Hogzilla (2007-2020, somewhere in there) - Review Thread

Part of the “Movies Dracula Wouldn’t Use to Wipe His Ass” series!

In 2007, John Bloom was broke. Who is John Bloom, you might ask? People who watched The Movie Channel in the 80’s and TNT in the 90’s know him better as Joe Bob Briggs, a redneck horror host who showed tried and true classics and full-on dumpster fires equally and proudly. After being fired from his second hosting gig, MonsterVision, money got tight. He received an offer to star in a low budget horror film about a killer boar called “Hogzilla.” He did the work and took the money. Years later, Joe Bob found a successful return to horror hosting on Shudder with The Last Drive-In, so successful that his first thirty-two-hour-marathon crashed Shudder’s servers and he has been bringing in the subscriptions ever since.

Everything worked out for Joe Bob, but what happened to Hogzilla? According to Joe Bob, post-production woes and legal troubles hit the unfinished film and it was fated to lie on a shelf in pieces (IMDB says it had a video release in December 2014, but I’m not sure what form this took). Joe Bob wasn’t bothered by this, because he felt it was quite possibly the worst movie ever made.

Enter Diana Prince, AKA Darcy the Mail Girl from The Last Drive-In. His co-star discovered the existence of the film, sought out the director, helped sort out potential legal issues, hired an editor to complete the film, and unleashed it on this week’s Last Drive-In, much to Joe Bob’s horror.



As a film enthusiast, I’m ecstatic! All film should be preserved, no matter the quality. I want future generations to be able to have access and look back upon everything.

That being said, this movie is a pile of shit.



Ever since my review of Radioflash, every time I do an entry in the “Movies Dracula Wouldn’t Use to Wipe His Ass” series, I like to recount the plot as I saw it through my own eyes. It’s fun. Hogzilla doesn’t really have a plot worth recounting, because most of its runtime is watching a bunch of unlikable people get pissed at each other at a camp. If you want a more in-depth premise than that, the story has a news crew investigate missing people in the woods that were supposedly eaten by a monster boar that hunts there. The rest of it is just them growling at each other until they get eaten.

And those characters are where the film primarily fails, because they are genuinely unpleasant people. I don’t like them, and the movie doesn’t even make me believe they like each other. They’re forced to be around each other, and that fact makes each of them very snippy. One of them even carries a gun and fantasizes about threatening the others with it. Probably the primary example of hatred of each other is an overweight crewmember who is portrayed as a classic, stereotypical glutten and every other character flings every insult in the book at him. I can single this out as being mean-spirited fat shaming, but the fact of the matter is everyone treats each other with the exact same attitude, and I feel no attachment to the characters because it seems so miserable to be around all of them. There is a point late in the film in which two characters are in a car alone together and the lady professes that she’s attracted to the dude, and that’s she’s been “sending signals” this whole time. I have to ask, when the hell was this? Everyone was so busy tearing the shit out of everyone else in this movie that I would think I would have noticed one slight bit of affection in there, no matter how little.

As for Joe Bob’s character, he’s not one of the crew. He’s that sort of character who lives in the woods and is obsessed with hunting the pig. It killed his son years prior, and he won’t rest until Hogzilla is porkchops. Joe Bob is probably the “best” performance of the movie, because he’s the only one who looks like he gives a shit about he comes off. But Joe Bob isn’t a real actor (though he was in Martin Scorsese’s Casino, for the record), and the fact that he’s the best actor here says more about the fact that every other actor looks as if they’ve given up.

Bottom-of-the-barrel filmmaking nowadays is probably most associated with the direct to video company The Asylum, which is a company that often doesn’t succeed in “so bad it’s good” movies because they have a general apathy toward what they make. They’re interested in a title, and a product to go with that title, and don’t care what that product is. There is something Asylum has that Hogzilla doesn’t, and that’s a slightest bit of content reward (and I can’t believe I just typed that out to describe Asylum). If you rent Sharknado, you get a Sharknado. If you check out Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, you get a fight between a giant shark and octopus. If I watch a movie called Hogzilla, I expect there to be a giant killer pig. Technically, this movie has a Hogzilla, but Hogzilla is mostly portrayed in close-up, because all they can afford is a fake pig head which only looks real to a point, so they zoom in on the eye when it’s in frame and portray the rest in “Monster Vision,” where we get a green filter camera rushing at screaming actors. There is one full body shot of Hogzilla, but it’s at a distance and in the background, as we see a CGI pig sneaking behind a scared cast, but that’s all we get. The rest of it is alluded, and if we’re lucky we get a blood squirt.

Part of me wonders if this movie’s post production back in 2007 included a full CGI pig, and in finishing this project all these years later they had to drop it and use what footage they had. But I also have to assess just how much this would “improve” the movie if that were true. The characters would still be unlikable jerks, and while the monster scenes may be more coherent, I’m not sure they’d be more entertaining.

If anybody wonders what my favorite “bad” movie of the last ten years is, it’s obviously Birdemic: Shock and Terror. Birdemic does almost everything wrong, but it’s made with a passion and drive, that feeling that those who made it thought to themselves “I have to make this movie! It’s my dream!” and just no talent or money to pull that dream off. Hogzilla is the opposite of that. It feels like nobody wants to be here making a movie that will just wind up on a video shelf and get ignored anyway. The best thing I can say about it is that people at least got paid for the work they put into it, but even then, considering they didn’t even have money to complete it, I’m starting to have doubts everyone got paid what they were owed.