Category: Film, Television & Music

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

Making a Monster Movie? You Need The United Monster Talent Agency

Even if you don’t recognize his name, you’ve probably seen Greg Nicotero‘s handiwork. He helped form KNB Efx Group in the 80’s and his creature & gore special effects have been seen in films like Cursed, Splice, Grindhouse, The Mist, Predators and most recently, AMC’s The Walking Dead. Werewolf News reader Viergacht sent me a link to an awesome little short film Nicotero directed last October: The United Monster Talent Agency.

“What if classic monster weren’t special effects but real, (sort-of) trained critters?” writes Viergacht. “A short by special fx artist Greg Nicotero… which includes an out-of-control Wolf Man tearing up the set and getting shot with a tranq!” Watch it below, and keep an eye out for cameos by Eli Roth, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Darabont.

That’s an industry I could work in! If you’re interested in reading about how Nicotero put this together, Shock Till You Drop interviewed him in October– it’s worth a read!

Feb. 4th 2011

Low-Budget Werewolf Western “Man Without a Saddle” Could Use Your Help

Actor / director / screenwriter Ron Ford has a ranch, some horses, horror-filmmaking experience and a hankering to combine the sweet chocolate of the Western film genre with the smooth peanutty goodness of werewolves. Chew on this:

MAN WITHOUT A SADDLE is based on Kipling’s classic story, Mark of the Beast, transferred from colonial India to the American west of 1870. Three ex-Army regulars, Strickland, Fleete and Barton, are hired to convince a Shoshone shaman to move on to the reservation. The shaman, Tanupah, guards a stone petroglyph, sacred to his people. Fleete, in a drunken fit, urinates on the petroglyph and dishonors its spirit. In retaliation, he is cursed by Tanupah, turning him into a raging creature, half man, half wolf.

This project has everything it needs to get off the ground except one crucial ingredient: $3,000 for authentic Western period costumes. To help raise that modest sum, Ford has put together a Kickstarter page with a thorough overview of the project, including a frankly endearing video appeal that contains 1) cowboy hats, 2) werewolf makeup effects by actor / makeup man Mitch Tiner and 3) nearly two minutes of blackness at the end that should probably be removed.

If you want to help out, you can pledge as little as a dollar to be listed in the film’s credits, or $20 to receive a DVD copy of the finished film. If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, just know that by “backing” the project, you commit to having your pledge amount charged to your credit card on April 18th 2011 only if the total pledges reach the $3,000 goal.

Crowdsourcing stuff like this is one of the many things that make the Internet awesome (maybe So Falls the Shadow should try this approach out), so if you have an extra buck, you could do worse things with it than pledge it to a Werewolf Cowboy Hat fund.

Werewolf Cowboy Hat-tip: ArcLight

Jan. 31st 2011

Rick Baker & Dave Elsey’s “Wolfman” Makeup Nominated for an Academy Award

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced the nominees for the 83rd Academy Awards, and I’m supremely pleased to see Rick Baker and Dave Elsey nominated in the Makeup category for their work on “The Wolfman“. They’re up against “Barney’s Version” and “The Way Back“, both of which I will glibly dismiss as contenders for this category because I haven’t seen them, and because come on it’s The Wolfman! This is Baker’s second Oscar nomination for werewolf makeup effects – he won the first Academy Award for Makeup in 1982 for his groundbreaking work on “An American Werewolf in London“. You can watch Baker and Elsey collect their hardware (and hopefully see The Social Network sweep everything else) on Sunday, February 27th.

Here’s a gallery of Baker and Elsey doing the work they were nominated for: transforming Benicio del Toro into the eponymous lycanthrope.

Jan. 25th 2011

Second Trailer for “Little Red Riding Hood” Reduces the Twilight Influence, Increases The Gary Oldman Factor

Werewolf News reader B. Dorr mentioned in a recent comment that a second trailer for the new Little Red Riding Hood film had been released, and that this version “has taken that ‘Twilight’ sense out of it that we’ve noted in the first trailer.” The first trailer was packed with all the extra dreamy lighting and dramatic hair director Catherine Hardwicke had left over from her earlier endeavor, but I will admit that this second cut makes the film look a little less like a mom-fest. Of course, now it just looks like a confused mess. The Nine Inch Nails remix in the background doesn’t really sit well with the period-piece setting, does it? And until Amanda Seyfried says something about going to Grandmother’s house, I’d actually forgotten that this was supposed to be a re-telling of the classic European story we all know from childhood. Leave it to Gary Oldman to save the day– his voiceover throughout the trailer is bad-ass.

Still not feeling this one, friends, although I’d love for it to surprise me. What do you think?

Jan. 22nd 2011

First photo of the eponymous werewolf from “Big Bad”

1313FX’s Tom Devlin recently had a brief chat with Dread Central (you guys! always getting the exclusives!) about his creature work on the upcoming upcoming horror/dark comedy film “Big Bad”. There’s also a longer, rather interesting discussion with producer Rick Moore about the film’s story (three kids locked in an abandoned prison overnight are stalked by something sinister), its production ethos (Monster Squad, The Goonies and Gremlins are mentioned) and the production’s approach to the creature effects:

“You read a lot about some filmmakers who don’t like CGI and want to do everything old school and also those who swear by the freedom that computer-assisted effects give you. We are actually firmly in the middle. We knew from the beginning we wanted a detailed, scary monster on set – one that could emote and perform everything written in the script. 1313FX and Brad Bishop completely delivered on this front. For some more complex scenes we may duplicate parts of the monster or enhance a set in order to achieve a certain shot that would have been too difficult or expensive under our time and budget restraints.”

