deserve to fear. By base standards, Nunn invests in the right elements, showing other filmmakers how easy (by comparison) it can be to win over viewers. If only his competition would listen.
Movie Score: 3/5
