Zoo Movie Review

Zoo is a very biased Documentary with one clear-cut goal; to humanize and rationalize Zoophilia (Zoo for short), or a sexual attraction to animals.

The film chronicles a group of Washington state men caught in the middle of a July, 2005 beastiality scandal in which a man died from internal hemorrhaging after engaging in sexual activities with an Arabian Stallion. Rather than focusing upon the historical events of the case, which received national media coverage at the time, the filmmakers chose to devote their efforts to the psyche of the zoophiles themselves; their thoughts, feelings, and ultimately how they became and continue to stay "Zoo."

Director Robinson Devor's Zoo is little more than a shell of a film that somewhat resembles a Documentary. Despite its incredibly ambitious concept, regardless whether one agrees or sympathizes with the topic, the film falls flat and fails to achieve the desired effect. It lacks plot, coherence, structure, and in no way does it educate, inform, or entertain on any level consistent with high caliber Documentary filmmaking. As it progresses it becomes painfully dull and wanders about arbitrarily, leaving the audience dissatisfied with the viewing experience and anxious for the final fade to black.

The film is rife with off-camera audio only interviews covered with random dramatization that has little to do with the story at hand; mainly due to the fact that many of the zoophiles involved in the incident refused to be on camera. The only talking heads in the film are law enforcement personnel, government officials, and private citizens involved on the opposite side of the fence.

The editing was anything but professional from first frame. The glitch-ridden debacle of a film starts on a poor note and erratically degenerates from bad to worse until it finally ends abruptly and leaves much to be desired in the area of story. Zoo did, however, manage to find some saving grace in the Cinematography which was aesthetically first-rate, as far as the dramatizations were concerned, but the camera work for the interviews was pretty mediocre. In essence Zoo becomes a demented one-sided running monologue of sorts in which the zoophiles attempt to rationalize their sexual attraction to animals much to the dismay of the viewing audience.