Category: Film, Television & Music

Believe it or not, there are werewolf movies other than “An American Werewolf in London”.

Werewolf Wednesday Digest – April 2012, Part 2

Hey, what do you know, it’s Werewolf Wednesday again! Put on your special bib and suck the marrow out of these bloody tidbits.

A week or two ago, I was asked to provide a Twitter signal boost for a search being undertaken to identify this handsome devil. A number of people came to our collective rescue and identified the creature as a were-hyena (or werewolf) created by Spectral Motion for an ultimately deleted scene from Blade: Trinity. Not content to leave it there, reader Nyetwerke sent in this video of Spectral staff building the suit. Fascinating stuff!

Hugh Sterbakov, Emmy-nominated and Annie Award-winning writer of Robot Chicken, has released his debut novel City Under The Moon. He was kind enough to provide me with a review copy, which I’ll be diving into during my train commutes starting next week. The opening page was enough to hook me – have a look at the sample and see for yourself. If you dig it, you can get it at a $4 discount on Amazon.

My cause of the month is coming along nicely! The Anathema Kickstarter is $6k-and-change away from its $20k goal, with a week and a half to go. I’ve pledged more money to it than I’ve spent on Werewolf News in the last year; if you haven’t pledged anything, I want you to feel bad about yourself for five seconds and then please, go chip in five or ten bucks. Remember, if the fundraising goal isn’t met, you don’t get charged.

Subterranean Press has just published a very bestial 5,600-word short story by Locus-nominated author and charming geek-dandy Hal Duncan. The title of the story is Sic Him, Hellhound! Kill! Kill! I made that link open in a new window so you can go read the story when you’re done here. Read it. It’s filthy in all the right ways.

My Werewolf Wednesday cohort David Fuller is in search of the best tune to wolf out to. Today he looks at 11 werewolf-related songs spanning a variety of genres (including a selection by yours truly), and asks you to vote for your favourite (or suggest your own). Have a listen!

Here’s some follow-up! As mentioned in the previous Werewolf Wednesday, Simon Sanchez wrote in to tell me about his comic Nazi Werewolves from Outer Space, but he neglected to provide a link. He’s now provided a link to the comic’s Facebook page, which contains purchase information and some delightfully campy samples.

And that concludes this Werewolf Wednesday! Thanks for reading!

Apr. 18th 2012

Full Moon Features: Witnessing the Rise of the Lycans

Every three years — almost like clockwork, it seems — we get another installment in the Underworld series. (Which I guess means we’re in for Underworld: Here Comes Another One come January 2015.) Keeping to that schedule, the first month of 2009 brought us a prequel, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, which temporarily set aside the present-day storyline in order to delve into the past to explore where the whole Vampire/Lycan war began.

Directed by Patrick Tatopoulos, who designed the creatures for all three films, and based on a story and screenplay that was the work of no less than five writers (including original director Len Wiseman and screenwriter Danny McBride), Rise of the Lycans tells how, well, the Lycans rose up against their vampire masters way back in the mists of time. It also doubles as the origin story for Lucian (Michael Sheen), the first Lycan, i.e. a werewolf who is able to take human form. (Much is made of the distinction between pure-blood werewolves, who are little more than savage beasts, and Lycans, who can be controlled and enslaved.)

Raised from birth by vampire leader Bill Nighy, Sheen grows up alongside Nighy’s daughter, who grows up to be the headstrong Rhona Mitra (and, not incidentally, his lover). Of course, this raises certain questions that the movie never pauses to consider. For instance, do vampire and werewolf children simply grow to a certain age and then stop? How does an immortal actually reach the point where they look middle-aged like Nighy or the other members of the vampire council? And furthermore, why am I bothered by these things if the people behind the series seemingly aren’t?

Anyway, also returning from previous installments are the impossibly deep-voiced Kevin Grevioux, who we first encounter as a human slave, and Steven Mackintosh, the vampire historian from the second film that I had completely forgotten about until I looked him up on Wikipedia. And I was happy to note that Paul Haslinger, formerly of Tangerine Dream, was brought back to provide the music. (He had scored the original Underworld but was apparently unavailable to perform those duties for Evolution.) That just leaves Kate Beckinsale out of the loop, since the events in the story take place long before she was turned (although she does provide the narration that opens the film and appears at the end courtesy of recycled footage from the first film).

