Hungry opens with a tortoise sitting on a rock, oblivious to the large alligator moving slowly towards it through the swamp water. Yet before the crocodilian can leap out and clench its powerful jaws around its would-be dinner, something even bigger attacks it from the depths. This is the food chain in action, Darwinian and deadly – and the visible red light with which the alligator has been tagged suggests that we too are a link in this chain. Not that the creature that takes the alligator down is exactly killing to eat – for this apex predator is also a strict herbivore.
Even if you had not seen the poster image for Hungry, and had no idea what you were in for, the film’s very title hints at the identity of this submerged predator via the name of a popular children’s tabletop game – and if that allusion is too subtle, shortly before best friends Sistine (Madison Davenport) and Hannah (Olivia Bernstone) go on an alligator tour of the Louisiana bayou, in the gift shop they (and we with them) are given a lesson on the terrifying aggression of the hippopotamus, responsible for more human deaths than any other animal on the African continent.
If you are wondering how wild hippopotami could end up in the American swamps, the answer that Walker (Joaquim de Almeida), the owner of Gator Joe’s, provides in this gratuitously expositional scene is the 1910 American hippo bill designed for the importation of hippos to Louisiana, where they were both to be farmed as an alternative meat source during what was then a food shortage in the United States, and were themselves to feed on the water hyacinth that was clogging the river system. So the hippo was an invasive species being brought in to control another invasive species – although viewers may note that Walker himself is a local business owner who states proudly that he hails from Portugal, that most of the film’s characters are tourists to New Orleans, and that none is a Native American, which is to say that all the humans here are no less intruders than the hippos. Even the film’s English-born writer/director James Nunn is an outsider to these parts, and a stranger in a strange land.
Hungry does everything that you expect a nature’s revenge movie to do. We know from the start that most of these characters – hunky guide and boat captain Rodrigo (Michael Curiel), Sistine and Hannah’s tour companions the teen Mike (River Codack), his devoted mother Sally (Samantha Coughlan), her widower father Tim (Jim Meskimen), and the estranged, entitled stepmother Dionne (Tracey Bonner) – are there mostly to have their numbers literally crunched as they are taken out one after the other by a serial-killing swampland slasher. This recalls Adam Green’s Hatchet series with its similar bodycount in the same Louisiana location, while also evoking David Nerlich and Andrew Traucki’s Black Water (2007), what with the amount of time its surviving characters spend up trees, watching for any signs of movement beneath the surface. Like the deadly shark in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), the hippo is more suggested than seen until the film’s second half, and is then an imposing, terrifying presence, having none of the cuteness associated with its iconography in children’s games or literature.
Much as the hippos and humans alike are fish out of water in this environment, they have something else in common. Hippos, Walker informs us, kill merely to dominate their territory, which sounds a lot like the American right to shoot anyone who enters your property uninvited – but female hippos will also, Walker says, sacrifice themselves to protect their own children. After all, this is a story of mothers. Sistine has recently lost hers, as has Sally, and both Sally and Dionne are desperate to foster good relationships with their own children. The principal hippo is a mother too, who only wants to range freely with her child, uninterrupted by unwelcome intruders – which of course makes her a highly relatable monster who is herself as much in a fight for her species’ survival as are those pesky bipeds trespassing in their boats.
As though to make the surreal fictional scenario of Hungry – wild hippopotamus on the loose in the backwaters of US! – come with some credibility, Walker, in his history lesson to the tourists, entirely neglects to mention that the American hippo bill, though certainly introduced before Congress in 1910, was never actually passed. Those who venture into those waters need normally worry only about the serpents and the gators. Indeed Walker is as surprised as everyone else to see hippos in these American tributaries, as out of place as a lion in Amsterdam or Snakes on a Plane – but in this unapologetic genre film, they are of course exactly where they belong.
strap: Up the creek, up a tree, without a paddle: James Nunn’s nature’s-revenge fable shows America as a nation of colonising outsiders and fierce mothers
© Anton Bitel
