There’s a certain kind of midnight horror flick where logic takes the night off, characters make impossibly dumb decisions, and the audience alternates between laughing, groaning, and gleefully anticipating the next kill. Colin Minihan’s “Coyotes” fits that mold perfectly, for better and worse.
The premise itself is solid B-movie gold. During a raging wildfire in the Hollywood Hills, a family is trapped in their burning home while a pack of feral, disoriented coyotes closes in. Workaholic dad Scott (Justin Long), his wife Liv (Kate Bosworth), and daughter Chloe (Mila Harris) do their best to hold it together as the night becomes a dual battle against fire and fangs. It’s a set-up that promises equal parts animal horror and siege thriller, and the film mostly delivers.
The kills are fun and frequent because this is a movie with no qualms about thinning its cast quickly and brutally. It’s bloody and sometimes gruesome, and genre fans will enjoy the horror elements. The CGI coyotes are obvious, but they’re menacing enough in the attack scenes to make you forget that they’re merely cartoons. There’s a goofy energy to the way the movie plays its corny concept straight and for a while, it’s genuinely entertaining.
But here’s what the movie can never overcome: the characters are unbelievably, almost comically stupid. They make decisions so jaw-droppingly bad that suspension of disbelief shatters. These characters are quite possibly the dumbest humans to ever walk the face of the Earth. I eventually found myself internally shouting at the screen, “Why doesn’t anyone just shut the damn dog door?!”
The script is littered with logic holes so wide you could drive a fire truck through them, and by the second half, the nonsense piles up faster than the bodies. What starts off as enjoyably silly horror eventually tips into the territory of pure idiocy, capped off with a finale that’s more eye-roll than payoff.
“Coyotes” is not a terrible movie, it’s just really difficult to get past the fact that the characters are so stupid. If you don’t think at all, it would make a decent choice for bloody, rowdy late night entertainment.
