COYOTES (2025)

Studio:   Decal
Director: Colin Minihan
Writer:   Tad Daggerhart, Nick Simon, Daniel Meersand
Producer: Nathan Klingher, Ford Corbett, Josh Harris, Jib Polhemus
Stars:    Justin Long, Kate Bosworth, Mila Harris, Brittany Allen, Keir O’Donnell, Kevin Glynn, Katherine McNamara, Norma Nivia, Norbert Leo Butz

Review Score:

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Summary:

Vicious coyotes stalk a frightened family trapped inside their Hollywood Hills home.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

While walking alone at night, Kat, a conceited social media influencer, sees her small dog Gigi mauled by a pack of vicious coyotes displaced by recent L.A. wildfires. A speeding vehicle suddenly runs over Kat as she backs away in terror. The coyotes then eat Kat while she lies immobile on the ground.

Workaholic comic book artist Scott consults eccentric exterminator Devon about sounds in the walls of his Hollywood Hills house believed to be coming from rats. Later that evening, Scott’s wife Liv and daughter Chloe have their movie night briefly interrupted by a knock from Julie, a prostitute who mistakes their home for their weird neighbor Trip’s house.

A storm topples a tree onto Scott and Liv’s car in the driveway. A downed powerline also causes their home to lose electricity.

The next day, Liv finds a collar belonging to Trip’s wandering cat Lucy in a gruesome puddle of blood beneath the fallen tree. Liv takes the collar to Trip, who still has Julie in his house, and he becomes obsessively concerned about his missing cat.

Another neighbor, Tony, visits Scott while he works on cutting apart the fallen tree. On his walk home afterward, a pack of coyotes savagely mauls Tony to death. Attacking coyotes later get inside Tony’s house, where a series of events starts a fire that engulfs Tony’s model wife Sheila.

Coyotes also get inside Trip’s home, interrupting another sex session with Julie. Trip and Julie barricade themselves in a bedroom, but a coyote turns the door handle to get in. Julie flees to the bathroom while Trip wildly fires his handguns.

Dealing with coyotes attacking their home too, Scott follows Chloe’s frightened dog Charlie to Trip’s house. Scott discovers Trip dead, with coyotes having eaten the flesh from his ribcage.

After finding Julie hiding in the bathroom, Scott proposes going back to his house together for safety. Scott calls Devon the exterminator for help dealing with the coyotes, but Devon cuts the call short because it is his night off. Coyotes confront Scott and Julie when they try sneaking out of Trip’s house, but Julie uses one of Trip’s guns to shoot them all dead.

Since his electronic gate is disabled, Scott speeds through it in Trip’s car to get him and Julie back to his house. Upon exiting the vehicle, a coyote attacks Scott. Liv rescues her husband by spraying the animal with a fire extinguisher. Meanwhile, a fire starts back at Trip’s place.

While treating Scott’s wounds, Liv tells him how Chloe blames herself for the animal attacks because she had been feeding the coyotes out of sympathy for their apparent hunger. Concern for Chloe leads to a larger discussion about how Scott hasn’t been spending enough time with his wife and daughter because he is too fixated on work.

Following several more coyote attacks, Scott begins building a protective cage for his family based on a suggestion from Chloe. While working in the garage, Scott finds a photo album that inspires him to reflect on how he lost focus on his family.

Devon arrives outside in his exterminator van. Coyotes immediately attack, bringing Devon to the ground.

Scott discovers that the noises in his house’s crawlspace are coming from trapped coyote pups, not rats. Scott rescues the animals. Using the cage he built, Scott escorts the young pups outside and returns them to the adult coyotes in an unspoken bargain to mutually respect the safety of their separate families. The reunited coyotes seemingly retreat.

Scott, Liv, Chloe, and Julie prepare to leave together. A coyote unexpectedly attacks Julie. Scott fights off the animal.

Scott, Liv, Chloe, and Julie escape in Devon’s van. As they drive away, the spreading fire that started at Trip’s house causes Scott and Liv’s home to explode.

Still alive in Scott’s driveway, Devon prepares to slit the throat of a coyote pup when an adult coyote suddenly attacks. Devon turns his attention to the lunging animal as he readies himself for a fierce faceoff.

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Review:

It’s baffling to see that a setup as straightforward as “coyotes besiege a family bunkered in their home” took three different people to come up with such a simple plot. Two of those people then wrote the script, although their names are listed in a different order for “Screenplay by” than they are for “Story by.” That’s likely due to writer’s guild protocol, but it’s amusing to imagine that anybody associated with a comedic thriller as blandly written as “Coyotes” would want to jockey for higher positioning on who should take more credit, or in this case, blame.

