HUNGRY (2026) - Rampaging Animatronic Hippo - REVIEW

Hungry (2026) directed by James Nunn is another of those animal killer movies, we had a couples in the past two years already and right from the opening scene inside a loud Louisiana bar, you can tell exactly what kind of movie this is trying to be so dont expect nothing ground braking here. Sistine and Hannah are partying hard, throwing shots and just having a blast, until Sistine gets a phone call from her boss and gets fired out of the blue. She basically decides to make one last reckless move and is here where both of them show up at the docks looking completely looking like shit. They have the dark sunglasses on, they look exhausted and you can tell the night before destroyed them, so they walk into this strange little shop that feels half store, half creepy animal museum, with old gator bones, weird taxidermy pieces and even a giant hippo skull sitting there like the place was designed to make everything feel more cursed. They board a tiny wooden boat guided by a local captain named Rodrigo and the thing looks exactly like a Jungle Cruise boat from Disney. Within the ones onboard are a retired firefighter named Tim grieving his dead wife, his middle aged daughter Sally, his grandson Mikey, and a pushy businesswoman named Dionne in a pantsuit. Their clashing personalities immediately drive the danger, especially since Dionne paid Rodrigo a three hundred dollar tip to navigate completely off the grid to photograph a giant alligator named Big Ben. Rodrigo starts throwing white marshmallows into the muddy river because alligators treat them like turtle eggs and we even get a cool close up shot of a real little green turtle sitting on a log. They navigate around a grassy area using an electronic tracker, finding Big Ben dead and ripped apart in the muddy water. Rodrigo tries to get them back but before they can turn around an enormous animal rams the boat, completely thrashing the boat until it flips over and dumps everyone into the water, with the radio shorted out by the flood, I got to give it to this movie, it wasnt fucking around to get you into the action.

• IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt34494076/
• Platform: PRIME VIDEO

The movie is more than fine for the first half obviously because of the physical creature design, because the production quality is super solid for a low budget movie, relying heavily on a giant rubber animatronic hippo head combined with CGI for the full body movement. You can feel the heavy weight and menacing presence of this creature whenever the three and a half ton, probably me exagerating; thrashes the tour boat. I did some digging after the movie and apparently giant practical prop took five separate crew members to operate on set, controlling the snapping jaw, rubber tongue and mouth slime to make it as realistic as possible before they throw in the CGI sauce. The cinematography gives us menacing shots right on the muddy rim of the swamp where the giant dark eyes of the creature slowly break the water surface, quietly watching the trapped travelers before making a sudden charge, its funny how you got now idea of whats comming if you only see the eyes and the tiny ears above water. You actually care about this group, especially the older grandfather Tim. Tim acts like a true classic hero when the beast returns finish the job and rams poor Hannah into the muddy river, Tim immediately jumps straight into the dangerous murky water to save her without a second thought, even though the giant drags both him and Hannah under the surface. That scene was powerful but it also make them look helpless and destine to die since its clear that there is no contest for the size and power of this animal. Sistine had this idea to use a video camcorder with a green night vision setting to scan the foggy swamp mist. Sally, who turns out to be a nurse, takes charge of treating the shoulder puncture wound of Rodrigo while Sistine helps out by retrieving the flare box with a branch and the practical blood effects look real enough for you to think the rest of the scene is possible, it doesnt feel too over the top. The group feels very authentic during these desperate medical moments, showing us real human beings dealing with severe shock and septic infection warnings, proving that a creature feature can deliver real emotional weight when the cast commits to the cold physical reality of water survival.

Hungry feels like a massive nostalgic throwback to the late 90s and early 2000s with all the animatronic involve, mainly because when you watch the giant hippo aggressively thrashing against the tiny Jungle Cruise sized tour boat in the middle of a remote muddy river, you can immediately see heavy structural similarities to movies like Anaconda where trapped travelers try to escape from a location in this case a river but you just dont see how its possible against such beast. Now that I think about this also feels like a carbon coopy of the survival horror movie The Bayou, where a plane crash survivors battle hungry alligators in the deep Louisiana swamplands until emergency backup arrives, so as I mention above there is nothing revolutionary or new about this movie that we have not seen in the past, all you got to do is replace the animal in between. Just like The Bayou, the traverlers in this case eventually row away from their sunken tour boat and seek temporary refuge inside an old abandoned structure built directly over the swamp water, almost perfect setup for claustrophobic location full of metal animal cages and flooded concrete hallways that look like an old gator farm tied to the abandoned hippo farming attempt, already giving you context from where this beast escape and even made me think if this is the only one?. There are many other movies that I would say influence this one, quick example is Jaws, specifically in how Big Ben had a tracking tag early on and later the survivors recover the GPS tracker from the boat so rescuers can find them, which mirrors the famous yellow wooden barrels used to track the great white shark. You feel the Jaws influence during quiet scenes where the travelers monitor the blinking GPS signal. The movie does this big data dump during the dock museum scene that roots the absurd concept in real American history. Walker explains to Mikey and the travelers that during a national meat shortage in 1910, a Louisiana congressman seriously pushed a plan to farm hippos across the Louisiana swamps and provide subsidized beef for regular American citizens. Walker notes that President Teddy Roosevelt himself backed the idea of importing the aggressive African animals to America, knowing that the vegetarian brutes would also solve an ecological crisis by eating the thick invasive water hyacinth plants completely choking the local rivers.

