He’s an artist doing research in Bucharest on the legend of the loup-garous for a graphic novel, she’s a werewolf chocolatier who’s been promised to the leader of her pack when she comes of age — can the two of them get along? (more…)
Category: Reviews
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Full Moon Features: The Wolves of Wall Street
Writer/producer/director/hack-of-all-trades David DeCoteau has had what could charitably be called a varied career. Over the past three decades he’s racked up more than 100 directing credits, many of them under pseudonyms, with cable horror staples like Creepozoids and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama among the earliest features he was willing to sign his actual name to. More recently his increasingly voluminous output has been alternating between the homoerotic “boxer-briefs horror” of the 1313 series, somewhat more family-friendly fare like A Halloween Puppy and An Easter Bunny Puppy, and hilariously overpunctuated titles like A Talking Cat!?!, A Talking Pony!?! and My Stepbrother Is a Vampire!?! — the last two of which are currently in post (where their myriad problems will assuredly not get fixed). A bargain-basement auteur who prizes quantity over quality, his films routinely wind up in the lower reaches of the IMDb’s user ratings, so why would I waste my time watching even one of them? The answer is simple: In 2002, DeCoteau made a werewolf movie. Sort of.
Wolves of the Wall Street (not to be confused with Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, although I’m sure it will be from here on out) is the rather fanciful tale of a hot young go-getter (William Gregory Lee) who moves to the big bad city to follow his dream of renting a filthy apartment from Louise Lasser and landing a job at a prestigious Wall Street brokerage firm. The first part’s a piece of cake, but as Lee discovers while pounding the pavement, his lack of experience hinders him on the second front until he meets wisecracking bartender Elisa Donovan, who brings him to the attention of Eric Roberts, the senior partner at Wolfe Brothers, which takes him on as a trainee along with four other hopefuls that we never see or hear from again after their first orientation session.
Right off the bat, screenwriter Barry L. Levy leans hard on the wolf metaphors, having Roberts make pronouncements like “This is a predatory business. In order to survive, you identify what you want and go after it.” Later, his right-hand man (Michael Bergin) comes right out and calls himself and his fellow brokers Roberts’s “pack” and repeats a lot of his dialogue, which becomes a running motif of sorts. (In fact, you could make a hell of a drinking game out of this movie merely by taking a sip every time somebody says “broker,” “pack” or “predator.” And you have to finish your drink whenever someone says the line “‘Can’t’ isn’t in your vocabulary,” which happens more often than you would reasonably expect.) Then there’s the scene where Roberts urinates on Lee’s leg, which is his way of declaring, “I own everything in here.” But I’m getting ahead of myself.
After he survives his first of two weeks as a trainee, Lee returns to Donovan’s bar and asks her out, but she turns him down flat with an “I don’t date brokers,” but that does little to deter him and the next day she’s cooking for him, giving him a fancy silver pen (gee, I wonder if that’s going to come in handy later on) and going to bed with him. Meanwhile, Bergin and his cohorts blow off some steam by stripping down to their black boxer-briefs and advancing on all fours on a couple of enthroned hookers they’ve hired for the weekend. Disappointingly, none of them grows so much as a single hair on his chest in the process, but they do proceed to sniff and lick the women all over — and presumably devour them after DeCoteau cuts away to a shot of the full moon, over which we hear their screams. (Incidentally, I would not recommend drinking every time you see the full moon because in this film it’s full for weeks on end and you would surely contract alcohol poisoning before you made it to the closing credits.)
At the end of his training period, Lee fulfills Bergin’s prediction by being the only one to make the cut, at which point Roberts bestows upon him the ring that all Wolfe Brothers brokers wear. The real transference comes that night, though, when he’s plied with shots and bitten on the neck under the light of the full moon. After that his wardrobe undergoes a transformation (even if he does not) and Bergin coaches him though his “growing pains,” telling him “You need to stop thinking like a human. You’re better than that now.” However, apart from his heightened senses (in one scene he smells another man’s cologne on Donovan, precipitating a fight), there are no outward manifestations of lycanthrophy, real or delusional, which renders Donovan’s claim that he’s becoming “some sort of monster” nonsensical. (At the point she says this, his worst offense is that he’s stopped returning her calls.)
There’s more — quite a bit more, in fact — but I’m going to take pity on myself and skip to the end, which finds Lee stupidly announcing in person his intention to leave the firm. (Why couldn’t he just give his notice over the phone?) This, of course, leads to a standoff between him and the non-hairy, barely-identifiable-as-such werewolves of Wall Street, who have, of course, taken Donovan hostage. And they, of course, all go down in turn, felled by Lee’s fancy silver pen, allowing him to return to a normal life. Sure, he has a few murders on his conscience (including one of a gay street hustler), but as long as he and his girl get to ride off into the moonset everything’s hunky dory, right?
