Director: Colin Minihan
Writers: Tad Daggerhart, Daniel Meersand, Nick Simon
Stars: Mila Harris, Brittany Allen, Kate Bosworth
Synopsis: Trapped in their Hollywood Hills home, a family fights for survival when caught between a raging wildfire and a pack of savage coyotes.
The cold opening of Colin Minihan’s horror/comedy Coyotes promises some delectably deserved deaths for the insufferable. Kat (Katherine McNamara) is an influencer walking her tiny dog, Gigi, in the Hollywood Hills. She’s on the phone to a “friend” boasting of her ahead of the crowd charms and vibe when her dog interrupts her by running into a bush. Her tone which is literally the worst plus her desperate selfie taking barely hides the desperation to be relevant. Desperation of another kind stalks her in the form of a pack of coyotes who, due to wildfires, have begun encroaching more into the environment of the “elites.” The influencer finds herself torn apart (and roadkill) by the wild animals and ending up with probably her biggest news story the next day as a corpse.
As much as there could be quite biting (pun intended) satire in the script penned by Tad Daggerhart, Daniel Meersand and Nick Simon, Coyotes only occasionally brushes against it. Instead, the film favors an assortment of oddball characters to complement and contrast with the main family of the piece headed by Scott (Justin Long), a comic book artist whose success has come with the price tag of maintaining his creative output to keep an aspirationally large roof over the heads of his wife Liv (Kate Bosworth) and his young teen daughter Chloe (Mila Harris).
On the day before a major storm, Scott employs Devon (Kier O’Donnell), an exterminator, to rid his house of rats. Devon, who is a tad too invested in his job, explains that the house is much cheaper than Scott realizes in terms of construction. It is, and looks, expensive, but as for its value as a sturdy property? An illusion. Scott should be paying attention to that information but like many things in his life he chooses to gloss over it. With the storm incoming Liv suggests that he might want to trim a tree that could cause a problem if blown over. Scott’s reaction is that he’s been told there are all kinds of things he was meant to panic over in the past, like swarms of killer bees, that never amounted to anything. In the case of the tree, he’s wrong as it knocks out power to the house and to the house of his coked-up neighbor, Trip (Norbert Leo Butz) who is entertaining Julie (Brittany Allen) a “woman of the night” and conspiracy believer.
The storm means that the coyotes have come even further into civilization, and they aren’t as cowered as they are usually when dealing with humans. In fact, they are mercilessly on the attack and more sinisterly attacking without necessarily finishing off their human prey, making for some particularly nasty gore. Unfortunately, the impact of some of the deaths is significantly lessened by the strangely AI-like coyote design. Whenever the pack faces one of its potential victims it appears to be grounded in a different reality where they each have a separate relationship to gravity. The AI-like (I can’t be definite if the coyotes are AI generated as much as I can’t be definite they are not AI generated) coyotes are difficult to overcome in terms of threat value as they pull the viewer out of the film with their artificiality and make the practical puppets used in sections appear ludicrously cheap also.
If one is able to move beyond the coyote design (which I must admit I wasn’t) and suspend disbelief, Coyotes has some funny moments that mostly come from the complete inability of the characters to come to terms with their new reality. Terrible things can’t happen to people whose main issues are late food deliveries or a bad hair day. It’s funny when a demanding diva ends up engulfed in a fire from her own poolside grill, or when an ultra-rich manchild ends up as meat in his jungle-outfitted mansion.
Inability to “man-up” is the core issue with Scott and his family drama. Scott’s lack of prowess with a saw or anything handyman related is given equal weight to his hemophobia. How is he going to man up and protect the family who are already disappointed in his lack of involvement in their lives? Although both Justin Long and his real-life wife Kate Bosworth are both quite affable screen presences, the manufactured family drama is relatively weak, and they have trouble selling it as a subplot. Even in the tight 92-minute runtime it is extraneous and causes a drag with the only payoff being that a heartfelt apology delivered to Liv by Scott isn’t heard.
Coyotes is a movie that struggles to be what it promised and without the true throughline of satire to give the film teeth the comedy is primarily goofy, the drama tedious, and the horror… unfortunately too artificial. It wastes its own potential and the generally good performances of Long, Bosworth, Butz, and especially Allen who also provides the soundtrack. Coyotes is a bit of a dog’s dinner.
