Director/Screenplay – Jeremy Benson, Producers – Jeremy Benson & Mark Williams, Photography – Ryan Parker, Music – Brock Manchester, Visual Effects – Mark Volzer, Production Design – William Chambers III. Production Company – Sixteenth Section Pictures.
Cast
Christian Walker (Nick), John Still (Wayne), Jeannette Comans (Erin), Patrick Cox (Edgar), Stacy Still (Kathy), Scott Fletcher (Josh), Scarlet Williams (Vicky), Bill Painter (Amell), Monica Sommerfield (Liz), Jon Sparks (Store Clerk), Michael McLendon (Ross Miller), Frances Wagner (Miller Daughter)
Plot
A group of friends are attacked at a house while they are partying and shot with tranquiliser darts. They come around imprisoned in the stables on Wayne’s farm. There Wayne and his associate Edgar plan to torture and break them and then to sell them into slavery.
Live Animals was the second film from director Jeremy Benson. Benson had previously made the horror film Shutter (2005), which not many people appear to have seen, and subsequently went on to make the backwoods horror Girl in Woods (2016).
Live Animals was made not long after the advent of the Torture Porn fad. This came about with the hits of Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005). Both of these films pushed the limits of on-screen grisliness and torture to new levels. Both spawned a host of sequels and copycats. Live Animals was clearly one of the films that sought to climb aboard the bandwagon, centring as it does around a group of twentysomethings imprisoned and tortured to be sold into slavery. The alternate title Slaver makes things even more direct. The publicity for the film makes the claim ‘Based on True Events’ but nowhere does it give any details about the real-life incident.
An imprisoned Jeanette Comans
And yet for all the appeal to being a Torture Porn film, Live Animals has a crippling tameness. In the scene where Scott Fletcher has his tongue cut off, Jeremy Benson cuts away just as the scissors are applied. The scenes where the family turn up and the parents are killed and the little girl hunted are shown only by implication. You know that Eli Roth or any of the Saw sequel directors like Darren Lynn Bousman would have gone for broke and pushed these scenes into nasty, uncomfortable to watch places. The nastiest of the scenes we get comes towards the end where Christian Walker has his hand jammed into a drill press and his fingers torn off.
While the film is made with a general competence, Live Animals is clearly also made on a low-budget. Jeremy Benson and co evidently obtained the use of a farm where they simply turn the horse stables into the dungeon of imprisonment. None of the actors present have recognisable names nor went onto any substantial careers.
