I don’t have any sort of introduction this week to ease you
into the post. What I am going to write
about would be very difficult to ease any of the readers into. It’s not weighty material by any means. It is meaningless fluff, in more ways than
one. Furry
Vengeance is the movie of choice this week.
It was released in 2010 and starred Brendan Fraser as Dan Sanders, a
real estate developer being tormented by animals for threatening their home, a
forest. With over the top pranks being
dealt out by forest creatures, this movie is ridiculous in many ways.
My question when I watch this movie is… Who is the bad
guy? The obvious answer is of course
Dan’s boss, Neal Lyman (Ken Jeong). But
what about the central conflict between Dan Sanders and the animals? Is there a clear cut good guy and bad guy in
that conflict? Some people might say
yes. I, however, am not so sure. I’m
going to dig into both sides of the conflict and come up with some sort of
results that will probably end up having me be even more confused about what
the movie is presenting to its viewers.
Who should we be rooting for while watching Furry Vengeance? There are two sides to the conflict. The first side is the animals that are doing
elaborate things in order to try and stop Dan Sanders from building houses in
the forest. The other side is Dan
Sanders, a man who is being tormented by animals for building houses in the
forest. Both have their pros and their
cons. Let’s get into them.
The Animals
The conflict of Furry
Vengeance is over a forest. This is
the forest in which Dan Sanders’s house is located. It is also a forest filled with many
animals. Dan Sanders has been told, by
his boss, to build more houses in the forest.
This will threaten the wildlife and essentially kill them by getting rid
of the wilderness in which they live.
That is the reason that causes the animals to fight Dan Sanders
throughout the movie.
First thing first, you need to know that the animals are
very protective of one another. If a
human harms or does even the smallest thing to slight an animal, the animals
will band together and work to get rid of the human by any means
necessary. This is set up in the opening
scene of Furry Vengeance. Riggs (Rob Riggle) is speeding through the
country road in his expensive car when he almost hits a prairie dog. As a result, the animals of the forest, led
by a raccoon, retaliate by releasing a boulder to hit Riggs’s car and send him
over the edge of a cliff. These animals have
basically committed murder because this man almost ran one of them over.
The idea of the animals protecting themselves through any
means necessary is backed up by another scene soon after Dan Sanders and his
family arrive in the forest. One of the
forest rodents is eating out of Dan’s garden, so he turns on the sprinkler to
spray it and scare it away. The rest of
the animals don’t like it. As a result,
the raccoon brings the animals together to once again send a boulder at the
vehicle of the human who wronged them.
These are some vicious animals.
Dan survives to fight another day.
That is how the animals of Rocky Springs act in normal
times. They exaggerate every wrong
doing, and get vengeance in the most violent of ways. It is played up for comedy since this is a
family film. But we all know that, much
like the violent Home Alone series,
if this weren’t a family comedy, the characters would die. The animals are willing to kill people
because they got a little bit wet. That
seems like some maniacal ideals there.
Later in the movie, the animals come under a much larger
threat, which is that Neal Lyman wants to get rid of the forest to put in a
housing development. That is Neal
Lyman’s choice. He practically forces
Dan Sanders to agree to this plan. The
raccoon in charge of the forest animals knows this since it snuck along to the
meeting in which this plan was revealed.
Yet the raccoon does not go after Neal Lyman. It spends the majority of the movie working
with the other forest animals (squirrels, minks, skunks, bears, crows, etc.) to
try and get rid of Dan Sanders. Dan is a
cog in the machine rather than the man behind the whole forest removal
plan. They are going after the wrong
person in full force.
The motives for the animals are simple. They want to keep their home and will work to
drive out anyone trying to take it away.
That is why they spend the movie spraying Dan Sanders with skunk
stink. That is why the crow spends the
night tapping away at windows and pecking weather vanes. They are trying to drive Dan Sanders insane
so that he will leave their home alone.
But are they targeting the right person in their fight for their
home? If they get rid of Dan, wouldn’t
someone else just replace him and keep the job going? Dan was the replacement for Riggs. They got rid of Riggs and Dan showed up. Nothing was prevented by their attacks until
the end of the movie.