It is such a shame that the pacing feels all over the place once the sun completely sets over the muddy river because the movie stalls out and wastes a massive amount of time with the characters endlessly hanging out in the low swamp trees making boring small talk. You have to sit through long repetitive dialogue where they start throwing blame at each other for no grounded reasons, crying and arguing over whose fault, when they should literally just be swimming to the riverbank to escape the territory. Middle aged mother Sally suffers a complete mental break after her teenage son Mikey falls off the slippery boat and gets dragged under by the beast. She had this emotional reaction that feels incredibly forced and over the top dramatic, probably one of the worst moments of the movie even a bit cliche and then she literally just slides into the muddy water and swims away into the thick swamp fog never to be seen again. Around this moments I also remmber how a scene that was suppose to probably look bad ass, turn very hilarious to me as when they pour fuel across the muddy water to create a protective ring of fire so Sistine can dive underneath the sunken wooden hull and retrieve the damaged GPS transponder so rescuers can eventually locate them. All this felt so draggy that I was tempted to fast forward but the cast still made it watchable, even though the sudden rough edit makes it look like the post production team literally lost an entire physical scene and slapped the remaining pieces together without any smooth transition. The recovery dive also drives me crazy because Sistine successfully swims underneath the dark wooden hull, screams when she finds the floating dead body of Hannah, unlocks the metal storage container to grab the damaged GPS device. To make things worse, the director tries to inject some incredibly cheesy comedy into the dark survival atmosphere when veteran guide Walker goes out in his personal motorboat to search for the missing tour group. He cruises into the dark foggy swamp blasting the loud Twisted Sister rock song We Are Not Gonna Take It on his boat speakers, and the stranded travelers bizarrely start smiling and singing along with the corny music.

When the last few survivors finally make it to the old gator farm, the movie starts pulling all the hippo stuff together. The place is creepy, abandoned, full of old cages, records, bones and all those hints that these things have been out there for way longer than anyone realized. Then they hear the baby hippo crying and find it stuck under the broken cage and right away you know the mother is not just randomly killing people. She is pissed off because everyone is in her space and her baby is trapped. This brings out the worst in Dionne like she was not already hard to like, but this is where she fully crosses the line for me but cant denied that it was hilarious of how fucked up her reaction was. When the mother hippo gets inside and everything goes crazy, she shuts the door and basically leaves Walker trapped with that thing. Then she tries to act like she had no choice, like she was only trying to save everybody but come on. After that, I was just waiting for the movie to give her what she deserved, but the contrast between personalities also works because Sistine is the total opposite by the end. She starts the movie getting fired, feeling like a mess and barely holding her life together, but towards the end she is the one actually thinking, helping people, using the camcorder night vision, starting the fire and eventually realizing that the baby hippo is the key to stopping all of this. It is not some deep character but for a killer animal type of movie it just works. She goes from “my life is falling apart” to “fine, I guess I have to survive a giant hippo now,” and Madison Davenport does a good job to makes this movie watchable. The ending is easy to predict, I’m not going to pretend it shocked me but it still works because the movie understands what kind of movie it is. It has some lower budget moments, some awkward edits and a few jokes that don’t always hit properly, but watching this giant hippo stalk people through a dark swamp and an abandoned animal facility is still a lot of fun. The mix of practical hippo work and CGI helps too, because when the creature is close to the camera, it actually has weight instead of looking like a full cartoon. Hungry is not reinventing this type of killer animal movies or anything like that, but if you like stuff like Jaws, Anaconda or Primate, this is a very solid watch, I would give it a strong 7 out of 10.

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