Full Moon Features: The Boy(s) Who Cried Werewolf
A few years back, Nickelodeon aired a made-for-TV movie called The Boy Who Cried Werewolf, which is about a boy (duh) who comes to believe her older sister is a werewolf (double duh). If you missed it, it can be found in its entirety on YouTube, but then so is the 1973 feature film of the same name, which I strongly suggest would be a much better choice. (more…)
Full Moon Features: The Werewolf of Woodstock rocks out
Six years before she was viciously mauled to death by lycanthropic serial killer Eddie Quist in The Howling, Belinda Balaski nearly met a similar fate at the paws of The Werewolf of Woodstock. (more…)
Full Moon Features: The Werewolf of Washington Wants You!
Over the past few weeks, as partisan politics has resulted in a partial government shutdown and petty bickering over the budget and raising the debt limit, it has pleased me to consider what it would be like if there were a hairy beast prowling the dark alleys of the nation’s capital, culling some of our more contentious congressmen. (more…)
Full Moon Features: Battledogs and the end of the Summer of Syfy
Ever since I first saw how the scenario played out in 1995’s Project: Metalbeast, I’ve never understood why anybody would think turning soldiers into werewolves (or vice versa) is a good idea. I mean, I get that werewolves are unstoppable killing machines, but they’re also uncontrollable killing machines — and giving one a metal exoskeleton is just plain begging for trouble. Even if the feral creatures in Syfy’s Battledogs aren’t metal-plated, they’re still highly unsuitable for military use, but you just try telling that to lieutenant general Dennis Haysbert, who’s willing to put the entire island of Manhattan at risk if that’s what it takes for him to get hairy super-soldiers.
The directorial debut of Alexander Yellen, cinematographer of such Asylum classics as Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus and Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus, and boasting a teleplay by Shane Van Dyke of Titanic II and Transmorphers: Fall of Man fame, Battledogs opens with an outbreak of lycanthropy at JFK International when an airline passenger, wildlife photographer Ariana Richards (the little girl from Jurassic Park, all grown up), spontaneously turns into a ravenous, four-legged (and unfortunately entirely CGI) beast and starts attacking her fellow travelers. Some of them die, but many more don’t, and the survivors are quick to change themselves, which is how the situation quickly snowballs. Much to the relief of president Bill Duke, the military is on the scene in a jiffy and gets things under control and the infected quarantined, which is when by-the-books Army medical researcher Craig Sheffer and CDC official Kate Vernon get involved, much to the annoyance of Haysbert and, by extension, his right-hand man, Wes Studi.
The only other actor of any note is Ernie Hudson, who plays JFK’s director of security and is keen to show off their state-of-the-art hologram surveillance system when Sheffer comes by in search of any clues that will lead them to the identity of the Lupine Virus’s Patient Zero. When Haysbert seizes the opportunity to test one of his unwilling recruits in the wild, Sheffer reveals himself to be the Werewolf Whisperer — a gift that comes in handy on more than one occasion — but he doesn’t really get a clue until all the major players (with the exception of Duke, who’s off doing something presidential) are gathered together in a cramped operating room and Haysbert lays his cards on the table. Eventually we reach the point where Sheffer and Haysbert have both been infected and start whaling on each other, but the film takes its sweet time getting there. In the meantime, we get to watch the spectacle of a bunch of computer-generated werewolves get mowed down on the streets of Manhattan. That’s nothing, though, compared to the spectacle of a fleet of CGI jets blowing up all of the bridges leading out of the city. Now I can’t wait for Battledogs 2: Escape from New York to be announced.
Next Up: We check in with a werewolf based out of our nation’s capital.
Full Moon Features: Summer of Syfy: Wolvesbayne & Red: Werewolf Hunter
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…
Full Moon Features: Summer of Syfy: Never Cry Werewolf
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…
Book Review: “Fenrir” by M.D. Lachlan
M.D. Lachlan is the only author who’s made me involuntarily swear out loud twice. The first time was at the end of Wolfsangel, and now he’s done it to me again with its successor, Fenrir. I think you should give him a chance to do the same to you, but to properly explain why, I have to dance around spoilers for two books.
