Category: Reviews

In the wake of the success of its first Beach Party movie, released in the summer of 1963, American International Pictures greenlit two sequels in quick succession, both also directed by William Asher. The reason they’re of interest to this site is because both feature random cameos by wolfmen that have no bearing whatsoever on their plots, but that’s par for the course with these movies, which exist solely to string together six to ten musical numbers and a handful of surfing montages. While the first movie starred Robert Cummings and Dorothy Malone (as a tweedy anthropologist and his secretary), the sequels were top-billed by Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, who play the surf-crazy Frankie and his long-suffering sweetheart Dee Dee, respectively.

Always surrounded by a gaggle of beach boys and girls (some of whom were fixtures of the series, like John Ashley and Jody McCrea), Frankie and Dee Dee are far from the most harmonious couple — she’s always pushing him to improve himself and think of the future, he’s content to keep living in the moment — but they’re the closest thing these movies have to a stable relationship. They also have to weather a variety of outside antagonists, most frequently contending with oafish biker Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck) and his gang, the Rat Pack. They’re nowhere to seen in 1964’s Muscle Beach Party, though, which is fine because Frankie, Dee Dee, and their gang have enough on their plates as it is.

First there’s a group of body builders managed by gym owner Jack Fanny (Don Rickles), who moves them into the beach house next door. Another wrinkle is the Italian contessa (whose long-suffering business manager is played by Buddy Hackett) who turns Frankie’s head and threatens to break up the happy couple for good. So where does the werewolf figure in, you ask? Well, Jack Fanny has a silent partner named Mr. Strangdour (played by Peter Lorre), and he has a secretary named Igor who lacks hair on his hands, but has enough enough fuzz on his face to get my attention for the scant seconds he’s onscreen. (Igor has no lines apart from some growling, and his one action is to pick up a ringing phone and pass it over to his boss, who proceeds to pulverize it because he’s the world’s strongest man.)

Following the precedent of its predecessor (which featured Vincent Price in a minor role), the end credits tease that Lorre was “soon to return in Bikini Beach,” but that was not to be since he died just four days after Muscle Beach Party‘s spring release. In his stead, fellow horror icon Boris Karloff stepped in to play an art dealer interested in the action paintings of Big Drag (Rickles again), who owns the hangout where the gang likes to hang out when they’re not catching waves, as well as the drag strip that is the focus of the action when Frankie finds himself in competition with an insufferable British pop star called the Potato Bug (an obvious swipe at the Beatles, also played by Avalon) for Dee Dee’s affections. He’s not the only impediment to their happiness, however, as local bigwig Harvey Huntington Honeywagon III (special guest star Keenan Wynn) aims to make a monkey out of the teenage contingent that has descended on his beach community with the assistance of his trained chimp Clyde. His editorials inspire the unwanted adoration of Eric Von Zipper, though, which gives Honeywagen his first inkling that he may be on the wrong side.

Also on the wrong side, at least based on the company he keeps, is The Teenage Werewolf Monster, who appears 68 minutes in and hangs out in the background at the Rat Pack’s hangout while Von Zipper shoots pool with South Dakota Slim (Timothy Carey, who returned as the character in Beach Blanket Bingo). Decked out in a black leather jacket, having apparently graduated from high school, this Teenage Werewolf Monster even clutches a glass of milk in his paw (an oblique reference to the original), but doesn’t drink from it. And he’s conspicuously absent when the requisite brawl breaks out at Big Drag’s. Must be why he wasn’t asked to come back for the sequel.

This month’s Full Moon Feature again comes courtesy of Rifftrax, which decided one half-assed Rob Roy werewolf movie wasn’t enough for them, which I suppose is the same reasoning Roy had for following 2006’s Lycan Colony with the search-engine-challenging American Werewolf last year. Now, I understand why Roy would hold An American Werewolf in London in such high esteem — it is, after all, my favorite werewolf film and one of my favorite films, period — but borrowing part of its title for your no-budget, barely feature-length effort isn’t just asking for trouble, it’s demanding it at gunpoint with silver bullets in the chamber.

