COYOTES

**

Directed by Colin Minihan.

Starring Justin Long, Kate Bosworth, Mila Harris, Brittany Allen.

Comedy, US, 91 Minutes, Certificate 15.

Released by Signature Entertainment. Release date TBC.

Reviewed as part of Halloween FrightFest 2025 - UK Premiere

Coyotes and forest fires. Such a thing in real life would obviously be a horrible tragedy, but throw the two elements together in a genre film and you have something which comes close to high-concept. Mix in a family in peril and you are cooking with gas. Or you could take this high-pressure combination and play it for laughs. In the right hands that could work out too. Unfortunately Colin Minihan, who has proven himself as a director of inventive horror more than once over the past few years, fumbles what could have been a fun and inventive horror comedy with a film that appears to have cut a few creative corners, resulting in something that fails to satisfy on very few levels.

Justin Long, who has made a nice segue into horror over the past few years, plays Scott, a struggling comic book artist living in the Hollywood Hills with his wife Liv, played by Long’s real-life partner Kate Bosworth, and their teenage daughter Chloe, played by Mila Harris. In time honoured fashion Chloe is the kind of teenager who wanders around the house with a mobile phone seemingly glued to her hand and is stand-offish and rude to her parents, especially her father who is seemingly over-dedicated to his work. Adding to the woes of this miserable household is a power cut which is only made worse by the presence of a pack of wild coyotes who seem to have developed a real flesh ripping animosity to their human neighbours.

The comedy elements, despite the best attempts of the more than capable cast fall completely flat here, with a script that fails to raise a smile or any laughs at all. It feels quite lazy with cliche ridden dialogue, “As if!” is muttered at one point without a trace of irony, leading to the feeling that the writers may not quite have their fingers on the pulse when it comes to how teenagers speak these days.

Just as unfortunate is the depiction of the coyotes themselves. The debate of practical versus CGI effects in low budget horror can be had another time but the creatures here look like they have been rendered through AI, an issue which Minihan has denied but which seems plainly obvious when watching the film. The unnatural, glossy and inconsistent look of the creatures, as well as the fire when it eventually arrives, jumps off the screen  and undoes the hard work of the cast. A slide into sentimentality in the latter stages of the film also helps derail the film's progress and feels jammed in. Without all of this it could have been a fun, forgettable flick but the cost-cutting used in its visual aspects, as well as its lazy, flat script marks it out for all the wrong reasons.

Iain MacLeod