Werewolf links, news, and reviews
Believe it or not, there are werewolf movies other than “An American Werewolf in London”.
Shock Till You Drop has some great scans from the promo booklet for an upcoming Spanish horror/comedy, Game of Werewolves. I don’t want Werewolf News to be one of those sites that copy-pastes all the juice from another site’s articles, so I’m going to post two photos and the teaser trailer. Check them out, then go see the rest at STYD!
You might also want to have a look at the film’s official web site, which has more video and a weekly production blog.
Yes, that’s a lot of werewolves at once!
From a Movieline article about Universal’s COO & President Ron Meyer speaking at the Savannah Film Festival:
Universal’s biggest recent disappointment? The Wolfman.
“We make a lot of shitty movies,” Meyer admitted. “Every one of them breaks my heart.”“We set out to make good ones. One of the worst movies we ever made was Wolfman.Wolfman and Babe 2 are two of the shittiest movies we put out, but by the same token we made movies we believe in. We did United 93, which is one of the movies I’m most proud of.”
A little later in the interview, Wolfman producer Stratton Leopold ambles over from his “family-run ice cream shop across the street” (I swear I’m not making this up) to contribute his two cents.
Meyer, good naturedly: “It’s one of those movies, the moment I saw it I thought, ‘What have we all done here?’ That movie was crappy.”
Leopold: “I said the same thing before the reshoot. I said, ‘Why are we spending all of this? Let’s shoot two scenes to create some sympathy for the [hero] and that’s it,’ but…”
Meyer: “We all went wrong. It was one of those things… like I said, we make a lot of bad movies. That’s one we should have smelled out a long time ago. It was wrong. The script never got right…”
Leopold: “The cast -”
Meyer: “—was awful. The director was wrong. Benicio [del Toro] stunk. It all stunk.”
The board of directors at NBCUniversal need to hand these two gormless, spineless motherfuckers their walking papers on the double. These guys contributed directly to the mis-management of an A-list film that subsequently flops, then they casually shit all over the cast and crew they let down with their miserable leadership. What a great way to inspire the people working for you – and cultivate a loyal audience.
You can read the entire interview on Movieline if you want – Meyer’s reasons for getting into the film industry are oh so noble – but I’m going to go look at pictures of Rick Baker holding his Oscar.
photo: WireImage
Inter-species war? A werewolf-vampire hybrid? “Lycans” in the sewer? Black PVC and improbable acrobatics? I’m worried that the Underworld franchise is starting to edge into self-parody. Kate looks like she’s having fun, though. Plus, that giant guy could make for an interesting mini-boss, as long as he avoids falling helicopters (insert slide-whistle sound here).
And on an evening where the streets are crawling with werewolves and ladies in vinyl “sexy fill-in-the-blank” Leg Avenue costumes! This looks really silly but also delightfully self-aware. Plus, dang, that Robert Englund!
From last night’s Community episode, “Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps”.
“Teach me to read?” “Awww!”
Also, in case NBC kills the video, here are some animated GIFs of the scene you came to this post to see (thanks to drain-the-blood for posting and @Salome for pointing these out).
Academic, writer, publisher, friend and fellow werewolf enthusiast Dr. Hannah Priest has a terrific post up on her blog, She-Wolf, in which a number of contributors (including your humble servant) make a case for our favourite female werewolves. Hannah’s the authority on lady lycanthropes, so the results of this poll will be canonical – we’ll be logging the results with the Library of Congress and Wolfram Alpha.
The nominees are:
I nominated Brigitte Fitzgerald, but she’s up against some pretty tough company. Read through each contributor’s analysis and post your vote (or write in your own) on the She-Wolf blog, then come back here and defend your choice (unless you picked Brigitte).
Via Frank Jacobs’ Strange Maps segment of Big Think comes this image of “a relatively rare poster for An American Werewolf in London, arguably the best horror/comic film ever made”. Arguably the best werewolf film ever made, Frank. He posted this under the title of ‘Lycanthropography‘, a very specific word which I nonetheless feel needs to be used more often.
2002’s Dog Soliders is one of those polarizing werewolf movies – either you love it or you’re not a real person. Murmurs of a sequel called Fresh Meat faded back in 2006, but now Kismet Entertainment has plans to bring our super-tall, super-skinny werewolf friends back to the screen. Two plans, actually: a web series called Dog Soliders: Legacy, and an as-of-yet untitled full-length sequel. No release dates have been announced for either, although Kismet has released a trailer for Legacy (somewhat confusingly titled Red) and a handful of promotional stills. I’m kind of on the fence about the trailer, but come on… more Dog Soliders! Additional details will presumably appear on Kismet’s site as they become available.
Hat-tip: ArcLight
Digging through some marked-as-read emails, I found that I’d missed an email from reader Byron Dunn, who shared this Badass Digest article about An American Werewolf in London‘s 30th anniversary. Click the link, friends, and gaze upon the wonders contributed by Beware The Moon director Paul Davis: never-before-seen-storyboards of David’s first werewolf transformation, by concept artist John Bruno. Here’s one frame, showing David’s muzzle – click through to the article to see the rest!
If you haven’t seen this already, scroll down and watch it. Go. Now. If you have seen it, holy shit, right?
Holy shit.
Director Julien Mokrani and an extraordinarily talented cast and crew have created what I think we all have to agree is the definitive motion-picture version of Ben Templesmith’s comic series Welcome to Hoxford – or the first part of it, anyway.
Hoxford isn’t Mokrani’s first fan film labour of love – he and writer / producer Samuel Bodin spent two years working on Batman: Ashes to Ashes, a $15,000 tribute to Batman’s quasi-vampiric nature. On the strength of that project, Mokrani and Bodin were able to entice actors Jason Flemyng (X-Men: First Class, Hanna, Snatch), Arben Bajraktaraj (Harry Potter – Order of the Phoenix and the Deathly Hallows) and Dexter Fletcher (Kick-Ass, Band of Brothers, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), plus director of photography Thierry Arbogast (The Fifth Element, Leon: The Professional, La Femme Nikita) and special effects makeup artist Jean-Christophe Spadaccini (The Bourne Identity, The City of Lost Children).
And why in the world would Mokrani and his colleagues invest their time, energy and money in a film that will never make a legal dime? “Welcome to Hoxford ran around in my head for over a year”, Mokrani says. “One day it was too much, I had to make it!”
Despite his passion and skill, he wasn’t able to get official sanction from Hoxford creator Ben Templesmith, who said he’d enjoyed Ashes to Ashes but was contractually obliged to avoid even thinking about talking about the idea of considering having anything to do with a fan-made Hoxford film – presumably because the rights are currently managed by Circle of Confusion, who Mokrani says are only interested in talking to major studios. Circle, come on. Quit fucking around and let Mokrani and company have a stab an official Welcome to Hoxford film – if this 20-minute production is any indication, they’ll treat it right.
You can see production stills and a whole lot more at welcometohoxford-thefanfilm.com. I’ll just stay here and watch Warden Baker eat that… “steak”… over and over. Somehow I can’t look away.