Werewolf News

Trailer & Release Date for Netflix “Hemlock Grove” Miniseries

The 13-episode Netflix original series Hemlock Grove, based on the novel of the same name by Brian McGreevy, will premiere on April 19th. Eli Roth (who directed the first two Hostel films and swung a Nazi-seeking baseball bat in Inglourious Basterds) will executive produce, as well as handle directing duties for the pilot and the last two episodes. Above is the trailer (which my favourite media site AV Club carefully dissects), and here’s a synopsis from the Netflix press release:

The series revolves around the eccentric residents of a dilapidated former Pennsylvania steel town and the murder of 17-year-old Brooke Bluebell. Through the investigation, the town’s seamier side is exposed, revealing that nothing is what it seems.

I’m in the middle of reading the novel, so I’ll avoid editorializing or spoilers and just say that it has my favourite cover art of 2012.

Angela Quinton Jan. 9th 2013

“The Werewolf of NYC” Kickstarter perks are pretty sweet

Last November I posted about Edwin Vazquez’s Kickstarter project for his comic “The Werewolf of NYC“. I just got my rewards package in the mail, and I think it warrants sharing here because it’s a very generous array of high-quality swag: two copies of the comic, a limited-edition t-shirt, a tattoo flash page (designed by Jenai Chin), stickers, buttons, and a hand-written thank-you note containing a limited edition piece of art. If you want to get the comic, the sticker or the shirt (in non-limited black), you can visit the Werewolf of NYC shop.

If every Kickstarted, Indiegogoed or otherwise crowdsourced project I backed resulted in stuff like this showing up at my office, I’d be broke in the time it took you to read this. Thanks, Edwin! I can’t wait to read about Albert’s troubles on the train ride home.

Angela Quinton Jan. 7th 2013

Dutch film “Alfie, the Little Werewolf” will eviscerate you with cuteness

“Alfie, the Little Werewolf” (Dolfje Weerwolfje) is a film based on a series of popular children’s books by Dutch author Paul Van Loon. It was in theatres in the Netherlands in November 2011, but it’s recently popped up at a few international film festivals (Toronto, Dubai). I think Tandye’s reaction after seeing the trailer speaks for us both: “Oh my God, that is the cutest thing I ever saw.”

Alfie has no idea what is happening to him when, on the night of his seventh birthday, he changes into a small, white, furry animal: a little wolf. By the light of the full moon, he runs through the park and the neighbours’ gardens, chasing chickens and ducks. The next morning, he wakes up as himself, an ordinary little boy. Now he starts to realise why he has always felt so different from his foster parents and his foster brother Timmie. He’s a werewolf. But sensitive little Alfie doesn’t want to be different. He just wants to be normal, like everybody else. He’s afraid his father and mother won’t want to have anything to do with him once they find out he is a werewolf. So Alfie wants to keep it a secret at any cost, but that’s not as easy as it seems. After all, there’s a full moon every month…

If your job is to acquire films for the North American market, come on. Come oonnnnnn. A cute little family-friendly werewolf kid with glasses (and a ton of merch)? You’ll be rich!

Angela Quinton Jan. 6th 2013

What is “A Werewolf Boy”? (besides a South Korean box office smash)

I’ve been seeing a lot of online enthusiasm for South Korean film “A Werewolf Boy” over the past two months, but most of the talk has been about how well it’s doing financially, not about the content of the film itself. Today I decided to eschew Google News summaries in favour of a little research, and here’s what I found:

…young Suni and her family moved to a small village in Korea. There, they encounter a bedraggled orphan boy hiding under a bush and take him in out of pity. Called a “wolf boy” by some for his feral behavior and uncommon strength, Suni teaches the boy how to eat at a table, and read and write so that he might one day live among people. He repays her kindness with a devotion unequalled by any human being, a love that exceeds all normal expectations.

It’s the first commercial film by writer/director Jo Sung-hee, and it stars Song Joong-ki as the titular werewolf boy and Park Bo-young as the girl who tames and befriends him. According to Korea JoongAng Daily, it became “the most-watched Korean melodrama to date” within two weeks of release, and by all accounts it’s made a ton of money. So far it’s had a very low-key release in North America, limited to the Toronto International Film Festival and a handful of what look like art-house showings listed on the film’s North American web site.

So is “A Werewolf Boy” something your average werewolf fan might actually want to see? Viewer feedback so far indicates that there’s no actual lycanthropy in the film, and the fact that its original title (늑대소년 / “Neukdae Sonyeon”) literally translates as “Wolf Boy” is somewhat telling. Nevertheless, there are some scenes in the trailer (including a claw turning back into a human hand) that make me curious. When it’s released digitally, I’ll pick up a copy and let Werewolf News readers know what I find.

