Werewolf links, news, and reviews
Believe it or not, there are werewolf movies other than “An American Werewolf in London”.
Here’s the official video for “OMAR K” by Rainbow Arabia. A mother and daughter turn into werewolves in a supermarket and wreak havoc. There are tomahawks. Wine is consumed. The werewolves just look like two people with slapdash John Lennon costumes. The music is a weird mix of tribal dance and yelping vocals. It’s the strangest thing I’ve seen all year, and I couldn’t look away.
Can someone interpret this for me? I liked it, but I don’t know why.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision blog reports that the cast for “The Girl in the Red Riding Hood” just got a lot cooler. The Warner Bros. film is a gothic re-imagining of the Red Riding Hood story, and word is that Max Irons (son of Jeremy Irons), Amanda Seyfried, Julie Christie (!) and Gary Oldman (!!!) are all involved. From the post:
Amanda Seyfried is already cast in the Catherine Hardwicke-directed project, playing a woman in a medieval village being terrorized by a werewolf. Earlier this week, Shiloh Fernandez nabbed the role of an orphaned woodcutter for whom Seyfried falls, much to the displeasure of her family.
Irons will play Henri, the son of a blacksmith who, through an arrangement, is to marry Seyfried’s character.
Christie, who would make her first studio movie since 2004’s “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” would play Seyfried’s grandmother, whose favorite pastime is knitting — with a pair of silver needles.
Oldman would play Father Soloman, a man whose title is the Witchfinder General and whose job is to find and kill the werewolf.
I’m happy that they’re making the Wolf in this story a werewolf. Hopefully Catherine Hardwicke will give us a proper beast this time– the last film she directed had a “werewolf” in it too, but I don’t think readers of this site were impressed.
Plus, come on: Julie Christie? Gary Oldman? I have a statue
Let’s play a game! One of the people in this photo is portraying a werewolf. Which one could it be?
I have only one rule when watching network TV: the show I am watching must be Dexter. True Blood fails this test, and now that I’ve seen this photo of Joe Manganiello as werewolf Alcide Herveaux, I’m obliged to report that the show has failed in another, more crucial way: it promotes the ridiculous and insulting “Rugged Werewolf Hunk” stereotype. This is a phenomenon I have just made up, but consider the evidence.
Joe Manganiello was hired to play a werewolf. Here we see him wearing a plaid lumberjack-style shirt. “Put this on,” he was told. “This is what a werewolf wears. Don’t forget to unbutton the top three buttons, to imply a burly man-chest.” Note the carefully sculpted hair and the full (but carefully trimmed) beard. The result is a figure you might recognize from the covers of countless trashy supernatural romance novels: the Rugged Werewolf Hunk. Dangerous… but tender. Manly… but sensitive. This is the best image that marketing people can come up with when they want to make a werewolf attractive to the average woman. You know he smells like Old Spice and leather, and although he’s a beast he’ll never forget your birthday.
This is what they did to poor, poor Joe Manganiello. To be extra-certain that no one would misinterpret his character’s species, someone asked him to stand in front of a painting of a wolf silhouetted by a full moon and put on his best “hunted” expression.
Now where have I seen this before? Oh yes. I have one of these on my shelf.
It’s all right there in the headline! According to Variety, “Spoke Lane Entertainment and Mike the Pike Prods. have acquired film rights to George R.R. Martin’s werewolf novella ‘The Skin Trade.'” Here’s the premise:
Martin’s story is based on a female private investigator on the trail of a serial killer linked to an underground werewolf clan ruling the remains of a vibrant city devastated by a recession.
The novella was first published alongside work by Stephen King and Dan Simmons in a short horror anthology called Night Visions 5. It seems to be out of print, but there are some used copies available on Amazon
Monday morning’s walk to work is often the best commute of the week for me, courtesy of the This American Life podcast that arrives on my iPod. This week’s episode, Babysitting, begins with a story that had me grinning like an idiot all the way to the office.
Act One. What Big Teeth You Have.
Lots of babysitting is done by family members. Hillary Frank reports on what can happen when a teenaged son is put in charge of his younger brothers. It’s not pretty.
Hint: a full moon and a group of little kids camping in the back field come into play. I can’t recommend This American Life enough, even when it’s not about an 18-year-old traumatizing his little brothers. Check it out.