Like An American Werewolf in London, American Werewolf attempts to be a horror comedy, but unlike An American Werewolf in London, it fails miserably on both counts. Its anemic story is centered on Sam Anderson (Russell Sage Patrick), sheriff of Pengrove, Virginia (or Pinegrove — the film uses both spellings), which has been plagued by reports of mysterious animal attacks, the latest of which causes him to break his tenth anniversary dinner date with his wife, who upon getting the bad news is immediately set upon by the mysterious animal herself. Cut to ten years later, and Sam is celebrating his fourth consecutive election in spite of his failure to do anything about the animal attacks, which have continued unabated and all appear to be linked to him directly. Even his dim-witted deputy, James (Aaron Crocker), who has been dutifully covering for his frequent blackouts, has started finding it suspicious that they always seem to coincide with the attacks.

Following the murder of a community theater actress that Sam was apparently sweet on based on the one scene they have together, he and James round up “The Unusual Suspects” for a series of painfully unfunny interrogations. The first subject, a self-described “Karen,” gives an eyewitness statement that is less than helpful. (“It was dark,” she says. “It was fugly.”) The second is a nine-fingered man whose prints have been found at multiple murder scenes, which is not as damning as Sam and James make it out to be since he’s a window installer. (Later on, we get to see a commercial for his company — Indawindow Dave’s — which boasts of their “Well Hung Window Installations.” Har har.) Last up is paranormal investigator Raven Nevermore (Dale Coleman), whose “Raven’s Eye” video blog on werewolves will hardly be revelatory to anybody who’s watched more than one werewolf movie. (Roy even contradicts his own expert by having Raven state emphatically that werewolves don’t only transform during a full moon, then jumping forward 30 days to the next one for the final confrontation with the monster.)

There are other characters, including FBI agent Jordan Brewster (Whitney Richardson), who rolls into town to take over the investigation since Sam has made little headway in the decade he’s been in charge of it. She does no better when she confronts the werewolf, is bitten by it, becomes one herself, and is decapitated, which make one wonder how Sam explained that her superiors. There’s also pesky news reporter Nadia Mandy Rivera (Mandy Rivera), who is part of the spate of poorly filmed attacks that allows Roy to thin out the cast in the run-up to the denouement. (And if you think “denouement” is a bit of a highfalutin word to associate with the plot pile-up that closes American Werewolf, I won’t contradict you.) At least by the time the last few victims are being picked off, Roy has actually started showing off the werewolf suit created and worn by Chris Johnson, who also doubles as Rivera’s cameraman for whatever that’s worth.

Not content to ride An American Werewolf in London‘s coattails, Roy also apes The Howling by including a scene where Sam eats Wolf Brand Chili out of a can. And he even incorporates the Ub Iwerks cartoon The Big Bad Wolf from 1936 to eat up some of the running time. The same goes for the extended closing credits, during which Roy not only takes credit for writing and directing American Werewolf, but also the production design/art direction (which means he’s responsible for trying to pass off a private home as the sheriff’s office), cinematography, editing, sound, fight direction and choreography, visual effects, production coordination, script supervision, wardrobe, animal wrangling, and location direction (whatever that means). If wearing all those hats (and I’ve actually left a few out) results in a film like this, perhaps Roy should consider delegating a few jobs next time.

For this month’s Full Moon Feature, I’m heading to Brazil for the 2015 horror anthology As Fábulas Negras, which translates to Dark Fables or The Black Fables (the title it appears under on Tubi). The work of four directors who tackled different facets of Brazilian folklore, its most high-profile participant is José Mojica Marins, creator of the macabre character Coffin Joe, but not the director of the lone werewolf segment. That was Petter Baiestorf, but since his story comes second, we’ll circle back to it.

The overall premise is that four kids in costumes are playing in the woods, pelting each other with water balloons, until they decide to call it a day. There’s plenty of time on their trek back home to trade scary stories, though, some of which the tellers insist are based on true events. That’s the case with opener “Monster of the Sewer,” which doubles as a critique of buck-passing civil servants, none of which are willing to take responsibility for cleaning up a sewage spill that only appears to be affecting one house in an entire neighborhood. Needless to say, this one is highly scatological, but it features the film’s first monster, which looks reasonably impressive.

