Werewolves (2024)

"Hugely Entertaining"

The latest from director Steven C Miller (whose THE AGGRESSION SCALE I reviewed here) is getting a UK DVD and Digital release from Signature Entertainment. It's a film that, in its unashamed efforts to entertain by delivering the gory goods, encapsulates much of what was great about 1980s exploitation cinema, while at the same time not paying the slightest lip service to that movie decade (which in itself is refreshing).

Before the story begins a supermoon has caused all humans to develop the tendency to turn into werewolves when exposed to its rays. Supermoons are rare, we are told (by Lou Diamond Phillips), but another one is imminent and so precautions need to be taken. There's a moonlight-blocking cream that has been developed but so far it has been untested.

It's tested.

It doesn't work.

Werewolves end up everywhere.

And so the film quickly becomes THE PURGE with werewolves (it even stars Frank Grillo of the second and third PURGE sequels), with those who wish to remain unchanged barricading themselves in their homes while gun nuts prepare to go wild. The action comes thick and fast with some well-staged sequences and once the film gets going it doesn't stop. The werewolves themselves are pretty decent creations (with only minimal use of CGI) and, importantly, there are plenty of them. There are some nice subtle touches, too. In the background are posters for 'The Right to Change' while early on someone mentions what is going on in other countries while America prepares. 

WEREWOLVES looks far more expensive than it probably was, is based on a crazy premise, and with its laboratory setting in its first act featuring people in Hazmat suits and essentially a 'you want werewolves? Well here are werewolves!' attitude, the film emulates the kind of early 1980s Italian exploitation ripoffs (frequently directed by Bruno Mattei) that are still being talked about and enjoyed to this day. If that sounds like your kind of thing then be assured it definitely is. Here's a trailer:

Steven C Miller's WEREWOLVES is out on Digital from Signature Entertainment on Monday 13th January 2025 and DVD on Monday 3rd February 2025

Dog Soldiers (2002)

"Something to Howl About"

Second Sight give their extra special treatment to writer-director Neil Marshall's debut feature as DOG SOLDIERS gets a new 4K restoration on UHD and Blu-ray.

As Gavin Baddeley eruditely puts it in one of the disc's extras, DOG SOLDIERS is a soldier movie with werewolves in it, rather than the other way around. So instead of a tale of cursed souls and elaborate transformation sequences, instead we are introduced to a bunch of squaddies sent on a seemingly routine training mission to the wilds of Scotland where they are attacked by werewolves and find themselves trapped in a cottage in the middle of nowhere as the beasts wage attack after attack. 

That's pretty much it for a story that is about as simple and straightforward as they come, but Marshall's genius lies in solid characterisation, aided immensely by an ear for dialogue, coupled with his skills as both director and editor. Mind you, special effects and production design also contribute greatly to the claustrophobic atmosphere and the performances are all endearing as well.

Second Sight's disc comes with three commentary tracks. Two have been ported over from previous releases, one from Marshall and another from producers David Allen and Brian O'Toole. There's also a new commentary from academic Alison Peirse who has a pleasant, engaging style and offers lots of insight into and ways of regarding the film.

Werewolves, Crawlers, Cannibals and More is a new 40 minute interview with Marshall in which he discusses his entire film career, right up to and including his experiences on HELLBOY and making THE RECKONING. I wish he'd been able to make the zombies on an oil-rig picture he pitched after DOG SOLDIERS and maybe one day he will.

Gavin Baddeley, author of The Frightfest Guide to Werewolf Movies offers a potted history of werewolves in cinema with specific reference to DOG SOLDIERS, including its use of comedy. We also get a history of werewolves in literature and film in a video essay by Mikel Koven that ranges from depictions of lycanthropy in classical Greek through to the Universal pictures and beyond.

Werewolves Vs Soldiers is an hour long making of featuring interviews with Marshall, producers Christopher Figg and Keith Bell, SFX artist Bob Keen and members of the cast. Production designer Simon Bowles gets his own 14 minute featurette about the sets for the film.

Marshall's short film COMBAT is also included, along with deleted scenes, a brief gag reel, trailers and a photo gallery which is well worth checking out as, rather than the usual set of movie stills, it's an account of how some of the special effects were achieved. 