Angela Quinton Jan. 5th 2013

Kickstart historical killing-spree “Dreadline” & play a werewolf girl who collects human hearts

Last May I posted about Eerie Canal‘s game Dreadline, an action/RTS mashup in which you play one of several monsters (including a werewolf) who time travel to the scenes of historical catastrophes in order to kill all of the victims who were just going to die anyway. At the time, the game was in development and scheduled for a Q1 2013 release, which is basically now. Since I’m writing this post instead of playing the game, and given the category this post is in, you can probably guess where this is headed, but I’ll let the Eerie Canal team explain:

What was originally going to be our quick-turnaround/low-risk/easy-breezy/genre game evolved into a completely original game that is far more exciting, but also far more challenging to build. Now that we’re ready to really get down to building this thing, we’re out of cash. We have enough of it up and running to know that it’s going to be ridiculously fun, and we can’t wait to finish it.

They’re hoping to raise $167,000 on Kickstarter, which seems like a lot of money to more mortals like you and I, but consider this: Eerie Canal is two dudes who’ve worked a ton of games for giant publishers, who want to take the best of what they’ve learned and make something informed by their own (sick and twisted) sensibilities, and who really know what this sort of thing costs. From the KS page:

Dreadline is currently slated to be an English-language, single-player, PC release that will be completed around August of 2013. The plan is to have 9 playable monsters and 7 calamities. We have estimated that it will cost us $167,000 (minus the take of Kickstarter, Amazon, and our prizes) to get Dreadline out the door. It’s quite a bit less than what other game projects of this size have asked for since we’ve been self funding for over a year now.

But we would love to offer more. We want more monsters, more calamities, multiplayer monster fights, Mac port, iOS port, more languages, or anything else YOU may want. We don’t want to put up a table of new features that could be rolled out yet, because we would first like to hear from people like you.

So, the Eerie Canal guys have the experience, the creativity, the tech (they even built their own game engine, called ‘shoe_gazer’), and the will. They just need the cash! If you want to play this game as much as I do, go contribute something to their Kickstarter project. To entice you, here’s a graphic they created that shows what some of the rewards are:

Angela Quinton Jan. 4th 2013

Animated Gotye turns werewolf in backdrop video for “What Do You Want?”

From the official Gotye web site:

The visuals for our live performances of What Do You Want? were created by an incredible animator from Australia called Lucinda Schreiber. Created with coloured paper and stop-time animation techniques, it’s a beautiful piece, hope you enjoy.

The song is from Gotye’s 2003 debut album Boardface. Musically it’s not quite the earworm that Somebody That I Used to Know is, but then, that’s like saying that mint tea isn’t quite the calmative that heroin is. It’s a cute video that makes me think of the Land of the Dead musical scenes from Corpse Bride, and the gripe I had about its somewhat repetitive nature is obviated by the fact that it’s meant to be shown on a screen behind a band playing the actual song.

Angela Quinton Jan. 3rd 2013

Immortal’s “Hellhound” design might be my new favourite werewolf mask

Reader Joseph sent me a link to Immortal Masks‘s silicone “Hellhound” design while I was in my holiday-induced coma. Holy shit. It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t look at it until just the other day – if I’d seen it before Christmas I probably would have returned everyone’s gifts and spent the money on one of these instead.

I think I’m in love! The Hellhound is available in four styles: Brown, Arctic and Grey ($550) or Lycan ($1,100, with NFT hair that’s hand-punched at the edges – link to the “get Andrew one of these” donation fund to follow). Check out the official demo video from Immortal below, and keep an eye on their Facebook page for updates… apparently they’re getting ready to release “monster sleeves”, so you can have Hellhound arms and hands to match.

Angela Quinton Jan. 2nd 2013

Is this one-eyed schoolgirl a werewolf? Support the short film “Howl” to find out

“Howl” is a UK-produced short film in which schoolteacher Karen Crawshaw “unravels the mystery behind the odd relationship between her new pupil and a stranger with a dark secret.” It’s being shot in Surrey this February, and it’s the most well-organized “indie” production I think I’ve ever been asked to help publicize. They’ve got their cast, location, gear, storyboards, creature FX and basically everything else figured out, and they’re using Kickstarter to raise the remaining £2,000 they need to pay for the project.

Director Jamie Sims emailed me a few months back to see if I might be able to recommend a UK-based maker of creature prosthetics, and while I wasn’t able to help much in that regard (I live in a Canadian city where they’re making at least one Hollywood werewolf picture a year and I can’t even get a foot in that door), I can share some more details from Howl’s Head of Marketing Ben Cowan:

The film hopes to regenerate interest in the horror/monster genre through combining metaphorical parallels between a common evil within society (child abuser/paedophilia) and a traditional creature of nightmares. Using this, the film explores both adult and child fears.