The same goes for the werewolf in “Pampa Feroz,” although the story it appears in is less than riveting. When one of the underlings of a character known only as The Colonel is found mutilated, the speculation is that it must be the work of a werewolf because “no human could have done this,” a claim the non-superstitious Colonel dismisses. “Whatever it is, we’re going to solve it with bullets.” When suspicion falls on a local voodoo priest, one of his men dons a ridiculous homemade suit of armor to confront the old man and winds up killing him. That doesn’t stop the werewolf attacks, though. In fact, one of the Colonel’s other men is killed that very night, which leads to reprisals and a very messy reveal of who the werewolf is. (If you guess who it is the first time the character appears, you will probably be right.)

Next up is “The Saci,” which was the nearly 80-year-old Marins’s follow-up to 2008’s Embodiment of Evil, his revival of the long-dormant Coffin Joe. Its focus is on a girl whose parents don’t believe her when she has an encounter in a bamboo grove with a Saci, which is played by a puppet. The scene where it sneaks up on a hunter is one for the ages, as is the exorcism performed by a priest played by none other than Marins. As for the last two segments, “Bloody Blonde” and “Iara’s House,” there’s not much that can be said for them, although the latter does feature a cameo by Satan, who’s played by the same actor who was the sewer monster and the werewolf. Versatile guy.

When one reaches a movie-watching milestone, one hopes the movie in question will be worthy of being memorialized in such a fashion. Well, I just watched my 200th werewolf movie and it was 2006’s no-budget shot-on-video shitfest Lycan Colony, so as Hans Landa would say, that’s a Bingo!

The work of single-minded multi-hyphenate Rob Roy — who also wrote and directed last year’s barely feature-length American Werewolf — Lycan Colony must qualify as a passion project for Roy since, according to the closing credits, he was the director of photography and makeup/creature designer, did the special effects and production design, produced the film, wrote the story/screenplay, and directed and edited it, in addition to composing three of the songs, which were performed by the Rob Roy Band, and providing additional music. So if there’s one pair of shoulders on which to lay the blame for how lousy it turned out, it’s his. And yet, remarkably, Lycan Colony is not the worst werewolf movie I have ever seen, which is the kind of perspective one can only gain by watching 200 of them.

I had the option of taking in the unedited version on Tubi or the slightly abbreviated Rifftrax cut on their YouTube channel, and opted for the latter because I knew I would need the 15 minutes I saved to pick my jaw up off the floor. Suffice it to say, this is inept in every way imaginable, and it totally justifies the following exchange:

Sandy: He’s gonna find out eventually anyway. May as well tell him.
Stewart: Tell him what?
Michael J. Nelson: Son, you’re in a movie that’s somehow worse than A Talking Cat?!?

What Sandy wants Stewart’s father, Dr. Dan, to tell him is that they had to move from Massachusetts to the small town of Canisborough, NH, because he had an oopsie in the operating room one day and was on the verge of being drummed out of the medical profession. Also, his AA sponsor Dave lives there, and the town apparently needs an unreliable surgeon on call because it’s full of werewolves, as Stewart discovers when he’s seduced by a neighbor girl who puts the bite on him in a moment of passion, thus passing on the curse of lycanthropy. How this manifests itself on Stewart is a vaguely wolfish mask, with tufts of extra fur on his back and shoulders. It is not a werewolf design that inspires much confidence, but it’s one Rob Roy wanted to take credit for, so I’m fully prepared to let him have it.

Further plot developments revolve around a brother/sister pair who come to town in search of their father, a hunter who was after some big game and became the hunted instead, but to go into much more detail runs the risk of making this sound too coherent. “So, you wanna hear about our sleepy, creepy little town, do ya?” local witch Athena asks the sister, and the expository flashback she launches into doesn’t clear up a blessed thing. As Bill Corbett says at one point, “This is like if an edible took a bong hit.” It’s also a film where Stewart is given a sedative to calm him down and Kevin Murphy quips, “Decent chance this kid’s a bad enough actor that they actually had to drug him.” Considering he shares the same last name as his director, I’d say the lack of talent runs in the family.