Lest you think my goal is to bash this series in toto, I will say that Rise of the Lycans surprised me by being much better than I thought it would be. In fact, I’m prepared to go so far as to call it the best film in the series, which is saying something when you consider it’s basically a feature-length expansion of one of the flashbacks from the first film. And this is also in spite of the preponderance of pretentious dialogue and the monotonous blue light that every scene in bathed in, both of which are part and parcel of every Underworld movie. Some things you just can’t get away from. At least this installment, by virtue of its period settling, was able to do without all the tedious gun fights. Too bad they would be back with a vengeance when the time came to reawaken Kate Beckinsale and see if she could still fit into her shiny, black catsuit…

Apr. 5th 2012

Web Series “Wolfpack of Reseda”: Drink some True Blood while driving your Kia to your job at Initech

According to the end of the first episode of  Wolfpack of Reseda, when you’re infected with lycanthropy you immediately receive enormous feathery sideburns and a brand new Kia Soul. (more…)

Mar. 17th 2012

Simon Beaufoy still adapting “very mad, really fabulous” epic werewolf poem Sharp Teeth

io9 has a few tidbits from screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours) regarding his in-the-works film adaptation of Sharp Teeth. As reported in February, Beaufoy is preparing a screenplay version of Toby Barlow’s novel-length poem for his perennial collaborator, director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Sunshine, Slumd– oh here).

From the interview:

io9: Are you able to enjoy a book, when you’re reading a book? Or do you see a screenplay straightaway?

Simon Beaufoy: It’s quite difficult to read a book now, I took to reading poetry (because I thought that will be alright. And it’s not. I just started adapting an epic poem. So that didn’t work, called Sharp Teeth it’s a really fantastic novel length poem. It’s gangland LA. Except the gangs happen to also shapeshift into dogs. It’s all about the pack dynamics — it’s very mad, but really fabulous. So poetry wasn’t even safe from the adaptation process.

Will it be animated?

Yeah probably not, that would be too easy. We have to make life much more difficult for ourselves and use real dogs. That would be the best, because that would be truly terrifying. I think animation would allow too much distance from it.

Beaufoy doesn’t bring up much of anything new, but it’s interesting to know they’re not considering doing something animated. That’s kind of a shame – an R-rated (traditionally!) animated feature would die at the box office, but damn, wouldn’t it look good? Especially if they used the book’s cover art as a design cue!

Mar. 14th 2012

Full Moon Features: The Underworld series, Part One

He’s a life-saving surgeon, she’s a death-dealing vampire — can the two of them get along? That’s the big question posed by 2003’s Underworld. (Actually, that’s not strictly true. The real question the filmmakers probably posed was “Hey, wouldn’t it be really cool if we made a movie where vampires and werewolves fought each other with guns while there was a Romeo and Juliet thing going on?”) I gave Underworld a wide berth when it was first released nearly a decade ago, largely because the trailers I saw were chock full of CGI werewolves (my favorite kind, don’tcha know), but I finally gave in and watched it a few years later just so I could get it under my belt. (This is how I wind up watching a lot of crappy werewolf movies, and I do mean a lot.)

I realize I may be in the minority around these parts, but I’m just not that big on the Underworld franchise, which I feel squanders a theoretically unsquanderable premise by getting bogged down in its monochromatic visual palate, humorless characters, and the convoluted mythology that original director Len Wiseman cooked up with screenwriter Danny McBride and actor Kevin Grevioux. (For the record, I have a similar problem with both the UK and North American editions of Being Human, which have their moments, to be sure, but are never allowed to be as fun as a show about a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost living under the same roof should be.)

If the first Underworld movie accomplished nothing else, it introduced the world to Kate Beckinsale’s vampiric, gun-toting, catsuit-wearing Death Dealer (which is their fancy term for werewolf-killer), who becomes attached to human Scott Speedman even after he’s been bitten by a Lycan and thus fated to become one at the next full moon. The next full moon, incidentally, just so happens to coincide with The Awakening, when the vampire elite is gathering to bring one of their elders out of hibernation. In the meantime, the vampires lounge about in their mansion acting all decadent while the werewolves skulk around their underground lair playing Fight Club. When you get right down to it, the vampire/werewolf war is a class struggle on par with the Autobots vs. the Decepticons — just don’t expect me to watch Transformers anytime soon to back that up.

Anyway, I haven’t gotten to the plot yet and there sure is a lot of it. In addition to The Awakening, there’s a lot of intrigue surrounding the collusion between the leaders of the two factions, which Beckinsdale attempts to bring to light by waking vampire elder Bill Nighy a century ahead of schedule. And it turns out Speedman is the key to bridging the gap between the two races, but some people would rather see that not happen, hence all the gun battles and people throwing each other around in decrepit subterranean chambers. One has to wonder, though, whether the decision to allow the vampires in the film to be seen in mirrors was made so the filmmakers could stage the final epic battle in a large pool of water without having to worry about erasing the vampires’ reflections. Oh, yes. And what tactical advantage is there to the werewolves charging their enemies sideways on the walls? Did the filmmakers go with that simply because it looked cool? My guess would be a resounding yes.