If you’d like to watch Lawrence Talbot do terrible things over and over from the comfort of your own home, you’re in luck: Director’s Cut DVD
I want to mention that every site I’ve seen mention these home releases has felt obligated to include a few shitty editorial comments about how “disappointing” this movie was. Even the official review Amazon is running moans about “bland computer-generated werewolves”. Sorry this movie didn’t blow the doors off Schindler’s List and the first three Indiana Jones movies, guys. It’s a bloody werewolf movie.
Trusty Werewolf News friend ArcLight sent me a link to this fascinating CGSociety feature article about all of the CG work (and politics) that went into the transformation scenes featured in “The Wolfman“. The article includes extensive comments by Rick Baker (who, as you probably know, designed the Wolfman’s look and the practical makeup effects) and Adam Valdez (the Visual Effects Supervisor at Moving Picture Company, the group that did the CG work). Here are some choice excerpts:
Drawing on his years of experience and success to create a character he had loved since he was a boy, Baker requested “a couple of weeks to do some designs, a range between man and wolf. I did a number of Photoshop images and ZBrush sculptures ranging between Del Toro and a wolf. In other words, if man was one and wolf was ten, was the Wolfman a five, or perhaps an eight? Well upon viewing my designs they said it wasn’t anywhere in that range.” Baker was asked to do additional concepts showing steps within that range to narrow down the final design. This happened repeatedly until the point where Baker told them there simply wasn’t an in-between left.
Nothing like design-by-committee to ruin a project!
[Says Baker:] “I had a great time working with the folks at Digital Domain on the CG Benjamin Button character, I would have liked to have contributed the same way on this film.” One scene that he felt could have worked particularly well using animatronics and makeup was the scene where Del Toro is strapped to a chair surrounded by doctors, since the chair offered plenty of space to hide the hardware and it would have been easy to digitally remove any visible mechanics.”
That’s probably my favourite scene in the movie, and it blows my mind to imagine how much better it might have been if Baker had been able to work his magic.
Johnston wanted to see how the transitions would look in action, so animators were given rigs that could do rough deformation and transformation work. [Says Valdez:] “In the middle of that we had to start over, because Joe wasn’t happy with what he was getting. There were a few rounds of discussion about whether or not Benicio Del Toro, who played the Lawrence aka Wolfman, should turn into something else on the way to becoming the Wolfman, so rather than traditional close-ups of bones stretching and hair sprouting he might turn into something resembling an almost fetal orc-like creature.”
I wonder if that “orc-like” concept was used for the creature that appears in some of the movie’s dream / hallucination scenes.
There’s a ton of down-and-dirty CG modeling talk near the end of the article, so if Maya and ZBrush are your thing, you might want to get a napkin ready to mop up the drool. Now stop reading this post and read the article!
A while ago a reader named dollface ripped on me for not knowing about The Cramps and a host of other bands that have recorded songs about werewolves. I have to admit that most of the music I listen to is bereft of fur and / or fang. I finally got around to looking up the songs dollface recommended, and while I can’t say I’ve discovered any new favourite bands, I’ve got to admit that when used as subject matter for song, werewolves have produced some truly interesting and eclectic music. Here are three wolfy songs that dollface thinks you should hear, and one that I’ve probably already recommended before.
There is one werewolf song that I’d listen to over and over again even if I wasn’t into werewolves, and that’s Cat Power’s haunting cover of Michael Hurley’s “Werewolf”.
I encourage you (or maybe implore you) to post links to your favorite werewolf songs in the comments section.
Do you trust SyFy? I want to trust SyFy but it’s hard, especially after they changed their name from Sci-Fi. Now comes news that Felicia Day will star in a SyFy movie called “Red”, where she’ll play a descendant of Little Red Riding Hood who “brings her fiancé home, where he meets the family and learns about their business — hunting werewolves.” Naturally the fiancé tangles with a werewolf and gets bitten, Red’s family freaks, and wacky hijinks ensue!
Sorry, I guess I’m a little skeptical after SyFy put out “War Wolves” and then announced their plan to Americanize “Being Human”. These recently released stills don’t do much for my confidence either, but then again, Felicia Day. She made the already-awesome “Dr. Horrible” even better, and, well, come on: “The Guild“. “Red” could actually be pretty good, especially if they let Day have her way with the script.
The tiny JPEG to the right is purportedly the first official poster for Gladiators V Werewolves. Sadly, this is the largest version of the image I could find (hat-tip: Quiet Earth). And… that’s it! No one seems to know much about this film. Check out the three previous Werewolf News posts about it and you’re pretty much up-to-date.
Thanks to @SheenFanSite for the heads-up.