As we look forward to Valentine’s Day this weekend (or Horny Werewolf Day for those of us who prefer to celebrate Lupercalia), I am reminded that Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman was released on this day (in France, Belgium, Sweden, and the French-speaking region of Switzerland) in 2010. Consequently, I find myself again questioning the wisdom of the bean-counters at Universal who decided to release Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man the weekend after last month’s Wolf Moon, which means it will be limping out of theaters by the time you’re reading this. (As it is, Wolf Man came in third its opening weekend, behind Mufasa: The Lion King in its fifth weekend and One of Them Days, the other new wide release.)

Whannell’s second crack at re-imagining one of Universal’s classic monsters after 2020’s The Invisible Man (which put a high-tech spin on the concept), Wolf Man swaps out one domestic abuse story-line for another. This time, instead of a woman being targeted by her vindictive ex, the focus is on a man who was traumatized by his survivalist father as a child and has mixed emotions when the old man is officially declared dead decades later. Whannell opens the film in 1995 with a fairly intense sequence of father and son going hunting in the Oregon woods and running afoul of a mysterious beast that goes about on two legs, but isn’t Bigfoot. The captions at the beginning make plain that this a missing hiker who has caught “Hills Fever” and has taken on what the indigenous people refer to as the “Face of the Wolf,” but Whannell skips forward 30 years before revealing just how their hunting trip panned out.

Now living in New York City with a child of his own, the grown-up Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) has clear anger-management issues that he hasn’t worked through since his hair-trigger temper causes him to snap at his daughter Ginger (Maltilda Firth) and be short with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) while cooking them dinner. (He’s a writer who’s between gigs, so as a working journalist she’s the breadwinner in the family and has to hustle for good assignments from her editor.) Naturally, Blake’s solution is for the three of them to drop everything and relocate to the Beaver State for the summer so he can wind down his father’s affairs and they can bond as a family. Of course, as anybody who has seen the Wolf Man trailer can tell you, they get into an accident on the way there and Blake sustains an injury that makes him sick. In fact, one of might even say he develops a fever of sorts, which puts his family at risk. So no. No bonding this trip.

Once Blake starts undergoing his change, which happens gradually rather than all at once and does not require the presence of the full moon to progress, he develops the usual heightened senses. Whannell and co-writer Corbett Tuck change things up by periodically having the camera shift to Blake’s perspective to show how much his vision is enhanced and how little he understands human speech. As for his physical changes, those are handled by prosthetics and special make-up effects designer Arjen Tuiten, a veteran of the Stan Winston Studio. Unfortunately, Blake isn’t given time to let his hair grow out, so he’s a decidedly un-shaggy wolf man. A few fleeting glimpses of body horror aside (Blake loses his teeth and fingernails like Seth Brundle in The Fly), his final form pales in comparison with his lycanthropic forefathers’. We deserve better.

When Something Weird Video released House on Bare Mountain on DVD in 2001 as part of a “Monster Nudie Double Feature” with 1964’s Kiss Me Quick! (which features Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, and the Mummy), it came with the following warning: “This program contains nudity and really bad jokes.” (Also included: an archival short subject entitled Werewolf Bongo Party, which doesn’t even have an IMDb entry, so it may as well not exist.) While I was expecting the nudity — and not to be aroused by it in the slightest — the “jokes” in Bare Mountain are truly atrocious, with most delivered by “Lovable Bob Cresse” in voice-over like he’s tossing off the most clever bon mots imaginable.

The Lovable One was also one of Bare Mountain‘s producers (credited as David Andrew) along with Wes Bishop, who likewise used a pseudonym (Wes Don) and was the film’s original director until he blew the entire budget on the first day of shooting and was replaced by Lee Frost (credited as R.L. Frost), who chalked up an extensive CV in the exploitation arena, culminating in taking the reins of AIP’s The Thing with Two Heads, starring Ray Milland, one decade later. How much calling the shots on House on Bare Mountain prepared him for directing an Academy Award winner in the twilight of his career is debatable, but Frost keeps things moving as best he can and gets enthusiastic performances out of most of the, uhh, performers. (To call them actors would be a stretch.)

The lead, for better or worse, is Cresse as Granny Good, who runs Granny Good’s School for Good Girls, who mostly demonstrate their goodness by doffing their clothing at every opportunity and letting the camera leer at their boobs and bare behinds. That, however, is not why Granny’s narrating the film from a jail cell. (“It’s a horrible, terrifying story,” she says, overstating the case to a large degree.) Rather, it’s the illegal still in her cellar, which is operated by her faithful handyman Krakow, that has Granny Good in dutch with the authorities, who are closing in on her operation right from the start.

