Fantastic Fest: Schlock creature feature Coyotes needs to be put down
Courtesy Fantastic Fest
Fantastic Fest 2025 is taking place in Austin, Texas right now, and the yearly indie/genre film fest has a bunch of cool, killer premieres. These films are either headed to theaters soon or are looking for distribution. Our film writer, Adrian Torres, is covering the new releases. Catch up on all these previews right here.
We all enjoy a good hypothetical of “who would win a fight?” between animals, monsters, creatures, bad people, and the like. The good news is that it tends to inspire a multitude of very exciting movies. Anaconda. Arachnophobia. Deep Blue Sea. Jaws. Roar. Snakes on a Plane.
You’d assume the new movie Coyotes would immediately be added to that list, based on its environmentalist horror take of Hollywood hipsters vs. the creatures they’ve displaced. While it does have some fun set pieces and a strong central story, it never finds a consistent tone to make it worth recommending. More importantly, the creative mistakes on display are more distracting destructive than the disaster film that should’ve been an easy win.
For comic book illustrator Scott, the last year has been something of a dream. Though he’s swamped with work, he’s happy for the home deep in the Hollywood hills it’s provided for him, his wife, Liv (Kate Bosworth), and daughter, Chloe (Mila Harris). The women of the house feel otherwise, that Scott has grown too far apart from them. As luck would have it, they’re brought closer than any of them would expect when a windstorm knocks a tree and transformer onto their SUV, and all the power in the neighborhood goes out.
Oh yeah, and a pack of coyotes is seemingly targeting anyone and everyone in the vicinity.
From the opening moments, director Colin Minihan (Grave Encounters), along with screenwriters Nick Simon and Tad Dagherhart, make it clear they want Coyotes to be filled with humor and thrills. How effective it is will depend on your taste. Their first misstep is investing in shallow and vapid characters without much substance. There’s an aging druggie, Trip (Norbert Leo Butz), next door who only wears a kimono. Trip’s call girl du jour, Julie (Brittnay Allen), slinks off to the side to spread her conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, the local exterminator, Devon (Kier O’Donnell), exists in some weirder and zanier film.
If only the rest of the film took place there.
Thankfully, Long and Bosworth, using their real-life couple status and natural chemistry, elevate the majority of the material they’re given. Liv has maternal instincts, is quick to act, and protects her family at a moment’s notice. Whereas Scott…well, Long leans on his dependable bag of tricks, portraying a feckless husband who needs to find inner strength if his family is going to survive in one piece.
Of course, with the title Coyotes, you’d imagine the titular beasts would be something to write home about. They are, but just not in a good way. From the first moment they arrive on screen, something feels…off. There’s bad CGI and then there’s this. It’s hard to tell exactly what the issue is or what’s being employed to cause this dissonance. The obvious culprit is A.I.
The coyotes have an unnatural painterly look to them. Even worse is how they never feel in the same scene when attacking people. What’s weird, though, is that the two VFX studios listed in the credits either have a huge catalog of major blockbusters they’ve worked on (Pixstone Images) or have deeper ties to the film (DI Post). The 2nd company lists Minihan as its Executive Producer, so you’d hope the director had hands-on knowledge of what was being developed.
Now, playing devil’s advocate, there could be nothing hinky going on. This is just a case of poor CGI. The problem here is the effect the shoddy CG work has. It can rob the film of any bite or suspense. Bad CG doesn’t always need to sink a film. 2023’s South Korean disaster film Project Silence proves this. It also deals with people trapped due to weather (dense fog and a collapsing bridge) and vicious killer animals (mutated army dogs run amok). The difference is that it heightens the absurdity of the situation to an almost untenable degree, so that the bad CG feels at home.
The same cannot be said about Coyotes.
Even if you look past the questionable and distracting CG work (which is hard to do), the film is mediocre at best. It purports to have some social commentary to dispense, but shrugs it off. When it appears to go all in on gore, it pulls its punches or dispatches people too quickly. On paper, there’s a lot to like about Coyotes, but that doesn’t make it to the screen. Yes, there are a few chuckles to be gleaned from the whole thing, yet with so many great and intriguing horror movies available in theaters and on streaming platforms, why settle for less?
[Editor’s note: In a request for clarification about whether the film used CG or artificial intelligence for its visuals, a representative for the film sent us this: “The coyotes were created using a variety of methods including animatronic, puppets, and the traditional CGI pipeline. There was a touch of machine learning to round out certain scenes/looks, but the majority of the effects were done via the human element.”]
