This just has not been my week. I’ve watched not one, not two, but including this review, three separate reviews that have the dreaded “Sci-Fi Original Movie” associated with them. It seems that the network right now has a thing for animals and such run amuck. I’ve seen the likes of genetically engineered spiders, killer crocodiles, and now an escaped tiger, and not the one from the San Francisco zoo either.

Maneater is set in a rural community of Taruga County, and a tiger has managed to get loose. How and why . . . it’s not really that important. What is important however is that there have been missing person’s reports and Sheriff Grady Barnes (Gary Busey) sets out to investigate, soon discovering that there is a big cat out there, somewhere, and he aims to find it before more lives can be lost. A young boy, Roy Satterly (Ty Wood), has seen the tiger and claims that it has visited him, but no one believes him. The military is called in, but they don’t have the skills needed to track the creature down while Colonel Graham (Ian D. Clark), a big game hunter with plenty of experience has shown up as well hoping that he too may stop the tiger, and that will mean killing the creature.

I can give at least one point of credit to Maneater in its favor and it is, are you ready for this, the tiger is played by . . . a real tiger. That’s right, it’s a real tiger; not computer animation, not some guy in a bad tiger suit, not even a stuffed animal superimposed on the screen. However, in the full movie, that tiger probably appears less than five minutes, so I’m sure that this would have covered the special effects budget that was allotted for the movie.

Maneater isn’t really the standard nature gone wild type of film that Sci-Fi has been showing. The tiger hasn’t been genetically altered in any way, and it’s not some mutant that has grown out of control, it’s not undead or anything of that nature. It’s just a tiger, that’s it, and the problem with a tiger being loose anywhere is that they are going to be hungry. There are plenty of tiger attacks, at least that is the illusion that the film portrays, but we never really see what it is that’s attacking the victims, we just have the idea that it’s a tiger, though there is at least one occasion when it is seen, and it’s a moment that actually is almost worth cheering for. What follows are potential clues to find the beast and the results of the attacks which is just a little blood, no real gore, and no real payoff.

To try and offset the tiger hunt, we have Roy and his mother who live out in the woods, right in the line of fire so to speak. Roy isn’t allowed to go to school however and instead lives in the trailer with his mom who is constantly teaching him things from the Bible and about the evils of the world. That’s not really enough to expand the character though, so we get moment where Graham recounts his hunts of the past and how his son was killed by a tiger, so now he has a motive to kill the creature and he also has something of a sorted past due to a failed hunt. Barnes also loses a deputy to the tiger, so there are moments when we have to endure hearing about the childhood of a character that we never really knew, why he got into law enforcement, and ultimately it’s just more padding for the script. Let’s not forget about the fact that Roy seems to have a connection with the tiger to an extent and can see in his dreams what he thinks may happen.

What makes the film rather difficult to watch isn’t the real lack of story, but it’s the acting, and Busey overacts at each and every opportune moment. The fits of anger that his character lashes out with come across as being completely unbelievable and nearly laughable at times. Most of the cast really isn’t up to par when it comes to acting ability, but then keep in mind . . . this is a Sci-Fi Channel movie. Who needs good actors, good directors, a great script? If you’re seemingly borrowing from other movies, especially ones that have come out in the past few months (though this actually isn’t one of those) that’s fine as well. I do have to question though, why kill the tiger, why not just tranquilize it and put it in a zoo somewhere? I guess that the fear is that since it has tasted blood, it will attack humans as quickly as Rosie O’Donnell would a buffet.

There are absolutely no special features on the DVD, and once again I have to point out that this has been the case with a number of Sci-Fi’s movies that have made their way to an unsuspecting video renting and buying public. The rule of thumb; don’t expect much from the movie, expect about the same from the bonus material.

It’s really bad when you have a movie where the best actor isn’t a human, but the tiger. I suppose it he’d seen some of the exclusive films on Sci-Fi, he might have found something better to do. At least there’s a real tiger, but that isn’t something that makes the film any better and Maneater may not be the worst that Sci-Fi has to offer, but then again, it is a Sci-Fi offering, and that means it’s just not that great.
 

-mike-