As for Krakow, he’s the film’s resident Wolfman, who prowls around the grounds at night, peeking in at the scantily clad girls and howling at the moon. Played by the 7’3″ William Engesser (credited as Abe Greyhound), Krakow is such an imposing figure that Granny Good has to get up on a stepladder to dress him down, threatening him with expulsion from the safe harbor she offers. “You remember the outside world, huh, sweetheart? That’s right. Silver bullets, people chasing you all over the place, stakes in the heart. It was a real bad scene, wasn’t it, sweetheart?”

There’s a worse scene to come, though, when the action shifts to the school’s annual costume ball, which is attended by Frankenstein (played by “Percy Frankenstein”) and Dracula (played by “Doris Dracula”), both of whom spike the punch. In fact, everybody gets in on spiking the punch to such an extent that the end result is more spike than punch. There’s even a guy dressed up as the Wolfman who isn’t Krakow, for maximum confusion. Granny Good gets the surprise of her life, though, when she’s cornered by a representative of the UWA (United Werewolves of America) and detained for her exploitive labor practices. Sure, Cresse and Frost give her the last laugh — an inexplicable outcome on all fronts — but anybody expecting a rational ending to a film called House on Bare Mountain is barking up the wrong tree.

There’s a moment partway through Werewolves where protagonist Dr. Wesley Marshall (Frank Grillo), a former Marine and current molecular biologist working on a cure for the condition that turns every human on the planet into a werewolf if they’re exposed to moonlight during a supermoon, is racing to his sister-in-law’s and crashes his car into a city bus that comes out of nowhere. While the argument could be made that he was distracted and wasn’t looking where he was going, the point could also be raised that this occurs well after night has fallen, so there’s no reason why any bus should still be on the road. (This one is well-lit, conspicuously empty, and doesn’t even appear to have a driver.) Marshall simply needed to be delayed and this was the reason dreamed up by screenwriter Matthew Kennedy, putting it on par with some of the nonsensical choices made by his characters.

This is a shame because the basic premise of Werewolves is solid enough that it could have sustained a Purge-like action/horror film about a man fighting to protect his dead brother’s wife and daughter from the ravenous creatures prowling around their fortified house. Alas, after setting up the defenses, including an electrified fence, a drum full of mace, bear traps, and nail boards (not to mention a dozen security cameras so they can keep tabs on what’s going on outside as long as the power doesn’t get knocked out), Marshall leaves to join his colleagues (under the direction of Lou Diamond Phillips, who doesn’t stick around long) seeking to test out an experimental “moonscreen” spray they hope will prevent the transformations. (Since all the scientists are in heavy hazmat suits with cameras on the inside so the viewer can see their faces, this is as close as you can get to ripping off Aliens without being a sequel to a movie called Werewolf.) The trouble with the formula they came up with is it wears off after an hour, at which point all hell breaks loose, forcing Marshall and lupine behavior expert Dr. Chen (Katrina Law) to hit the road, and eventually that bus.

Director Steven C. Miller (an action specialist with several latter-day Bruce Willis movies and Escape Plan 2: Hades on his CV) cuts back and forth between Marshall’s odyssey across town (with Puerto Rico subbing for Florida) and the siege at the house, where his sister-in-law Lisa (Ilfenesh Hadera) does a great job of wasting all her shotgun shells by blasting away at the hairy intruders before they even have a chance to get inside and make themselves proper targets.

And what targets they are! While the CGI transformation are as lousy as you would expect them to be, the final forms of the werewolves look terrific, and Miller gives them plenty of screen time, highlighting the care that went into the film’s practical effects, with plenty of red meat for the gore hounds. Too bad Miller also let some of Kennedy’s more egregious quips make it past the script stage, such as the moment (featured in the trailer) where Marshall gets the wolves’ attention by shouting, “Hey! Bite me.” Meanwhile, after he finally arrives at his destination, the best he can muster is “All right, you hairy motherfuckers. Come fetch.” Yeesh.

Werewolves, which came out last weekend, is still playing in some theaters. Catch it while you can. And be on the lookout for Blumhouse’s Wolf Man in January. For some reason, they’ve chosen to release that the weekend after the full moon. I don’t get it, either.

