BURNING BRIGHT

Johnny (Garret Dillahunt) pulls up to the side of a highway and keeps an illicit meeting with circus flunky Howie (Meat Loaf). The purpose of their shifty daylight tryst is for Johnny to procure a Bengal tiger.

He tells Howie how he's looking for a particularly scary tiger to wow tourists who he hopes will visit his home once he's finished converting it into a safari ranch. His wish is that the beast will be the centre attraction - but it's got to be fierce.

Johnny takes one look at the dozing tiger in the back of Howie's trailer, a beautiful feline by the name of Lucifer, and moans that it's not worth the asking price. He proposes dropping the fee by $5,000.00. Unimpressed, Howie tells a tale of how Lucifer recently ate a circus horse alive (a specific horse that the cat had a grudge against) and prepares to bid his customer farewell.

Totally sold on the story, Johnny pays the full asking price and returns to his home as a very happy man. Despite the weather forecasts predicting an incoming hurricane, he insists that the Spanish immigrants he has under his employment continue work on converting the place into the safari attraction of his dreams.

Meanwhile, we meet the gorgeous 20-year-old Kelly (Briana Evigan) and her autistic 12-year-old brother Tom (Charlie Tahan). Their mother recently committed suicide and Kelly has assumed custody of the little fellow. However, with a scholarship waiting for her at a not-so-nearby college, Kelly enlists Tom in a care home as a temporary measure.

Unfortunately the cheque Kelly uses to cover Tom's care fees bounces and a telephone call to the bank manager reveals that the account Kelly's mother set up to help look after Tom has been wiped out and closed. By - get this - the kids' stepfather, Johnny!

Yup, Johnny's a real shit: the type of cad who drinks beer during the day while sweating profusely, and the kind of person who unsympathetically yells at his illegal alien employees to keep working even when their lives are under threat.

Kelly drags Tom back to their mother's old home and is startled to see that Johnny is in the process of converting it into a tourist attraction. She demands that he hand over the cash that mother had left for Tom, but Johnny insists that there was no will - and, therefore, the mother's wishes mean nothing now that she's dead.

Understandably miffed, Kelly retires herself and Tom to their old bedrooms in the house, planning to reason further with Johnny the next day.

But, as night creeps in and Johnny swans off to the local bar to sink a few bottles of beer, Kelly is awoken by strange noises coming from downstairs. It can't be the Spaniards - they've all left for the evening.

Creeping to the top of the stairs, Kelly peers furtively over the banister and makes the horrifying discovery that Lucifer is no longer in his cage and is now roaming hungrily downstairs.

That's the premise, which takes about 30 minutes to unravel. The remainder of BURNING BRIGHT - just under another hour - is devoted to a relatively tense succession of scenes involving creeping around darkened rooms and hallways (all doors and windows to this house are boarded up, incidentally), and running like fuck from an angry tiger.

Evigan (S DARKO; SORORITY ROW) is an amiable lead who is easy to root for: strong, sexy and resourceful. She's also just about vulnerable enough to believe, and even fallible (when her family commitments threaten to shatter her dreams of scholarship, she dreams of smothering Tom with a pillow). The rest of the cast are fair but unremarkable, but are good enough to keep the viewer involved in the unfolding action.

Director Carlos Brooks keeps things taut and fast-paced once the initial exposition has been catered for. He is further aided by some proficient editing from Miklos Wright and a claustrophobic score by Zack Ryan.

Cynics will no doubt have a field day picking apart the convenient early plot contrivances that return into play later in the script (Tom's fear of the colour red; his need to eat at inopportune times; the mystery surrounding mother's death; the impending hurricane).

But, if you're willing to overlook the sign-posted "revelations" and go along with what is ostensibly a somewhat silly premise, BURNING BRIGHT makes for decent, tightly-wound entertainment.

I enjoyed it more than I did CUJO, put it that way.

BURNING BRIGHT looks very good in an anamorphic widescreen transfer that boasts sharp, clean images and strong natural colours.

English audio is provided in 5.1 and is also an extremely capable proposition. Optional English subtitles are on hand for the hard of hearing.

Momentum's disc opens with a static main menu page. From there, a static scene-selection menu allows access to the main feature via 12 chapters.

The only extra on the disc is a 2-minute trailer presented in anamorphic widescreen.

The disc is defaulted to open with widescreen trailers for FROZEN and THE BLEEDING.

BURNING BRIGHT is one of the better man-versus-wild animal films that have been relegated straight to DVD in recent years. It has its limitations, mainly plot-wise, but Brooks is a competent director and Evigan is a lead actress worth keeping an eye on (she also co-stars in Darren Lynn Bousman's forthcoming remake of MOTHER'S DAY).

Review by Stu Willis