DocuMental: Zoo

Ok, I’ve been watching a hell of a lot of documentaries lately and so I shall review them. Wow, that was an awful opening sentence. Never mind, let us continue regardless. The world of documentaries has always fascinated me. I love fictional films, obviously, but there’s something different about a really great documentary. Unfortunately what I’m reviewing today is not a great documentary.

Zoo is a 2007 film directed by Robinson Devor. It concerns the 2005 death of Kenneth Pinyan, referred to in the film by his username ‘Mr Hands‘, a 45 year old man who was fucked to death by a stallion. That’s right, he was literally fucked to death by a horse. A horse fucked him, punctured his colon and he was dropped off at hospital by another horse fucker and died there of his injuries. The death resulted in the passing of a law which made it illegal to have sex with animals in Washington… I honestly can’t believe that this was legal in Washington until 2005. I now have a horrible feeling that Bill Clinton wasn’t the only one to engage in sexual discretions in the White House. After all, Nixon REALLY loved his dog Checkers but I digress.

Essentially the story goes that there was a farm in Washington owned by an old couple who loved there horses. They had a guy working there for them who also loved horses. He loved them, however, in a different way. The kind of way were you allow yourself to be mounted by said horses. He thought it would be fun to invite other people over to the farm who were also interested in such activities when ever the couple went away and so he did via the world wide web, mankind’s greatest invention when it comes to enabling deviant sexual behaviour. Hooray!

So people would come out the farm, have a few drinks, eat some food, watch TV and then go and get fucked by a horse. You know, just a regular night in with the lads. So anyway, one night Kenneth goes out, does the usual and starts to complain that he’s not feeling right. It soon becomes clear that something pretty bad has happened so one of the other guys dumps him at a hospital and drives off. Unfortunately for him, a number of CCTV cameras track his car and it’s journey. The media are soon flying over their farm in a helicopter, police are called in and religious folks try and save the animal fucker’s souls. The couple who actually own the farm are shown some footage of the actual manimal loving, and so unfortunately is the viewer, but no one is actually charged because at the time it’s not against the law.

That’s the story. In the film it’s almost exclusively told in recreations for obvious reasons. The problem that I have with the documentary, other than seeing the act on screen even if only fleeting glimpses, is that it’s told in some weird, experimental storytelling format, something the film has been praised for. It doesn’t seem to have any real structure until the last half of the film which made it really difficult to get into. The first half seems to just throw random parts of the story in, interviewing the woman who rescued the animal who caused the man’s death, a man explaining how he got into bestiality and several others, all just jumbled up together with no semblance of an order.

The worst thing though, the worst fucking thing, is that every scene seemed to be shot in slow motion. It’s like the ‘300’ of dude fucked to death by a horse movies. At least in three hundred there were times when this was kind of Ok. In this however scenes of people walking, running, watching TV and answering the phone are all in fucking slow motion and though the music in the film wasn’t particularly bad, it was not particularly great either. In fact, sometimes it made the scene seem even slower than they were already.

The strangest part of the film, and that really is a claim when talking about a film in which a man is fucked to death by a horse, comes at about half way through. Suddenly we’re introduced to a man, sitting on a stool in a white room who is just talking. It turns out that this man is one of the actors in the film. This really confused me for a second because I suddenly thought that maybe I’d been watching a documentary on the making of Zoo for 45 minutes. Maybe that explained why they hadn’t really touched on the story that I thought the film was actually about at this point, but no it turns out this man felt that he could somehow relate to this story because he once tried to help a drowning kid at a swimming pool and failed. I honestly didn’t fully understand the connection and still don’t now.

Oh, and to top it of they geld the horse who killed the dude. They castrate the fucking horse so that no one who is interested in having sex with it will come to try and adopt it. That’s just wrong in my books. How about they just don’t let anyone adopt the fucking horse and let it keep it’s tackle?

Overall, I just didn’t like this film. The strange story-telling style definitely had something to do with it. I just felt it was unnecessary and really detracted from whatever plot or point they were trying to get across. I guess ultimately I just was also kinda disappointed that this film wasn’t as funny as I felt a film about a man being fucked to death by a horse should’ve been. It was just kinda dark and disturbing.

Now, in honour of my favourite documentary, King Of Kong, I shall give each documentary a review out of five Kongs. Zoo receives 1 Kong out of 5. Now, if you don’t mind I must go muck out the stables.