Reviewed by Neil Davey
Stars John Paulsen, Ken Kreps, Coyote, Jenny Edwards,
John Edwards, Paul Eenhoorn, Russell Hodgkinson,
Michael J Minard, Karl Holzheimer, Bob Fink
Written by Robinson Devor & Charles Mudede
Certification UK 18 | Australia R
Runtime 80 minutes
Directed by Robinson Devor
The official drink of the 2008 Derby is Woodford Reserve. You might think that I'm abusing my position at Screenjabber to promote this lovely bourbon — and you'd be right. However, I'm also using it to stress the link between horses and rather lovely alcoholic beverages (with marvellous notes of caramel and wood smoke) because you'll need quite a lot of the latter to get through Zoo, a documentary about the former.
Well, sort of. It's not so much the horses that form the subject of Zoo, more the people around them. And it's not all of the people around them: it's just the people who love their horses, ahem, a little too much. Still too veiled? OK. Zoo is about people who fuck horses. Or, in the case of the real-life death that forms the central point of the film, people who let horses fuck them. In 2005, a man known as "Mr Hands" — and I really wouldn't recommend Googling that name as yep, they videoed his final night of receptive lust and I still haven't managed to lift my jaw from my chest or blink — was part of a group of, er, horse enthusiasts (or zoophiles, to give them their proper name / explain the title of the film) who congregated in Enumclaw, Washington State.
After an unfortunate, but utterly predictable incident — the perhaps unnecessary moral of this story is "do not allow a horse to shove approximately two feet of penis up your bottom" — another of the group dropped "Hands" off at the emergency room where he shortly bled to death. Using security camera footage, investigating police traced the car that dropped "Hands" off to a local farm, where they found a number of videos showing men and animals in assorted intimate situations. The group were thus pilloried (yeah, go figure) but not arrested as bestiality wasn't illegal at the time in this state (although it is now). When Seattle filmmaker Robinson Devor hear the story he was struck by one thing: the nature of the coverage. As his co-writer Charles Mudede explained to the New York Post last year: “There seemed to be two responses: repulsion or laughter... Early on Rob and I said to each other, ‘We’re going to revive their humanity.’ ”
They may well have done that in private but they certainly haven't achieved it in this rambling, incoherent film. Mixing documentary and drama is a structure that can work well but you have to have a modicum of talent to achieve it and, on this evidence, Devor and Mudede have neither. Devor can certainly frame things prettily but the voiceovers are impossible to follow, the action shifts all over the place without explanation and the net result, which should, of course, have been endlessly fascinating, is unbearably tedious. Somehow, the two have assembled only 25 minutes of interesting material and, through the medium of pointless slow-motion and lingering tracking shots of Washington State's flora, have stretched it to an interminable 80.
This also includes some three minutes of rambling anecdote from Michael J Minard. Minard is, at least, the only person here talking direct to camera and that would have been fascinating if he'd had been involved in the case. However, given that he's playing "Cop No.1" and that his rambling three minute anecdote is about his trouble finding a parking space on the day of his bleeding audition and how he could bring something to the role because, well, he'd once dropped somebody with a softball injury off at the same hospital it does not, as he suggests, make you think. No, Michael, it makes you yawn and question what else you could have bought with the probably obscene sum you just spent on a ticket for this piece of junk.
Aside from the unintentionally hilarious despair of the group's leader — who genuinely can't understand how he lost his job at a stables when the news broke — there is nothing to recommend Zoo at all: hell it only gets its half-mark because it's better than Meet The Spartans. Seriously chaps, if you can't make bestiality interesting, then filmmaking really isn't the job for you.