Maneater

I watched this movie 'Maneater' this friday on Zee Studio, the third one in a ten made-for-television film series produced by RHI Entertainment under an agreement with Sci Fi. Based on Jack Warner's novel Shikar, the film details the killing spree of an escaped Bengal tiger after it gets loose in a small town along the Appalachian Trail. The movie falls in the genre of 'natural horror'.

I was disillusioned. The movie left me with a sour taste in my mouth. And yet, it inspired me. It taught me what are plotholes and unexplored subplots. Mutilated bodies are being found in the forest. There are talks of a tiger, but the tiger is never shown attacking any one of them. Although later I discovered the reason for that was the infeasibility caused due to the avoidance of CSI effects and using a trained, live tiger in the film, yet it inadvertently helps in creating the first subplot - Is it the tiger or is it someone else, who's playing cunning, killing people and letting the blame go to the maneater? No sooner the suspense has started building, that a particular scene giving some evidence like signs of a tiger's claws on the bodies dispels it. The first subplot goes crashing.

Now, there is this strange, sweet little boy living in the forest with his mother, who hasn't got a TV in his house, doesn't go to school, reads only the Bible, and has fancies about tigers after reading a tale in the book. He has this habit of sleepwalking, and roams in the forest in sleep calling for the tiger, "Where are you? Come on, come out. Where are you?" The tiger, on many a night, comes and sits near his house. Once the boy even sees him peering inside through the glass of his window. He is so happy on seeing him, but before he could reach out to meet him, the tiger runs away. Later, the boy meets a hunter, who's helping the Sherrif to kill the maneater. The boy pleads in front of him not to kill the beast. The hunter, in response, explains the tyranny of the situation and among other things, mentions about a particular Buddhist folk tale in which a teacher punishes his student. The angry student runs to the forest and takes the form of the first tiger on the Earth. The boy tells him frankly about his whim that he feels that he is a tiger himself. Once he takes his friend with him to the forest. There is the roar of the tiger. The friend runs away, whereas our strange cute boy remarks to the tiger (not shown), "Go away. They are looking for you to kill you. Run away." In a scene, the sleepwalking boy goes to a pond, and instead of seeing his own reflection, sees the reflection of the tiger in the water. When he wakes up, he thinks that this was his dream. He goes to the pond, and sees the footprints of a tiger on the edge of it. The boy and the tiger are never shown together in any scene until now. By now, the subplot has built on so smoothly to such a great extent. I am left totally mystified by this mystical subplot - Is the boy a weretiger, and takes on the form of a tiger sometimes; does it deal with a concept relating to compassion which transcends all hiatus, shown in abstract by using the POV (point of view) of the tiger; does the fancy of the boy for the tiger get communicated to it though some unknown channel like telepathy and in response, it has also developed a liking for the boy? Such tales like my favourite story 'The leopard' by Ruskin Bond, the tiger Richard Parker in the Booker-award winning 'Life of Pi', R.K.Narayan's 'A tiger comes to town' have started floating in my head. And this one seems to come out as more or at least equally wonderful. But alas! to my utter dejection, something I would never predict - the story takes on the most predictable end. The tiger kills the boy's mother. The sheriff kills the ferocious maneater, who's killed around 20 people including a squad of armymen, with a single shot of his gun. The sherrif has no kids of his own, and adopts the boy. The movie, which could have been one of its type legendery modern-day folk tale, culminates as a 'hardly one-time watch' two-star-rated movie, which neither succeeds at scaring the audience nor arousing any dramatic interest.

I'm left feeling so cheated. It upsets me a great deal. How could any writer be so lazy as to leave a wonderful subplot in between, and resort to a simple, predictable ending? The 'suspension of disbelief' of the audience, at many scenes like that of the boy's friend running away scared but the boy calmly talking, the boy seeing the tiger's reflection in the pond instead of his own, and many other similar scenes, falls out flat in the face, and uncovers the scenes as big plotholes, going against the line of logic.

The film suffers from an inordinately slow pace and repetitive action typical to 'Friday the 13th' movies. Except that of the sheriff, the character shade built for the hunter, the boy and other characters is metted out with severe injustice. In one of the scenes nearing the end, the hunter is attacked by the tiger (tiger not shown, by showing the hunter from the POV of the tiger in the preceeding scenes leading to it), but in later scenes, we see that both the tiger and the hunter are alive, which is the biggest plothole of the film. Did the maneater suffer from a mood swing, or did it have to go to toilet leaving the hunter halfway to being devoured? Or did the hunter have a surge of mercy on the creature and let it go after issuing a warning?

In addition to that, the film is filled with stereotypes, and doesn't promise any freshness. The only original experiment of using a live tiger served no purpose, but brought with it several disadvantages. The major one being the infeasibilty to show tiger-attack scenes - people caught in the tiger's jaws battling for their life,which could send an adrenaline surge up the audience's spines, making for horrid nightmares while catching on sleep in the aftermath of watching the movie.

The only good part was that the movie was subdued, speaking relative to other natural horror creature flicks, adding a depth and realism to it, and allowing subplots unconventional to such films (which remained unexplored though). The movie has snatches of visual appeal and good cinematography in certain parts.

All in all, watch it if all other movie channels are showing idiotic movies, and you have nothing much to do. Rated 2 on a scale of 5.