Well, enough people got suckered into seeing the first Underworld that a sequel was inevitable, and 2006’s Underworld: Evolution was the result. The question was, had the Underworld series evolved in the intervening years? Ehh, yes and no. After a prologue set in 1202 A.D. (in which we find out that all vampires and werewolves are descended from twin brothers who were bitten by a bat and a wolf, respectively), we return to modern day where professional ass-kicker Beckinsale is on the run after having killed elder Nighy, with vampire/werewolf hybrid Speedman trotting along beside her. He’s still new to the whole “needing blood to survive” game, but there’s little time to dwell on that with supervampire Marcus (Tony Curran), who was awakened at the end of the first film, on the loose.

Once again directed by Len Wiseman from a screenplay by Danny McBride, Evolution ups the gore factor somewhat and, like the first film, shows a disappointing predilection for characters shooting each other with heavy weaponry (except, of course, for the prologue, where the vampires ride in on horseback and hack and slash at their hairy foes with swords and axes). There’s also an emphasis on cutting-edge technology, particularly in the scenes with Sir Derek Jacobi as an immortal who has been cleaning up the messes left by his progeny over the centuries. One thing that’s thankfully kept to a minimum, though, is the posturing that marred much of the dialogue in the first film, where it seemed like every other scene somebody was ordering somebody else to “Leave us.” Alas, that would return to a degree in the prequel, which expands a five-minute flashback from the first film to feature length, but that’s a story that will have to keep for another month.

Mar. 7th 2012

Full Moon Features: Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman, two years later

It’s tantalizing to think about The Wolfman that might have been. Mark Romanek’s music videos are so distinctive that it’s pretty much a guarantee that his treatment of the material would have been, too. Just take a gander at “Closer” or “The Perfect Drug” by Nine Inch Nails, or Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” or even Michael & Janet Jackson’s “Scream” and you’ll see what I mean. The man knows his way around striking — and frequently disturbing — imagery.

Once slated to be his follow-up to the well-regarded One Hour Photo (which starred the hirsute Robin Williams — how is it possible that he never made a werewolf movie? Or did his nude scenes in The Fisher King render that redundant?), Romanek’s Wolfman was scuttled when the director reached an impasse with Universal over the budget. Which is ironic considering the way it swelled from $100 to $150 million thanks to all the reshoots and retooling the film underwent after it wound up in the hands of Joe Johnston, whose experience with special effects-driven films made him, if not ideal, at least a suitable replacement. (I don’t even want to contemplate what a Brett Ratner-helmed Wolfman would have looked like.)

Even with a steady hand at the tiller, Universal did little to inspire confidence when, barely a month into principal photography, The Wolfman‘s release date was bumped from February to April 2009. Not that much of a leap, really, but that wasn’t the first time it had been pushed back. After all, the film had originally been scheduled for a November 2008 release and, in fact, would get punted around the studio’s slate several more times before ultimately landing on Valentine’s Day weekend, 2010. This put it in direct competition with the romantic comedy Valentine’s Day, which may have seemed like shrewd counter-programming on paper, but wound up hobbling its commercial prospects (which, to be perfectly frank, weren’t helped by the critical pummeling the film received once it finally limped into theaters).

One thing that definitely didn’t help matters was the decision to cut out a sizable chunk of the first hour in order to get to Lawrence Talbot’s first transformation that much sooner. Not only did this destroy the flow of the story (and completely drop Max von Sydow’s cameo as the man who gives Talbot his silver wolf’s head cane), it also inspired the studio to scrap Danny Elfman’s already-recorded orchestral score and substitute an electronic one by Paul Haslinger, which he composed in the style of his work on the Underworld series. When that proved to be a bad fit they went back to Elfman’s music, but the job of reshaping it to fit the studio cut had to be left to others since Elfman had other commitments.

When I think of how The Wolfman turned out, I can’t help but wonder how it would have fared with critics and audiences if Universal had released Johnston’s cut to theaters instead of the version they allowed to be test-marketed to death. I know when I finally got to see the director’s cut months later on DVD, I thought it was such a marked improvement across the board that even some of the things that rankled me when I saw it in theaters — like all the CGI and quick cuts in the action sequences — didn’t bother me so much the third time around. (And yes, this does means I saw it twice on the big screen. I was lucky it hung around until the end of the month so I could see it at the next full moon.)

I won’t enumerate all of the differences between the two versions, but I did like the extension of the opening sequence and that we got to see Benicio Del Toro on stage briefly. (In the theatrical cut, we had to take it on faith that he was a renowned Shakespearean actor.) And Emily Blunt coming to see him at the theater was a much stronger choice than simply having her write him a letter telling him about his missing brother. There’s also more about his gypsy mother and the villagers’ superstitious nature and so forth. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no question that these cuts were harmful to the film. Sure, an hour of screen time elapses before del Toro wolfs out, but in the director’s cut the first half of the film no longer feels rushed and the second half doesn’t seem so lumpy and misshapen. Maybe if it had been left alone, the film would have done well enough at the box office to merit a direct sequel following Hugo Weaving’s Inspector Aberline as he comes to terms with his own lycanthropy problem (a prospect clearly set up in the film’s closing moments). As it is, we’re left with the reboot Universal supposedly has in the works. If only they’d gone to the trouble of getting the first film right, that wouldn’t have been necessary.