The Dread Central article is accompanied by a number of in-progress makeup photos and an image of the film’s poster, but the one photo I think you’ll be most interested in doesn’t seem to be there anymore, despite Horror-Movies.ca posting it and crediting Dread Central as the source. Weird. Anyway, the photo I’m referring to is of the werewolf creature effects. Check it out below.

I’m not going to lie to you, Marge. I like it. There are definitely some things I would do differently with the creature design (somebody get this werewolf some Dream Cream), but damn if he isn’t rather scary. And check those abs!

Read the Dread Central article or visit the official “Big Bad” Facebook page for more info.

Hat tip: ArcLight

Jan. 20th 2011

Lucía, Luis & The Wolf – Nightmarish stop-motion shorts from Chile’s Diluvio

Viergacht sent me links to these videos earlier in the month, and I only got around to watching them this morning. They’ve been with me all day. I can’t explain them, other than to say they freak out the part of my brain that makes it so I can’t play Silent Hill games.

Lucía (2007) by Cristóbal León, Joaquin Cociña, Niles Atallah
Lucía is the 1st short video of the series “Lucía, Luis y el lobo” (“Lucía, Luis and the Wolf”). The video was shot frame by frame with a digital photo camera. Materials: charcoal, dirt, flowers, found objects and cardboard.

Luis (2008) by Cristóbal León, Joaquin Cociña, Niles Atallah
Luis is the 2nd short video of the series “Lucía, Luis y el lobo” (”Lucía, Luis and the Wolf”), it is a follow-up to the short video Lucía. The video was shot frame by frame with a digital photo camera. Materials: charcoal, dirt, flowers, found objects and cardboard.

These are the work of Diluvio, a film production company in Santiago, Chile.

Nov. 18th 2010

Official Trailer makes “Red Riding Hood” look like “Twilight” because of course it does

The trailer for 2011’s Red Riding Hood was just released, and from the look of things, director Catherine Hardwicke is still in denial over not being asked back to direct more Twilight films. See for yourself:

A gaunt, poofy-haired male lead swanning about a forest full of sunbeams with his virginal, angelic female counterpart? Hmmm. Hmmmmm. As excited as I am to hear Gary Oldman say the word “werewolf”, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

Nov. 17th 2010

The Wretched, Awful Trailer for MTV’s Wretched, Awful “Teen Wolf” Remake

Hopes: dashed. This looks like an after-school special with a big effects budget. The producers in charge of this should be fired, first from their jobs, then from a big cannon pointed into a volcano. Good job, MTV: obtain the rights to a quirky 80’s cult film, then replace all of the character, charm and originality with “drama” so lame and predictable it would’ve been cut from The Gates. Oh no, Scott’s got a date with a hot girl on the same night as the full moon! What’s gonna happen? Frankly, MTV, I don’t give a shit, and neither will anyone else.

Viacom is going around DMCAing this trailer wherever it pops up, so if this embedded version doesn’t work, sorry. Or… you’re welcome?

Special shout-out to the special effects crew who worked on this: thanks for the effort. Your work (what little I could see of it in this trailer) looks like the one redeeming feature of this abomination.

Hat tip: manny

Nov. 16th 2010

French Canadian werewolf film “Le poil de la bête” (The Hair of the Beast) looks awesome

Every now and then I see something werewolf-related that makes me giddy. This is one of them. I’ve only seen a trailer and a poster for “Le poil de la bête” (The Hair of the Beast) and already I’m in love. The problem is, everything to do with the movie is in French, and I’m one of those Canadians who didn’t pay attention during high school French. Here’s what I’ve put together thanks to Google Translate and the film’s IMDB page: It’s 1665 and scruffy con-man / swindler Joseph Côté manages to escape a Québec (née New France) prison mere hours before he’s scheduled to be hanged. He flees to the seigneury of Beaufort, where the main activity is waiting for “Daughters of the King”– French women who’ve been sent to Canada to find husbands. To avoid capture by the colonial soldiers searching for him, Côté assumes the identity of a Jesuit priest who, unbeknownst to him, is a famed hunter of werewolves. And wouldn’t you know it! Beaufort has a werewolf problem.

It’s Canadian, it’s photographed well, it’s a period piece and it has a werewolf that looks great (from what I could see). This particular mix of ingredients has got me excited! It’s been out for a month in Québec, but I’m not sure if / when / how us Anglos will get a chance to see it. In the meantime, here’s a trailer (love that hand transformation) and a poster. There are more clips and images available at www.lepoildelabete.com. If any French readers (I know there are a few of you out there) learn anything about a larger release on that site, please let us know.

Hat tip: Roger Flavell

Oct. 31st 2010

Standard Thompson music video “Fireworks”: female werewolves want more than a daisy on the first date

[insert lame joke about “dinner and a date” here]

Lovely cinematography and good solid rock music by a group of guys who all look like they call their mothers at least once a week. I wish they would have shown more than a glimpse of the werewolf costume, though. It looked pretty good, at least from the shoulders up.

Hat tip: lessthanhuman

Oct. 31st 2010