Fenrir is the second instalment in Lachlan’s exploration of the brutal cycle of strife, power and death prophesied to end (along with most of the world) when the Norse god Odin is killed by the monstrous wolf Fenrisulfr. You can certainly read this book without first reading Wolfsangel, but you’ll deprive yourself of the joy that comes from watching Fenrir‘s main characters rediscover who they were when they were alive before, in the pages of that first book. The echoes of those previous lives – glimpses of golden fields and icy ocean spray – will merely be beautiful, and will lack the joyful hints of recognition you might feel while scanning a crowd for a friend you haven’t seen in a few years.
Despite Fenrir‘s deep connection to its predecessor and its focus on the inevitability of fate, Lachlan isn’t one for foreshadowing (beyond the scope of the existing Norse mythology, anyway), and his poetic, almost detached prose belies his skill with unexpected and staggering plot developments. One such sucker-punch was the cause of my “loud cuss in a quiet place” moment, and it comes fairly early on in the story. I won’t give any specifics, but the scene involved an hitherto mild-mannered character accidentally being forced to rediscover one of his (or her, no spoilers) core competencies. Suffice it to say, motherfuckers die. This character’s sudden connection to her (or his) previous incarnation came so suddenly and took me by such surprise that I found myself making a fist and shout-whispering “oh FUCK” to the full cabin of an otherwise silent red-eye flight. These are the kinds of delights that Fenrir holds for people who know enough about Wolfsangel to groan at this terrible t-shirt suggestion I made to Lachlan on Twitter.
Fenrir side-steps the tropes often found in stories about prophecies and inescapable futures. Its characters react to the revelations of their (often terrible) fates not with rebellious bombast – there are no Sarah Connor moments – but with resignation, patience and, in the case of one schemer, an ingenious attempt to “hack” the whole group’s future lives by using one of the most powerful tools available at the time. Fenrir isn’t a “guess this character’s past identity” mystery or a Paul W. S. Anderson “SURPRISE loud noise” thriller, though. Once all of the characters are in motion, the narrative thread leads down a path of love, resignation and devotion that alternates between stoicism and aching melancholy. Fenrir is a thriller, but Lachlan always makes sure the reader knows – and more importantly, cares – what’s at stake.
If Fenrir has a shortcoming, it has more to do with the stage than the actors on it. There’s a lot of travel in this book, and while the terrain is described beautifully, the locations feel slightly disconnected from each other. It might be a natural consequence of Fenrir‘s setting (9th century northern Europe) being a little easier to identify (Paris is on fire, and the Vikings did it) than its predecessor’s, but the world never quite bloomed for me like I wanted it to. When Lachlan lets the characters rest, though, the surroundings are beautifully rendered, however briefly we might be staying there.
Beauty? Yuck! Don’t worry, for all the sun-dappled forests and verdant gardens surrounding them, the people inhabiting Lachlan’s Medieval Europe are still doing terrible things to each other. Returning after its profoundly creepy debut in Wolfsangel is an order of magic that rewards its practitioners for their suffering… or the suffering of unlucky bystanders, who become fodder for producing visions and carrying out little odd jobs like murder. In terms of sheer results it easily outmuscles the Christianity that spurs on the book’s Frankish faithful, and it even unsettles the spiritually mercenary Vikings. I don’t know if this concept comes from Norse history or if Lachlan just made it up, but it’s disturbing and does a great job of reminding the reader that secret knowledge and far sight come at tremendous cost. It’s also made me really nervous about certain kinds of birds.
The book’s other source of suffering (and the reason I’m able to post about this book on this site) is the werewolf. Everything I loved about the physicality of Wolfsangel‘s werewolf – the transformation, its playful ferocity – is back, but in greater quantity, perfect detail, and presented in a way that will make readers squirm with conflicted emotions. You will suffer as the beast suffers, exult with it as many (many, many) men die under its claws, and share in the disgusted horror afflicting the werewolf’s small but bright human core. Reading about Fenrir‘s werewolf is like reading about a sentient knife that knows it is sharp, and loves to cut.
Despite its darkness and unflinching brutality, Fenrir is full of beauty, humour and exhilarating action. Fate casts a shadow over its characters, and a less skilled writer would let that shadow crush the story into a grim march of futility, but Fenrir‘s characters are bright even in the darkness. They laugh with broken limbs, cast riches into the sea, embrace God while gulping down bloody snow, and scheme to do better the next time they live. May we all do so well with our own days!
Buy, borrow or skip?
Buy, and see if it doesn’t make you swear out loud too. Lachlan’s Wolfangel series has usurped many of my favourite book series. The trilogy’s concluding volume is right here on my desk, and I’m starting it tonight.
Full Moon Features’ Summer of Syfy, Part 2: Hybrid
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…