It’s the holiday season and things are getting weird in the world of werewolves. Here are a few short pieces to chew on while you wait for your buddy Krampus to show up.
The upcoming PS4 game “The Order: 1886” features “lycans” as a staple villain. Here’s a short video of actual gameplay involving one of the protagonists engaging in a knife fight with a lycan. The lycan’s design is still impressive, but it would have been nice to see the creature doing more than a few perfunctory melee attacks and stumbles in the dark. And what’s with the constant fade-outs?
This trailer for upcoming Tamil action/romance film “I” has all the colour the previous video lacked. It’s also almost totally incomprehensible to me because I don’t speak Tamil and my brain’s not calibrated for this kind of filmmaking, but with over 3.6 million views, it’s clearly hitting the mark with its Indian audience. This article from the Hindustan Times attempts to explain it better than I, but here’s the gist: it took nearly three years to film, features creature effects by WETA, and involves bodybuilders, colourful musical numbers and a “Beauty and the Beast” scenario involving werewolf-like transformations.
Warner has re-released mid-90’s werewolf film “Bad Moon” on DVD as part of their minimalist, made-on-demand Archive Collection. I’d never heard of the Archive Collection before, but it seems like a reasonable attempt by Warner to provide legal access to esoteric or previously out of print films. Upon purchase, the film is burned to a DVD-R from the highest-quality source available, and arrives in the mail within a day or two. This sounds like a good choice for some hard to find titles, but given the weird format and the lack of extras, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t just buy the standard Bad Moon DVD instead. It doesn’t have any extras either, but it’s more likely to play properly on that PlayStation 2 in your rec room.
Lastly, Amazon temporarily pulled Graeme Reynold’s werewolf novel “High Moor 2: Moonstruck” after 18 months because it contained too many of the wrong kind of hyphen. This got a surprising amount of coverage, appearing on Gizmodo and even Slashdot (which is the last place I ever imagined I’d see a werewolf transformation being quoted). A reader recently registered a complaint with Amazon over the number of hyphenated words in the ebook, but according to Reynolds, only approximately 100 of the 90,000 words in the professionally edited novel were hyphenated. That sounds like a reasonable number to me, but as has been pointed out, Reynolds used the minus sign (or possibly the “–” emdash) instead of the standard hyphen character, which can cause layout and screenreader problems. Whatever the cause, Amazon has since relented and put the book back up.