“This is gonna be a rough trip. Are you big and bad enough to handle it?”

Drake’s rating: Just when you thought it was safe to go back to nature

Drake’s review: If there’s one thing the ‘70s taught us, it was to stay home and barricade ourselves inside where it was safe. We all knew that the beach wasn’t risk-free… not with a 20-foot-long Carcharodon lurking in the waters nearby.

But safety wasn’t to be found in the woods, either, and an innocent camping trip could soon become your last vacation thanks to dangers ranging from a grizzly bear to a swarm of bees. It was best not to tempt fate and instead stay locked inside your house with only your pet rock for company, listening to KISS on your 8-track tape player while your mood ring glowed a pleasant, if tedious, blue.

Or, if you were pretty well off and had money to burn, you could play Pong on your TV.

Scads of movie characters were endangered, mangled and mutilated to get this point across, but did we listen? No, we did not. Probably because we were listening to “Detroit Rock City” on the 8-track at full volume, but we still ignored the dangers portrayed in the movies and went outside, and we generally returned hale and hearty. Though we were often sunburned since sunscreen was new and therefore untrustworthy back then.

Still, despite losing their cinematic comrades to a wide variety of imagined terrors, movie characters kept on trekking into the dangerous outdoors. Take this tour group in Day of the Animals, for instance. Heedless of the fact that the ozone layer is breaking down, and, for reasons explained by dubious pseudoscience, this has caused animals to become highly aggressive, they happily hike into the mountains to meet their varied demises.

Led by tour guide Steve (Christopher George, The Exterminator) and his partner Santee (Michael Ansara, The Doll Squad), this happy bunch of 1970s archetypes make the trip into the Northern California mountains with barely a care in the world.

That soon changes, however, as the local wildlife begin to surreptitiously stalk our little band of polyester-clad protagonists, a phenomenon noticed early on by Santee. Still, the group continues on, heedless of the fact that they’re in a William Girldler flick and this cat just plain ravaged his cast of characters the previous year in Grizzly. And, hey, Christopher George starred in Grizzly. He should really know better.

But, no. Steve ignores the menacing soundtrack and the ominous glares from eagle and mountain lion alike, and throws caution to the wind by camping out with this band of tenderfoots* in the wild, where one of the women is attacked by a wolf. Not wanting to turn the whole troop around and presumably hand out refunds, Steve instead sends the woman back down the mountain with her husband, which ends badly when she’s attacked by a flight of hawks and falls off a cliff. Needless to say, her sudden yet inevitable landing on the rocks below is 100% more fatal than the wolf attack.

Ultimately the tension in the group escalates, and results in it splitting in two. One group follows Steve while the other follow obnoxious blowhard Paul Jenson (Leslie Nielsen, Airplane!), which seems like an odd choice since Jenson knows nothing about the terrain. He speaks loudly and with misplaced confidence, however, which gives him legitimacy with the simple-minded.

So we get two sets of characters to follow in their travails, as well as a few ancillary characters who are just ripe for picking off. But really the entire movie comes down to one thing: Jenson taking his shirt off during a thunderstorm and, for reasons unclear to anyone with two brain cells to rub together, fighting a grizzly bear.

Day of the Animals, for all of its weird theories, unintentional humor, and shirtless Nielsens, is a pretty decent entry in the “nature runs amok” films of the ‘70s. It’s harmed just a bit by lacking a central creature to serve as the menacing antagonist, instead enlisting birds and bears and dogs in the various attacks.** But director William Girdler was never afraid to brutalize and quite often surprisingly kill off his characters, so the tension is effective and the action is generally well shot. It’s definitely one of those “it’s a product of their time” flicks, and it’s certainly no Jaws, but at the same time it’s a strange little eco-horror movie that can sit happily alongside other B-movie efforts like Kingdom of the Spiders and Piranha.

Maybe avoid watching this one with your pet rock, though. You wouldn’t want to give it any ideas.

*Merriam-Webster assures me that “tenderfeet” is also acceptable. Well, it might be acceptable to them, but it’s not to me!

**The simple house cat is seemingly exempted from the mayhem, leading me to believe that they were the masterminds behind it all.

Intermission!

• Wow, Leslie Nielsen’s character is SO racist. He’s probably the guy who’s still complaining that the Washington Commanders changed their team name.
• Oh, he’s also the “I was just joking” guy. Yeah, can’t wait for that bear to show up.
• Oof. That ‘70s green-screening. I mean, sure, I like ‘70s flicks, but there are some things I don’t miss.
• Jenson’s an advertising executive. It all makes sense now.
• Now that’s a bear hug worthy of Bruno Sammartino.
• Death by rattlesnake AND dog. That’s quite the tag team. They should call it the Bark & Bite Connection.
• No, I have no idea why this Intermission has metamorphosed into pro wrestling lingo.
• Wait, that roof is at least thirty feet high. How the heck did that German Shepherd get up there? Maybe he teamed up with the hawks and they carried him…?
• Which, yes, I know. That would make them the Hawk & Howl Express.
• Does throwing the dog off of him make that a German Shepherd suplex? I can stop any time, y’know.
• OK, one more: The bear that mauled Nielsen should be called the Ursine Executioner. And he should totally be a babyface.