The people at Severin Films continue to do the Lord’s work — or perhaps it’s the Devil’s — with their folk horror series All the Haunts Be Ours, now on its second volume. The first yielded Wilczyca, about a Polish she-wolf bedeviling her husband. The new one, just out this month, brings with it 1975’s Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf, by Argentine filmmaker Leobardo Favio. It revolves around the superstition that a seventh son “will suck devil’s milk and be born a werewolf,” but since this doesn’t happen to the title character at birth, he gets to grow up to be a strapping young lad played by Juan José Camero. Nazareno leans into the “howling at the moon” bit every month to the amusement of his fellow villagers, but otherwise he’s in no danger of sprouting fangs and fur and going running through the woods.

That is, not until he meets and falls head over heels in love with Griselda (Marina Magali), a blond-haired beauty who catches his eye and catches him off-guard when she asks, “What does a wolf do when there’s a full moon?” That’s not a question Nazareno has ever had to seriously entertain, but he changes his tune when he meets a well-dressed stranger (Alfredo Alcón) who has a dire warning for him: Unless he rejects love, he will fall victim to the curse that’s been lying in wait for him his whole life. To sweeten the pot, the stranger offers Nazareno riches beyond his wildest imagining, telling him that “caressing the gold will cure your sadness,” but the young man decides he’d rather find out what it’s like to have a son with Griselda. First, though, he finds out firsthand (or firstpaw) what a wolf does when there’s a full moon.

In short, it gets into an altercation with a shepherd, who is killed along with four of his sheep and two of his dogs, which naturally riles up the townspeople and gets them sharpening their knives and scythes to go on a wolf hunt. Meanwhile, Griselda is distraught because her father wants to join the hunt, but Nazareno sends her a note to put her mind at ease. “They say this is punishment,” it reads. “But I think it’s blessing, you know?” Indeed, I do.

While Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf plays like a folk tale brought to life, Favio actually based it on a “famous serial radio drama” by Juan Carlos Chiappe, which was popular enough to drive audiences to the theaters in droves when it was originally released in Argentina. Now, thanks to Severin’s efforts, the audience for it will only grow from here.

It’s a rare thing to get to catch a werewolf film in its natural habitat (i.e. a movie theater), so I jumped at the chance to see this at its one local screening earlier this month. The poster trumpeted the participation of Shelley Duvall, Edward Furlong, and Dee Wallace, but The Forest Hills proved unworthy of their talents, and a pitiful swan song for Duvall, who died in July and receives an “In Loving Memory of” dedication in the closing credits. The brainchild of multi-hyphenate Scott Goldberg, the film starts off reasonably well, with Duvall’s character receiving the news that she has stage four lung cancer with a world-weary resignation — and without pausing her near-constant smoking. The trouble comes when the call goes out to her estranged son Rico (Chiko Mendez), who is the actual protagonist and is not the sort of character whose exploits one wants to follow for 70-ish minutes.

Before we know it, Duvall has exited the picture and Mendez has taken center stage, going on the war path against the werewolf he’s convinced is lurking in the woods around the farmhouse where he has set up shop, and randomly shooting friends and acquaintances with the guns he’s gotten from a fellow werewolf hunter. In fact, Rico has bagged two of them (friends, not werewolves) before the film gets around to properly introducing his best friend Billy, the kind of role that illustrates just how far Furlong’s star has fallen since he made his screen debut 33 years ago in Terminator 2.

For someone who gets top billing in the film, with his name before the title, Furlong doesn’t actually stick around very long, and a late-arriving flashback shows that Billy isn’t as much of a friend as he makes himself out to be. (Wallace, meanwhile, has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her cameo as Rico’s boss, who unceremoniously fires him from his dishwasher job.) Also in the mix is Rico’s sister, who is concerned that he’s off the meds, and a social worker who tries to get him back on them to no avail, at which point it becomes abundantly clear that Rico’s main problem is that he’s mentally ill, possibly stemming from a head trauma he sustained at a vaguely defined point in the past.

