Hyenas
Hyenas
R | 12 May 2010 (USA)
Hyenas Trailers

Roving clans of shape-shifting human/hyena creatures prowl and hunt for human prey. They are hunted by one man seeking revenge for the death of his loved ones.

Reviews
Michael Ledo

The movie starts out with a woman and child being killed and eaten by shape-shifting hyenas. The first thing you will notice is that the faces of the hyenas move about as much as a rubber mask with red lights in the eye sockets. There is a first person narration by Briggs (Maxie J. Santillan Jr.) sitting by a camp fire talking in the past tense to fill in plot points they didn't have time to film. His narration seems to have been written for Tony Todd, which they most likely couldn't afford. Crazy Briggs is able to convince Gannon (the man's who family was killed) that it was shape-shifting hyenas who did it. (In this movie we find out snipes don't really exist.) The sound track was awful as it seems to have been taken from a TV movie.Within a few movie time minutes they have become seasoned veterans who are now being hunted by the hyenas and they have a partner who has a BMW that won't start. (My friend had one like that. Hit the starter with a hammer, the bendix is stuck.). It seems the "alpha female" is dying which is why they are coming after the hunters, a connection I didn't grasp."B" movie queen and silicon lover Christa Campbell plays a shape-shifter. She is the one that has to remove her skimpy top before changing.There is a subplot of townies vs. Mexicans, involving a blond girl and her brother. They manage to bark out dialouge and acting usually reserved for an Asylum film production.Amanda Aardsma with a gaunt Susan Dey face plays Valerie, a woman saved by Briggs and Gannon who parades around in undies and a tank top, thanks.The movie has its predictable twist and ending.No f-bombs that I recall. The nudity which the box claims exists, looks more like body suits designed to make one look naked, i.e. CG nudity. The movie was poorly written and directed thanks to Eric Weston.

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ashgameover

The one thing I can say for this movie is that the quality of the cinematography is fantastic. Being a Costas Mandylor fan, it was awesome to see great closeup shots of him with those sparkling blue eyes. The plot itself was alright, nothing to rave about. The subplot involving rival teens seemed pointless to me at first, but after watching the movie in it's entirety I can see why they put it in the film. The downfalls of this film were the CGI/special effects. The transitions from humans to hyenas were so blatantly obvious and unbelievable. Also the "hyenas" themselves were basically computer animation. The acting was fairly decent. There was a lot of predictability in the writing. I would watch this movie again sometime.

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himanshu_0808

I first saw the trailer of this movie and then I decided to see this. But I was disappointed to see this wanna be werewolf movie. Ya I hated it. Story was not great enough to arise some kind of horror or excitement. All it had are some Hyenas want to hunt Humans that's it. The Alfa of the group or I should say leader of the group shedding clothes and hunting humans that's it. This entire movie had nothing else. This movie had some potential but failed to deliver. It tried to give some twists but not good enough as I figured it out very early. Special effects were awful and not up to the mark. Transformation scenes were very bad. Some of characters that were displayed is this movie I can't figure it out why they were in this movie further there was not any relation between some of the scenes. Acting was not good enough to arise some kind of thrill. Screenplay was not great enough to arise some interest. All this movie did is just replaced Hyenas instead of wolves and tried to create a movie that had nothing in it. Total waste of time.My Rating 3 out 10...

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Paul Andrews

Hyenas starts as a woman is forced off the road with a punctured tyre while driving along an isolated backwoods road, while trying to repair the puncture a car pulls up & two people get out who then transform into flesh eating Hyenas & slaughter the women & her young baby. The woman's husband Gannon (Costas Mandylor) is informed & is devastated by the news, a guy named Crazy Briggs (Meshach Taylor) contacts Gannon & claims to know who killed his wife & baby. After some convincing Gannon finally believes Briggs & sets out to kill as many Hyena creatures as possible along with Bruggs who is himself a seasoned Hyena hunter, meanwhile in the Hyena clan itself a power struggle has broken out between two Alpha females who want to take complete control of the clan. Both Briggs & Gannon become involved as the circle of lies & betrayal leads to shocking revelations...Edited, written & directed by Eric Weston this has quite a nice video cover as seen on the IMDb but is a lousy film, basically a Werewolf film but with Hyenas instead of Wolves this is pretty bad. At 90 odd minutes Hyenas is too long, there simply isn't enough meaningful story here to pad this thing out for an hour & a half. The script is pretty flimsy, the existence of the Hyena creatures is never gone into besides some nonsense about the slave trade or something, we never find out why Briggs became a Hyena hunter or even what the advantages of turning into a Hyena actually is. I mean Hyenas can't really do anything other than run & bite, being a human has far more positive aspects, right? Hyenas is pretty dull with minimal story, minimal character development & a twist that feels like an afterthought it has such little impact. Wholly predictable & throughly bland throughout there really is nothing about Hyenas I could recommend to anyone, there are quite simply so many better films out there that you shouldn't even be considering watching this forgettable 'Creature Feature'.Shot mainly in some wood somewhere & a mine at the end Hyenas is visually bland with nothing going for it, some of the special make-up & CGI computer effects are very bad. There are a couple of dead mutilated bodies & a bit of blood splatter but nothing much in the way of gore & all the attacks occur off screen, the opening attack for instance happens off screen while we see a shot of a car door. Less than inspiring. There's a little nudity but not much. The high pitched sounds the Hyenas make sound more like Chimps than anything else & it goes into the realms of unintentionally funny when humans with glowing red eyes are making these high pitched monkey type sounds to each other.Probably shot on a really low budget the opening sequence set at night was obviously filmed during the day & the image darkened along with terrible looking CGI headlights added to the cars. The acting isn't great although the threadbare script doesn't give anyone anything to work with, does it?Hyenas has been doing the round on British cable television for a while & while there doesn't seem to be any DVD out yet I can understand why as it's pretty bad all round. Watcha decent Werewolf film instead.

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