We are currently releasing production videos and concept art on both our Facebook page and our website, that will allow followers to feel a part of the action, and also feel a part of our production team, embarking on the filmmaking journey as we do too.

At the time of this post, the Kickstarter campaign had less than £800 to go with 19 days left, and there are some really interesting perks available, including two pieces of world-building bonus content:

Ministry of Defence Classified Dossier

In July 2010, Scotland Yard ran an investigation into the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Karen Crawshaw. Upon reading and analysing the events described in the late Miss. Crawshaw’s diary, Scotland Yard concluded that the case be passed onto the Ministry of Defence. The investigation is ongoing and strictly classified, but a number of restricted dossiers have surfaced online.

Karen Crawshaw’s Original Diary

Locked away in the vaults of the MOD for a number of years, very few have read Karen Crawshaw’s original diary from 1994. Handwritten, she describes the strange occurrences in the village of Chillum and beyond, including the bizarre behaviour of Eleanor Stagg as she grew up. The diary has seen some wear over the years, but still retains the various ink splodges and sketches by the original owner within.

If you’d like to start 2013 off with some charitable giving in support of a short werewolf film, give Howl a look!

Angela Quinton Jan. 1st 2013

Full Moon Features: Werewolf: The Beast Among Us

For my final Full Moon Feature of the year, I went with what promised to be the werewolf movie event of 2012 — Universal’s Werewolf: The Beast Among Us. Supposedly an offshoot of The Wolfman (although there’s no real connection between them as far as I can tell), the film takes place in a world where the existence of werewolves and other creatures of the night is taken as a given, which saves a lot of time and unnecessary dickering around. It’s also a world with enough of a werewolf problem that it can support teams of professional werewolf hunters, with one particularly colorful crew headed up by top-billed Ed Quinn, whose backstory involves bearing witness to his mother and father getting batted around by an enormous beast when he was a wee lad, but not before having a wolf-headed family heirloom passed on to him.

Twenty-five years later, Quinn and company are summoned to a remote village where they encounter a foe of unusual intelligence and a whole array of potential suspects. They’re also dogged by an overeager doctor’s assistant (Guy Wilson), who has to offer his services three times before Quinn finally relents, over the objection of his preening second-in-command (Adam Croasdell). For his part, Wilson is a constant worry to his gypsy mother (Nia Peeples), sneaking off to meet up with his rich girlfriend (Rachel Katherine DiPillo) — whose trigger-happy father doesn’t exactly approve of him — whenever he isn’t needed by the doctor (Stephen Rea, appearing in his second werewolf movie in one year), who’s grown distressingly accustomed to putting down the survivors of the werewolf’s attacks. (Seems if this isn’t done soon enough, they turn into wurdaleks, although the film never actually bothers to explain what a wurdalek is. All we know is that you don’t want them hanging around.) Steven Bauer rounds out the cast as the boastful huntsman with an eye patch and the one story about how he got it that he trots out in every town they visit.

Given its direct-to-video budget, it’s a wonder Werewolf: The Beast Among Us is as watchable as it is, what with its Renaissance-Fair-crossed-with-the-Old-West costumes and Van Helsing-like weaponry. As for the plot, director Louis Morneau and his co-writers toe the line between painfully generic (pretty much any scene between Wilson and DiPillo is a waste of time) and bizarrely specific (e.g. Rea’s determination to send Wilson off to medical school). They even find a way to tie the whole thing to the winter solstice, which is when we get our most sustained look at the title creature, which goes back and forth between being an entirely digital creation and a stunt man in a suit. It fails to sustain a consistent look, though, which is the most basic thing you can ask for. If there’s a sequel — as the open ending suggests there could be — maybe they’ll manage to hammer that out.

Craig J. Clark Dec. 27th 2012

Take a note, Twiddle

Well, I’m all grown up now! I watched The Wolf Man for the first time last, and I did it in good company. I won’t bore you with a review of the film – that would be like reviewing Super Mario Brothers 3 – but I will say that I liked it a lot more than I expected to. It’s amazing that so much of what we consider to be canon in werewolf lore came from Curt Siodmak’s screenplay. As I said in the livestream chat and then on Twitter, I think the 2010 remake could have been significantly improved by emulating the original’s economy (and by including Twiddle).

Much of the hour’s entertainment came from watching the movie with an audience on Synchtube. I’m not a fan of MST3K, but there’s something to be said for sharing a cheesy movie-watching experience with a bunch of like-minded smart alecks. It’s something I’d like to do again, maybe as often as once a month, so if you missed tonight’s viewing (or participated and enjoyed it), maybe keep the evening of Friday, December 28th open.

Angela Quinton Nov. 29th 2012