Randomly edited to the point of incoherence, with an overabundance of dream sequences, slow-motion shots, and scenes of Mendez bellowing at the top of his lungs in varying states of undress, The Forest Hills eventually starts introducing new characters and plot twists at such a rapid clip, it’s as if Goodman decided every single idea he had needed to make it into the final film, regardless of whether it fit or not. If this had been told in a straightforward fashion, it could have been a compelling portrait of a mentally unstable man driven to commit terrible deeds. It could have even been played as a black comedy, leaning into some of the more risible moments that inspired peals of laughter at my screening. As it is, it’s an incredibly shitty no-budget indie that is to be avoided at all costs. True, it occasionally throws in a cool-looking shot of a werewolf, but there are better films with cooler-looking shots of werewolves out there.

Charley Barrett is a wolf man on a mission. What that mission entails — and how he came to be cursed with lycanthropy in the first place — is a bit murky at the start of Larry Fessenden’s Blackout, but all eventually becomes clear. Emphasis on eventually.

The latest feature from the indie auteur behind Glass Eye Pix — which previously gave us the 2014 werewolf-in-a-retirement-community film Late Phases — Blackout finds Fessenden exploring territory he previously covered in his 1995 film Habit, in which he played an alcoholic on the rebound who falls into a destructive relationship with a vampire. As this films opens, alcoholic artist Charley (Alex Hurt, son of William) has severed ties with his wife and virtually everyone else in this life following a werewolf attack that Fessenden refrains from depicting in any detail until the very end. After laying low at the Talbot Falls Motel (yes, he went there) for a whole month — during which he has been obsessively filling canvas after canvas with self-portraits and images of his unfortunate victims — Charley packs up his belongings, hops in his car, and hopes to take care of some unfinished business before he reaches the end of the road, at which is a friend who has made some silver bullets for him.

That’s the plan, at least, but those have a tendency to go sideways in horror films and this one is no exception. Between telling off his father-in-law Hammond (Marshall Bell), a developer whose Hilltop Resorts has been divisive in the community, dropping off some of his late father’s papers with lawyer friend Kate (Barbara Crampton), and having an awkward reunion/farewell with his estranged wife Sharon (Addison Timlin), Charley is behind schedule enough to still be behind the wheel when night falls. As a result, he transforms while driving, a rookie mistake I haven’t seen since 1995’s Werewolf (as featured on MST3K). When he goes off the road, flipping his car in the process, a couple of passing motorists (one of whom is played by Steve Buscemi’s brother Michael) stop to see if they can help, prompting Charley to help himself to them. And then there’s the other motorist who arrives on the scene in time to be added to Charley’s roll-call of victims.

Waking up in the woods the next morning, Charley is understandably disappointed in himself, but this does give him an extra day to tie up loose ends, including picking the brain of the one man who’s seen him in his feral state and lived. “Be honest with me, man. What did you see that night?” he asks Miguel (Rigo Garay), a Mexican laborer whose succinct reply is “Hombre lobo.” Charley also accepts a ride from local pastor Francis (John Speredakos), who like everyone else sees he’s worse for wear than when he left town one month earlier, but is unable to get out of him what’s troubling him. That’s saved for his friend Earl (Motell Gyn Foster), who was expecting him the night before and is still ready to carry out his last wish. “You’re really a fucking werewolf?” Earl says. “I gotta see this shit.” Alas, their plan of Earl tying Charley to a chair, filming his transformation, and shooting him also goes awry in spectacular fashion, resulting in more death and dismemberment and a town full of easily stirred-up yahoos.

Also in the cast are such indie stalwarts as Kevin Corrigan (as one of the aforementioned yahoos), James Le Gros (as Hammond’s foreman, who’s prepared to take charge of the situation on his behalf), and Joe Swanberg (as Sharon’s new beau, who isn’t destined to stick around long). The characters the most in over their heads, though, are sheriff Luis (Joseph Castillo-Midyett) and his deputy Alice (Ella Rae Peck), whose playful banter and speculation about what they’re up against does little to prepare them for the reality when they actually confront it. “Sad to say, if you combine a wolf with a person, you’d probably get the worst of both,” Luis says. “You’d just have a vindictive asshole with big teeth and claws.” Big teeth and claws Charley definitely has, but it must be said the werewolf that bit him (not glimpsed until the flashback that closes the film) has the better overall look.