Dan Sanders
Dan Sanders is the main character of Furry Vengeance. He was
relocated from Chicago to Rocky Springs in order to head a real estate
development. He brought along his wife
Tammy (Brooke Shields) and son Tyler (Matt Prokop). Together, they are trying to make a new life
in this small town. Dan is trying to
work on some houses while pleasing his crazy boss. Tammy is a new teacher at a local school and
heading the forest festival planning.
Tyler is trying to deal with the loss of all of his friends.
Now, Dan Sanders is the man in charge of building the houses
that will ostensibly see the destruction of the forest. His motivation behind building these houses
is to support his family and allow them to get the things they want and
desire. He is trying to make his boss
happy by doing the things that his boss asks him to. And when it comes to the animals, he wants to
relocate them to a new home so they can live in peace.
What Dan does not know and discovers near the end of the
movie is that relocation is not always a solution when it comes to animal
habitation. If the animals are not able
to adapt to a new home, they are likely to die.
Losing their current home is why the animals do what they do to
Dan. They steal Dan’s clothes because he
is stealing their habitat. They drive
his car because he is going to be driving away their food. They make Dan go insane because he is trying
to make them go off to their deaths.
It seems like Dan is involved in one of those situations
where “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” He is simply trying to do the best for his
family. But it comes at the cost of the
forest. Does he deserve all that the animals
are doing to him? Does Dan deserve to
have a boulder thrown at his vehicle because he wanted to give his son a
Nintendo Wii (in some insane product placement)? No. He
does not. And his boss is the one
telling him to do this stuff anyway. The
animals should be going after Neal Lyman more than they should be going after
Dan Sanders.
Though Dan Sanders might seem like the bad guy in a nature
versus urbanization conflict and the pawn of an even more sinister force
against the forest, he is the character we tend to follow through the
film. He is our protagonist. This isn’t some sort of anti-hero movie like
a Wolf of Wall Street where the main
character is despicable. Dan Sanders
isn’t a bad guy. He’s just been pushed
into building houses in a forest. His
boss is the bad guy, knowing what it will cause. Dan’s just a worker doing his job. It would be like following a sanitation
worker on the Death Star and blaming him for all the wrongdoings of the Empire.
In the end, I think I have come to the conclusion that Dan
Sanders is the bad guy in the conflict, but he’s an almost innocent bad
guy. He doesn’t deserve the torture
inflicted upon him by the animals in Rocky Springs. He is the bad guy, but he’s not so bad that
he deserves to be bouldered off of a cliff of have his eyes scratched out. Not that any of this even matters since the
ending flips the whole movie.
When Dan Sanders discovers that the animals have families as
well, and may not survive relocation, he joins them and goes after Neal
Lyman. Lyman is the real bad guy in the
movie and thus deserves what he gets (he gets dragged off in a bouncy worm
playhouse by a bear driving a golf cart).
In the end, neither the animals nor Dan Sanders are the bad guys. They become a team and protect the forest
together. Happily ever after.
Before I head into my notes, I’d just like to leave you on
one more thing. During the end credits
of the movie, there is an insane music video made by the people involved in the
movie. It is strangely reminiscent of
the song at the end of Shark Night 3D,
except this one is in a family movie and it’s a cover of the Cypress Hill
classic Insane in the Brain. I would
describe it, but words cannot possibly do it justice. So I will link to it below. It’s crazy.
Now for the notes:
- Furry Vengeance was suggested to me by @GabnDad. Thanks for giving me an experience I am not soon to forget.
- Brooke Shields was in Furry Vengeance. She was already featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies in a movie called Freaked.
- Have you seen Furry Vengeance? What did you think of it? You can comment about the movie or this post below.
- If you have a movie that you think I should watch for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, the comments are a good place to tell me. Or you could find me on Twitter and tell me there.
- Next week’s movie is Outcast. It is the first time that Nic Cage will be featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies. It’s a big week. Are you ready for it? See you then.
- Oh yeah, the video. Here’s the music video from the end credits of Furry Vengeance:
No comments:
Post a Comment