Coyotes ordinarily avoid humans, but they’re inexplicably on the attack in L.A.’s Hollywood Hills in the movie. Or rather, in a small pocket of the city populated by a handful of tame oddballs, since “Coyotes” only has nine characters, all of whom are either “eccentric” or “unremarkable,” with nearly no other way to describe them except by identifying an occupation.

At the top of the roster sits Scott, a comic book artist whose obsession with work has caused him to lose focus on his family. Scott’s wife Liv and daughter Chloe aren’t their own entities so much as vanilla-flavored nobodies circling in Scott’s orbit.

Other characters get quirks from stereotyping. Devon is an unkempt exterminator who salivates with a serious stare at the prospect of waging fantasy-fulfilling war against rats. Twirling gold handguns, exposing his hairy chest through a silk robe, and expressing suicidal concern over a beloved cat that goes missing, Trip checks all the wacky neighbor boxes. Trip has a proclivity for hiring hookers like Julie, whose heels rival the height of Kat’s, a self-centered social media influencer whose tiny teacup dog becomes the coyotes’ first victim. Two additional neighbors pop in too, though their throwaway inclusions amount to so little, there’s no need to note names no one will remember anyway.

Everyone ends up terrorized by computer-generated coyotes in one way or another. Bloody bites and savage attacks create a couple of gnarly scenes such as one victim’s entire ribcage getting gruesomely gnawed to the bone. Coyotes cause other kinds of havoc as well, including the igniting of two fatal fires that compound already dire siege situations. Eventually, our hero Scott serendipitously finds a solution and “Coyotes” goes out on an explosion that quickly deflates into a weak whimper.

Since the material is incredibly thin to begin with, “Coyotes” tries squeezing style out of erratic editing. Take this sequence as an example of how it feels like the film was snipped into random clips, thrown in the air, then Humpty-Dumptied back together again according to where pieces fell on the floor:

Liv finds a collar belonging to Trip’s cat, so she takes it to Trip’s house. The camera stays behind for an interaction between Scott and his daughter Chloe in their driveway, then cuts to Liv talking to Trip and Julie next door. When Liv returns home, Scott is now sawing apart a fallen tree with his beer-drinking buddy Tony. Liv goes inside to have a discussion with her daughter. Then the movie goes back outside for more banter between Scott and Tony before jumping to Trip and Julie talking about his cat. Now back to Scott and Tony, who begins walking home only to encounter a pack of coyotes. Trip comes over to talk to Chloe while Tony gets mauled. After Tony dies, there’s more cat-related drama between Trip, Liv, and Chloe. Next, meet Tony’s wife as she leaves angry voicemails about Tony not having come home yet. Then go back to Scott’s family. Then go back to the wife. Back to Scott’s family. Back to the wife.

Chopping up events to unnecessarily bounce back and forth between them instead of seeing threads through to their conclusions is a bizarre strategy for injecting artificial energy. Equally peculiar is the film’s jarring habit of freezing the frame whenever a character appears for the first time, then turning their face into an illustrated comic book panel accompanied by their name as a “kapow!” This technique makes a little sense in that Scott is a cartoonist, yet nowhere else does the movie do anything to maintain a graphic novel presentation. In fact, these sudden comic panels conflict with a title sequence whose graphics feature celluloid cigarette burns, grainy scratches, and film perforations on the side of some images. Is the frame supposed to be a comic book or an exploitation-era grindhouse movie?

As hard as it goes on the fright factor with gory images and a booming music score fit for an apocalypse, “Coyotes” occasionally remembers it’s supposed to be funny too, so it sometimes stops to pull an unripe joke off a low branch about Spam tasting terrible or the escort saying something spicy around the teen daughter. Already wobbling from trying to balance two tones, “Coyotes” adds a third plate on its platter in the form of a sentimental subplot where Scott comes to terms with how prioritizing work hurt the relationships with his wife and daughter. This misplaced attempt to stick a late slice of heart into the movie becomes one more identity crisis “Coyotes” can’t cope with. Unable to collect the ingredients for creating juicy entertainment, “Coyotes” instead builds a stale-tasting nothingburger with moldy buns of humor, curdled condiments of horror, and meat missing from the middle.

Review Score: 40

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