Steve (Christopher George) leads a group of tourists on a survival
trip to the mountains. Trouble is that most of the tourists, city folks,
are not really up to that kind of pastime anyways, so it doesn't help
one bit that on exactly that day all the animals have been turned into
fierce creatures out there to attack humans by a hole in the ozon layer.
In the first night, Mandy (Susan Backline) is attacked & wounded by
a wolf. So she & her boyfriend Frank (Jon Cedar) decide to head for
the next ranger's station to call for help, a valiant idea only spoiled
by the fact that on the way to there they are attacked by vultures &
Mandy is killed. The rest of the group doesn't fare much better since
they are soon attacked by Pumas, & while they manage to ward off
that attack, frictions in the group soon begin to occur when tourist
Jensen (Leslie Nielsen) starts questioning the authority of Steve &
soon causes the group to break up - his half heading uphills to the
ranger's station while Steve's half heads downhills to the next village.
Little does he know that the village is already evacuated, which Frank,
who arrives there with a little girl (Michelle Stacy) he picked up on
the way, soon realizes first hand, as he only finds corpses & fierce
animals, & he dies from a massive rattlesnake-attack. Jensen
meanwhile has lost control over himself, dominating his group with
sheer violence, beating them up, killing one of them, & when he
tries to rape a girl, only another animal attack (this time bears) can
stop him. The
rest of his group finds a safe haven in a wrecked helicopter. Steve's
group meanwhile seeks refuge in some holiday bungalows, but instead
finds hostile German Shepherds who viciously attack them until only
Steve, his love interest TV-reporter Teri (Lynda Day George) & the
token Indian (Michael Ansara) survive, escaping on a raft. But as soon
as the animal-horror started it is over too, all animals die the next
day & the little girl, the tourists in the wrecked helicopter &
our heroes on the raft are all saved. Rather weak 70's
ecological thriller, that is done less like a horror movie but more like
a desaster movie of that era, meaning it has many second-rate actors
playing standardized troubled characters (you know the kind, there's
always someone suffering from cancer, a couple on the verge of breaking
up that tries to rekindle the relationship, of course the single mother
who becomes a better parent due to this experience, the self-centered
egomaniac etc. TV-reporters & Indians are also pretty popular), with
way too many subplots & inner conflicts to resolve to make the main
plot really work or even create suspense. Leslie Nielsen's performance,
by the way, is especially bad.
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