Category: Film, Television & Music

The Sci-Fi Channel rebranded itself Syfy in the summer of 2009, making that year’s Wolvesbayne the first official werewolf-centric “Syfy Original Movie.” I went into it hoping for the best, which I’ve always found to be preferable to the alternative, but alas, Wolvesbayne is a sorry slice of sub-Underworld schlock with a convoluted plot about a rogue vampire clan collecting magical trinkets to resurrect their queen and a newly minted werewolf who’s recruited to help stop them.

A puffy-faced Jeremy London stars as Russell Bayne, a slimy real estate developer (is there any other kind?) who’s rebuffed by occult book store owner Christy Romano (the lone holdout holding up a major property deal), but has bigger problems to contend with when he is attacked by a werewolf and survives. Soon he’s dreaming about transforming into a hairy beast, waking up covered in blood and finding animal carcasses in his house, and looking up information on “WEREWOLVE” on the popular Internet search site BooYah! And screenwriter Leigh Scott (the auteur behind The Beast of Bray Road) leaves no cliché unturned since he also includes the requisite moment where London discovers that he has super-sensitive hearing. Before he can get too bogged down in the bewildering changes he’s going through, though, he’s rescued from two hot vampire chicks by Romano, who also turns out to be a werewolf because why the hell not?

From there, London finds himself caught between the vampires (headed up by clan leader Mark Dacascos, who amply illustrates the difficulty of speaking intelligibly with fangs) and the slayers (led by Rhett Giles as Jacob Van Helsing because of course he’s a Van Helsing) who keep them at bay. Director Griff Furst does them no favors, though, by intercutting their first fight scene with two other, unrelated melees. And he also does little to restrain Yancy Butler, who devours scenery left and right as vampire queen Lilith, who turns out not to be that much of a threat, really. Sure, she was planning to blot out the sun so vampires could take over the world, but I never believed for one second that she was going to pull that off. As for London, by the time he masters the ability to wolf out, he looks silly enough that he probably should have just stayed hairy on the inside.

Things didn’t improve much the following year when Syfy unveiled Red: Werewolf Hunter, which somehow managed the trick of being a knockoff of Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters years before that even existed. As the film opens, federal agent Felicia Day is bringing jerky fiancé Kavan Smith (also a federal agent) home to meet her family — headed up by wise, all-knowing grandmother Rosemary Dunsmore — for the first time and let him in on the family secret — namely, that they hunt werewolves. Smith barely has time to process this before he’s bitten by a particularly nasty customer named Gabriel (Stephen McHattie) who is able to “phase at will,” but he’s able to keep this a secret long enough to put Day and her family in danger.

Between action beats, writer Brook Durham gives smartass younger brother David Reale (who comes across as vaguely B.J. Novakish) a hair more complexity than older sibling Greg Bryk, but Durham’s least compelling contribution to werewolf lore has to be the notion that they burst into flame when they’re killed. (Really? That’s your choice? What were your other options?) Also, while I was expecting the transformations to be computer-assisted (this is a Syfy Original Movie, after all), the fact that the werewolves are completely digital creations was a major letdown to me. I guess director Sheldon Wilson couldn’t be bothered to have an actual werewolf suit made. (Even a guy in a crappy werewolf suit — like the ones on display in The Beast of Bray Road or Never Cry Werewolf — would have been preferable to the rail-thin, virtually weightless creatures in Red: Werewolf Hunter. Ish.)

Next Up: The embattled Summer of Syfy reaches its conclusion by going to the dogs…

From the first time I heard about the Canadian direct-to-video horror movie Never Cry Werewolf (which premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel in 2008), I knew it was one that I was eventually going to get around to seeing. I just had no idea that I had essentially already seen it, only with a different supernatural monster.

Directed by Brenton Spencer and written by John Sheppard, Never Cry Werewolf owes a huge (and completely unacknowledged) debt to Tom Holland’s 1985 film Fright Night. That film (which received the official remake treatment in 2011) was about a teenage boy who can’t make anyone believe him when a vampire moves in next door. In this film the teenager is a girl and the new neighbor is a werewolf, but otherwise the parallels are unmistakable. There’s even a washed-up television star (played by Roddy McDowell in the original Fright Night and here by Kevin Sorbo) in both that the hero goes to for help. The main difference between them is McDowell is a horror movie host who comes through in the clinch and Sorbo is a self-involved hunter/sportsman who actually gets treed at one point. (No one could ever accuse Sorbo of not having a sense of humor about himself.)