Feb. 7th 2012

So, this is happening: “FDR American Badass” trailer – Franklin Roosevelt kicking werewolf ass

Did you watch it? Did you watch that trailer all the way through? Did you find anything in it that wasn’t

  1. Amazing?
  2. Hilarious?
  3. So dumb it was great?

Here’s a snippet from the Huffington Post writeup:

The new film from director Garrett Brawith stars Barry Bostwick as a raunchy version of the four-term president who contracted polio from a bite from a Nazi werewolf. As it turns out, Hitler and Mussolini are werewolves, too, which sets Roosevelt and his allies on a wild mission to defeat them using any means necessary.

I know the werewolves are the villains in this thing, but come on, a foul-mouthed FDR played by the guy who was Rocky Horror‘s Brad Majors? It even stars Kevin Sorbo as Lincoln. There’s no release date yet (not even an official web site or Facebook page either), but I hope it comes out soon. Real soon.

Jan. 18th 2012

Has fan-driven werewolf film “Freeborn” been resurrected?

It’s been dormant for years, but it looks like Anthony Brownrigg‘s fan-driven werewolf film Freeborn is getting back on track. A video announcing the project’s resurrection has surfaced, with what looks like a little bit of new footage.

It makes sense that a film with a fan-influenced script would solicit funding from those same fans. There’s no specific IndieGoGo link for the project yet, but the crowdsource-funding site’s prominent presence in the video and the mention of a February 1st “launch” on the film’s Facebook page would indicate an upcoming campaign to get things moving again. For more info, keep an eye on The Pack’s Den, the forum where many of the film’s supporters (including Brownrigg) gather.

“The Pack” seems to be comprised largely of fans who like their werewolves to look mystical/majestic, rather than monstrous (and who yell at me here and on Twitter for preferring the latter), but I am cautiously optimistic. A werewolf film with this much community input could be terrific.

No word on how much money needs to be raised or if anything they’ve already shot will be used.

Jan. 16th 2012

Has anyone seen Italian werewolf film “Versipellis”?

See if you can guess what Versipellis is about from the trailer alone. I see some pained expressions, a giant placenta (?), some nicely-done transformation shots involving lots of teeth, a detective who seems to spend a lot of time wandering around on his own or writhing at his desk, and a few glimpses of a classic werewolf.

Okay, now here’s the IMDB synopsis, provided by “Anonymous”:

Giulio and Francesco Ferretti are two young twins, with a harsh childhood. They lived among scary and twisted folks’ beliefs. Because of a too apprehensive and catholic mother, an absent father and a mysterious physical anomaly, Giulio, the most quiet between the two brothers, heads away from his family, having no desire of being in touch with the rest of the world. Francesco seems to suffer Giulio’s departure and becomes nervous and unbearable . It’s a radical changing in their lives, that gets worse because of the discovering of a secret involving their birth, a secret that leads the twins to confront themselves with the darkest human side. A secret that seems related to the murders commissioner Vanni is trying to solve. It’s something that link Giulio and Francesco to the legend of VERSIPELLIS. While Vanny is searching for the truth in the streets of a dark Rome, the two brothers start hunting for each others…

Okay, yeah, I would watch that – the trailer looks solid! Give me some English subtitles and I’m good to go. Have any Werewolf News readers seen this film, and if so, what’d you think?

Thanks to reader Reepicheep for submitting the trailer and IMDB link!

Jan. 13th 2012

“The Devil Inside” team’s next project: faux found footage werewolf film

Bloody Disgusting has turned up some exclusive news on the next project to be undertaken by the creative team behind recent critical flop / box office hit The Devil Inside. Director William Brent Bell and writer / producer Matthew Peterman have collaborated on the script for an as-of-yet unnamed werewolf film, also to be assembled from “found footage” like Devil. According to Bloody Disgusting, the film will be about someone who turns into a werewolf while being held in police custody.

Some halfway decent werewolf special effects shown through deliberately lo-fi faux found footage could make for some great visuals, but as we’ve seen time and time again, great visuals don’t make up for a wretched story. I haven’t seen The Devil Inside (and most likely never will, since pretty much everything about it falls outside the scope of my interest), but the box office numbers being what they are in the face of such negative mainstream reviews indicates that the film has found an audience somewhere. Horror fans, maybe? I’d like to hear what Werewolf News readers thought about the film.

As for this new “werewolf in jail” film, I’m thinking: alternate version of the Monster Squad wolfman’s story? Come on, someone get Jon Gries on the phone.

Jan. 12th 2012