Day of the Animals

It’s summertime, and the screamin’ is easy, so it’s time to pack up your sleeping bag for STAY OUT OF THE WOODS month at Mondo Mondays, featuring a forest-full of aliens, maniacs, and angry animals that are just dying to invite you into their treehouse of terror!

“For centuries, they were hunted for bounty, fun and food … now it’s their turn!” Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the wilderness, ‘70s schlock auteur William Girdler and producer Ed Montoro sought to top their surprise 1976 hit Grizzly with a bigger budget, larger cast, and even more insane nature-gone-berserk carnage! In Day of the Animals, when a hole in the Earth’s ozone layer triggers bloodthirsty madness throughout the animal kingdom, all of humanity – particularly a group of tourists on an overnight hike in the mountains of Northern California – will become prey. Buzzards, snakes, mountain lions, wolves … you name the animal, they’ve gone nuts and they’re out to destroy an all-star B-movie cast including Christopher George, Lynda Day George, Richard Jaeckel, Michael Ansara, Andrew Stevens, and Leslie Nielsen – in his now-legendary pre-Airplane! performance in which he goes for broke, wildly chews the scenery and strips off his shirt to wrestle an angry grizzly in a rainstorm. An outrageous, eco-themed addition to the popular cycle of ‘70s disaster flicks, filled with surprisingly gruesome animal attacks for a PG-rated movie, Day of the Animals will have you howling with laughter and terror, and may even have you cheering on the animals as they finally have their day! (Dir. by William Girdler, 1977, USA, 97 mins., Rated PG)