This is a Second Sight release so of course there's more, in the form of a 108 page book with new writing, behind the scenes photos and a new Neil Marshall interview, six art cards and a rigid slipcase to house it all in. Twenty years on DOG SOLDIERS remains a tightly edited, superbly characterised, action-packed werewolf picture (or soldier picture with werewolves in it) and Second Sight have done the film proud.

Neil Marshall's DOG SOLDIERS is out in a limited 4KUHD and Blu-ray double disc set and standard 4KUHD and Blu-ray editions on Monday 22nd August. The new 4K restoration will also be screened at this year's Frighfest

Bloodthirsty (2021)

Low Budget Werewolf Pic - With Songs!

Be advised, however, that Amelia Moses' BLOODTHIRSTY, getting a digital and DVD release from Signature Entertainment is not a musical. Instead it's the psychological (mainly) tale of vegan pop singer Grey (Lauren Beatty) who has two main problems: difficult second album syndrome, and dreams that she can turn into a wild beast with a hunger for flesh.

Blink and you'll miss him Michael Ironside plays the psychiatrist who puts her on anti-hallucination medication before she sets off to the isolated mansion of famed record producer and possible wife-killer (although he was never convicted) Vaughn Daniels (Greg Bryk) who believes he has the ability to bring out her latent genius. 

Grey's girlfriend Charlie (Katharine King So) comes along for the ride and to do some Night Gallery-style painting, and the film becomes a virtual three-hander as Grey works on her music by day and her increasing lust for blood by night. But what's that running around and killing things at night while Grey's busy elsewhere? Could the woods already have a beast? And could it have anything to do with how she's feeling?

BLOODTHIRSTY is the very definition of slow burn but within that it achieves what it sets out to do well. Acting and direction are appropriately low key and the songs Grey writes (actually written by co-composer Lowell Boland) embellish the narrative well. Don't expect a major special effects extravaganza (although there is quite a bit of blood as we get to the end) and BLOODTHIRSTY is a quiet, unassuming but effective low budget horror picture.

Amelia Moses' BLOODTHIRSTY is out on DVD and Digital from Signature Entertainment on Monday 30th August 2021. Here's the trailer:

Werewolves Within (2021)

"KNIVES OUT meets THE BEAST MUST DIE"

The flavour of Ryan Johnson's superior whodunit is combined with the 'who is the werewolf' gimmick of Paul Annett's 1974 Amicus movie for Josh Ruben's WEREWOLVES WITHIN, an endearing and utterly enjoyable comedy horror picture that's getting a digital and DVD release from Signature.

Fin (Sam Richardson) arrives in the remote town of Beaverfield to take up his new post as forest ranger. Almost as soon as he arrives someone cuts the power and the town's tiny number of inhabitants end up having to stay at the local hotel. Unfortunately whoever plunged the snowbound town into darkness also left deep claw marks all over the generators, and as the hotel's residents start to get attacked it becomes clear that someone amongst their number might actually be a shapeshifting monster intent on eating the lot of them.

Josh Ruben's first feature, which he wrote, directed and co-starred in, was 2020's SCARE ME, a virtual two-hander in which two people played by Ruben and Aya Cash told each other scary stories in an isolated cabin. It's not at all bad and it's still playing on Shudder should you wish to check it out. WEREWOLVES WITHIN feels very much like the next natural step for Ruben as a director, employing the same basic situation but this time having a whole cast of eccentric and colourful characters.

The film is tightly and wittily scripted by Mishna Wolff (and apparently it's based on a video game) but it's Ruben's direction with its deft handling of the screenplay's many characters for maximum comic effect that really makes this one shine. As such I cannot recommend this one highly enough - WEREWOLVES WITHIN is one of the must-see films of 2021.

Josh Ruben's WEREWOLVES WITHIN is out on digital and DVD from Signature on Monday 19th July 2021

Howl (2015)

The second horror film from Paul Hyett, director of THE SEASONING HOUSE, gets a UK DVD and Blu-ray release courtesy of Metrodome.

Last train. Full moon. All change. The poster's tag line and the movie's title should be all you need to let you know what this one's about. At 11.59pm a local train service sets off out of Waterloo, filled with a motley collection of passengers, very few of whom, if any, are going to reach their intended destination. Why? Because it turns out that living in one of those fabled British Horror Forests that Hammer and their ilk used to portray so well, is a colony of werewolves who prey on local wildlife and the occasional trainload of passengers. When the train grinds to a halt thanks to a well-placed deer under the bogies, it's the cue for an attack on the tiny commuter train and its occupants.

