Rupert Berner (John Aldrich) works at the city zoo looking after the animals in a scientific capacity, and today meets his girlfriend Laura Schwarz (Lorraine De Selle) there, though they don't have long together before she has to get going. Pausing briefly to greet the blind composer who is recording animal noises on tape to contribute to his musical composition, Rupert gets the word that one of the tigers who has recently given birth is acting oddly, so he tranquilises the creature to examine it, noting the cub has been biting its mother's nipples instead of suckling. But soon all the animals in the zoo will be acting strangely...
Because there's something in the water supply and it's about to inspire havoc throughout the city in a film that would probably be a lot more notorious if it were better known. The plot had it that the captive animals were unleashed when there was a fault with the electronic door system (whatever happened to good old lock and key, then?) which opens all the cages, which would be bad enough, but as the opening montage has revealed there is pollution in the water supply which has sent the beasts barmy. Now, there was a disclaimer at the beginning of this which reassured us no animals were harmed during the making of the movie.
But given it was directed by the schockumentary maker Franco Prosperi, one half of the team who gave Mondo Cane and Goodbye, Uncle Tom to the world, there were indications you should take that statement with a pinch of salt. True, it was difficult to see how he could have got away with using the performing creatures in his film if he had been opening them up to abuse, but there were scenes here where you were meant to be worrying for the characters, only to start worrying about the welfare of their furry co-stars instead. Certainly, the director did set the fauna on his cast, but they were still far from domestic pets.
The narrative essentially took the form of a collection of attacks on humans, one after the other in James Herbert novel style, while Berner tried to quell the crisis before it grew even more out of hand. Watching this unfold was a weird experience, because there were sequences which were plainly ludicrous that you couldn't help laughing at, such as the bit where a woman in a decorated Volkswagen Beetle is chased through the streets by a bloodthirsty cheetah which naturally manages to keep up with thanks to it being the fastest land animal, but then there's the aftermath of the rat attack (no, they weren't exhibits in the zoo) where the exterminators arrive with a flamethrower - if those scorched rats were staged, that's some convincing special effects.
So the bad taste of Prosperi's other "documentaries" was well to the fore, except here it was in a fictional context. This would be his last film, presumably to the relief of critters everywhere, but could be seen as part of the cycle of revenge of nature ecological thrillers and horrors, though there were times it came across as a predecessor to Jumanji, only with CGI replaced with real animals. So we got a woman having her head crushed by a marauding elephant, the blind man savaged by his guide dog and a polar bear mauling another woman to death, plus you could tell Prosperi was fond of the tigers in light of how much screen time they received, including a part where one crazed example gets into the subway system. De Selle, no stranger to dodgy Italian cinema, gets to emote over the fate of her character's bratty daughter who is at her dance class when a power cut strikes, which sets up the big twist at the end where we are prompted to wonder which is worse, humanity or the beasts? And other such bullshit. Music by Daniele Patucchi.
