Florida Film Festival 2010 movie review: The Tiger Next Door

Dennis Hill, 'The Tiger Next Door' (thetigernextdoor.com)

The Tiger Next Door is a great documentary about an incredibly fascinating subculture often not given any thought by anyone, which is possibly why things have gotten to the point they have.

The movie starts in 2003 with Dennis Hill, a big cat keeper and breeder. In the 1990's he got a fancy shmancy USDA license to house large animals like tigers and cougars. He bought a couple of cats and loved it. So it he bought a few more. And a few more. A bear here, a leopard there, and before you know it, Dennis Hill has over twenty large animals in his possession.

And all of these animals are just in homemade cages and pens in his backyard. Living in Flat Rock, Indiana, there is a lot of open land, with hundreds of yards between homes and farms spacing everyone out. But his neighbors were still pretty nervous about him having a veritable zoo on his property. So nervous in fact that they even have a town hall meeting about Dennis Hill's practice of keeping and breeding animals. And Mr. Hill had to sit there with a sh*t eating grin and listen to people attack his character as well as his animal collection. Fortunately for Mr. Hill, a number of people came forward in the same meeting and said they knew Mr. Hill and trusted him and would put their babies in his tigers' mouths if he said it was cool. So it's not a one-sided issue.

Mr. Hill also lost his USDA license so he was forced to give up all but three of his animals by a certain date, or else Big Bad Government would come in and take all of the animals away. So a majority of The Tiger Next Door is about Mr. Hill trying to unload these animals on people all across the country. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to get rid of a bear. People seem to fear them for some odd reason. Maybe it's those giant skull crushing pawsies they have, I'm not sure. They also hang out a bit with this fella Joe Taft, director of The Exotic Feline Rescue Center, and he turns out to be a nice cinematic villain for Mr. Hill (or hero, depending on your own personal point of view). Joe Taft wants to see Dennis Hill shut down and even confronts him on his sloppy habits and practices, but Dennis Hill just shrugs it all off and insists things went otherwise.

There is some really awesome footage in this movie, including the wrangling of some very spooked and very large animals, and also some sad footage of animals in kind of crappy conditions. Dennis Hill is great for this movie because he makes for such a complicated character. He obviously loves all of these animals and wants to do good by them, but he also knows the monetary values of each animal and at one point had a nice business going. He even managed to breed his tigers so they would also give birth to white tigers because they are more valuable, and has been holding out hope for an all-white tiger, which would be like hitting the big cat lottery. The problem is that he keeps breeding cats to get to this white one and more of these animals are being born into captivity, as well as into a world in which more tigers are in captivity than there are in the wild.

This film has been picked up by Animal Planet TV for television distribution, and they cut it down to a 43-minute movie for an hour-long presentation (gotta get those Meow Mix commercials in there), so you could see essentially half the movie on TV now, or you could check out the whole thing at the Florida Film Fest (as well as other regional festivals around the globe). And this movie spans a large amount of time, allowing for more of a feeling of closure as the movie ends. It's hard making a movie for over five years, waiting for events to unravel and hoping to be around to get it on camera.

Click here for the complete schedule of films for the Florida Film Festival, as well as any other FFF 2010 info you may need.

Click here for my complete coverage of this year's Florida Film Festival.