Nowhere near as grim as THE SEASONING HOUSE, HOWL has been compared to John Landis' AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON and Neil Marshall's DOG SOLDIERS, but you're far better off ignoring those comparisons as HOWL is a different sort of beast (sorry) altogether. The emphasis here is on claustrophobic suspense, rather than elaborate transformation scenes, and rather than a special effect extravaganza, if you go in expecting something more akin to an late night BBC play with werewolves you won't be disappointed. 

The script fills the train with stock characters of the thinnest cardboard, but they are fleshed out nicely by seasoned actors like Shauna MacDonald and blink-and-you'll-miss-him Sean Pertwee. The werewolves themselves are a nice attempt to do something different - rather than a pack of sleek powerful killing machines there's enough variety in the designs that we get the impression of a community of differing ages and a fairly impoverished one at that. Broken Britain Werewolves? Now there's subtext for you - a horror film that features monsters echoing the British Age of Austerity. Very nice indeed.

Extras consist of a number of little featurettes detailing the making of the film and including interviews with director Hyett and the screenwriters. Each last about five minutes but there's a 'Play All' option. 

HOWL is a very decent, claustrophobic, low budget British werewolf picture. Towards the end of the film we get some shots of landscape that are as bleak and as washed out as in Hyett's previous film. At HOWL'S UK premiere I asked the director if that was how Paul Hyett sees the world. The answer was a resounding yes.

         Let's see some more horror films from this man.

Metrodome released Paul Hyett's HOWL on Region B Blu-ray and Region 2 DVD on 26th October 2015

Werewolf Rising (2014)

Horror cinema, like evolution, sometimes takes a retrograde step. As certain insects have lost their hind-pairs of wings or dolphins have returned to the sea, so this beloved genre of ours sometimes seems to be careering backwards to a time in the 1950s, when US Drive-In audiences were ‘treated’ to such Roger Corman-produced low budget fare as CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA and THE WASP WOMAN. These were movies that consisted of about an hour of nothing much happening at all, filmed in a static way with stilted dialogue and a tremendous sense of ‘Please Get ON With It’, intercut occasionally with shots of a cheap-looking monster or a girl in her underwear. They also tended to have great posters, the equivalent of which today is the eye-catching DVD box cover (see above for an example - fantastic, isn't it?)

      WEREWOLF RISING eschews the exposure of attractive female flesh (on the whole) for a nifty-looking werewolf that we get to see flashes of, but otherwise the result is much the same as all those bottom of the barrel 1950s movies, as well as much of the other product / rubbish currently in release from the Image Entertainment / RLJ stable. What you actually get for your money is a micro-budget, amateurish production with occasional flares of competence that one suspects had more spent on its advertising campaign than on the film itself. 

      Ex-alcoholic Emma (Melissa Carnell) returns to her Arkansas country shack after a period in rehab. She befriends Johnny Lee (Matt Copko) who, when he’s not sleeping on the floor next to his collection of beer cans is trying to impress her on his sit-on lawnmower. Emma’s other friend is Uncle Wayne (Brian Berry) a fat paedophile with a drink problem who brings wine to dinner and tries to get off with Emma in her kitchen, a place which seems to have been decorated by a chicken-obsessed madman. 

      A werewolf is terrorising the local area (as we’ve witnessed in the prologue). Johnny gets bitten and undergoes a CGI transformation. In what is possibly a werewolf movie first, he pays a naked visit to the laundrette afterwards to get his clothes washed.

Things reach a climax as Emma gets terrorised in her cabin and it all gets pleasingly mental and bloodstained for a bit, but by the resolution I still couldn’t work out who the werewolf we see at the beginning was meant to be.

      WEREWOLF RISING does have a few nice moments - the opening sweeping views of the forbidding, wintry landscape are excellent, and every now and then there are shots during the cabin terrorisation bits that show some nicely backlit scary werewolf shapes. On the whole, however, this is on a par with other Image releases like BLOODY HOMECOMING and THE INVOKING in terms of being, well, really not very good. While I hate to do micro-budget projects like this down, it’s difficult to find much to recommend here, and it was difficult to resist the urge to fast forward through much of its 77 minute running time. For serious werewolf completists only.

Image Entertainment are releasing WEREWOLF RISING on Region 2 DVD on the 22nd September 2014