Anyway, enough about Fright Night. What about Never Cry Werewolf? Well, it kicks off with an attack on a registered sex offender (never let it be said that werewolves are too picky about the class of their victims), after which we start to get to know our protagonists. The girl (Nina Dobrev) is a vegetarian who believes something is up almost right away when she finds out their hunky new neighbor (Peter Stebbings) has hair on his palms. Her younger brother (Spencer Van Wyck) is impressed by his Harley, though, and starts hanging out over at his place, helping him with his remodeling. (I’m guessing the sex offender scene may have been added to deflect any speculation that anything else was going on between them.) The other major character is the dorky guy played by Sean O’Neill, who has a huge crush on Dobrev and gets turned into a werewolf by Stebbings in much the same way that the best friend in Fright Night gets corrupted. (Okay, that’s the last Fright Night reference, I promise.)

The lack of originality on display in Never Cry Werewolf would be bad enough, but it’s fairly cheesy to boot. The special effects aren’t very special and the werewolf is mostly shown in extreme closeups or long shots because of how fake it looks when we finally do get a good look at it. It’s also very telling that the big transformation takes place entirely offscreen. Still, it’s amusing that the film makes up its own mythology and then tries to pass it off as common knowledge. (Werewolves travel with demon familiars that take the form of big, black dogs? Really?) The most overwrought part of the story, though, is Stebbings’s belief that Dobrev is the reincarnation of his long lost love, Melissa (who looks like Alyssa Milano in the picture that he carries around with him). Too bad that’s also something that this movie cribbed from Fright Night. (Sorry, couldn’t help myself.) In the end, the best way not to cry werewolf is not to watch it in the first place.

Next Up: A Syfy double feature that’ll have you seeing red and bayin’ at the moon…

I didn’t have very high expectations going into 2007’s Hybrid — after all, the TV movie was pretty much tailor-made for Syfy — but for a story about a guy who receives an experimental eye transplant from a wolf and then starts acting kinda wolfy, it’s remarkably tame. Directed by Yelena Lanskaya from a script by Arne Olsen — whose previous credits include Red Scorpion (which rather infamously was co-conceived and produced by Jack Abramoff), Cop and a Half, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie and All Dogs Go to Heaven 2 — Hybrid gives us perfunctory (at best) introductions to its main characters before plunging them into a faintly ridiculous story that everybody on screen takes way more seriously than anybody watching will be able to.

At the Olaris Institute in Winnipeg, Manitoba, research scientist Justine Bateman is working on the problem of inter-species eye transplants and finds the perfect human guinea pig in heroic security guard Cory Monteith, who loses his sight while saving a dumbass coworker. Meanwhile, Native American teacher Tinsel Korey banters playfully with tribal medicine man Gordon Tootoosis and rescues an injured wolf that rather conveniently gets passed along to Bateman’s research lab. Monteith’s operation is a success, but it comes with some side effects both expected (night vision, which is never referenced again after it is briefly demonstrated) and unexpected (enhanced hearing, strength and agility, as well as vivid flashbacks to the donor wolf’s memories). It also prompts to Korey to break into Olaris to confront Bateman about the innocent wolf that had to give its life so Monteith could spend the rest of the movie wearing yellow contact lenses, but Korey is thrown out before she can make her case. Fortunately, she immediately runs into Monteith and helps him escape, leading to an oddly choreographed bar fight and Monteith’s discovery that he’s a natural conga drummer. His further nocturnal adventures include going out shirtless, running with a group of stray dogs, and winding up at the zoo where he hangs around the wolf enclosure and nearly mauls a guard. There he’s found by Korey and his partner, Brandon Jay McLaren, who lets them crash at his apartment, which is then crashed by a security detail from Olaris under orders from Bateman’s G. Gordon Liddy-like superior, William MacDonald.

From there things spiral even further into absurdity, with Monteith making a dramatic escape from Olaris, doing the nasty with Korey, and being sent on a spirit quest by Tootoosis. The latter sequence is cross-cut with MacDonald and his crew gearing up and heading out to the woods where they patiently stalk Monteith (having been warned that “This is not an ordinary man that you’re going up against”) and then blindly spray automatic weapon fire at anything that moves. Bateman also shows up, having found time to Google “lycanthropes” for the benefit of those in the audience who need to have the concept of clinical lycanthropy explained to them, but Monteith gets the strongest assist from his lupine pals, who help him dispatch all the bad men with the loud guns. He then gets to run off into the sunset with them, which is just about the corniest ending I could ever imagine for a movie about a guy with wolf eyes, but there you have it. Hybrid may be 90 minutes that you’ll never get back again, but what were you planning on doing with them anyway? Restoring eyesight to the blind?

Next Up: Syfy demonstrates why you should never cry werewolf…