Wolves and Dogs

This month Cinema Macabre brings you a selection of films that are really something to howl about as we take a look at werewolves on the silver screen.
: The Wolf Man (1941)

Universal Studios classic horror story set the standard for lycanthropes on film. Of the three major Universal Studios monster movies, Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man, only the last does not spring from a notable novel.

While colorful legends of werewolves abound in print, it took the skill of screenwriter Curt Siodmak, the talent of makeup artist Jack Pierce, and the acting of Lon Chaney Jr. to tell the story of a man doomed by an eternal curse to kill the ones he loved by the light of the full moon.

Americanized Larry Talbot (Chaney) returns to his ancestral home in Wales.

His father, Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains), hopes that Larry will take over the duties of his family, and that the two will reconcile their long-standing differences. Larry, of course, is focused more on the gorgeous woman (Evelyn Ankers) he spies through the lens of a telescope. Seems like Larry s a bit of wolf even before he s bitten.

When he visits Gwen s (Ankers) shop in town, he buys a walking stick decorated with the head of a wolf and the symbol of a pentagram in silver, which prompts the discussion of werewolves and a recitation of Siodmak s brilliant poem; even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.

Later that night, Larry is bitten by a werewolf when he tries to save Gwen s friend from an attack by what he thought was a wolf. Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya), the old Gypsy woman, tells him that her son (Bela Lugosi) is the werewolf, and now he, too, is cursed.

Sure enough, Larry soon succumbs to his curse of lycanthropy, and starts seeing pentagrams mdash; the mark of death mdash; on the hands of those he loves. His father doesn t believe any of this superstitious nonsense, but people start dying when Larry changes into the Wolf Man and goes on the prowl. The denouement draws upon classic Greek mythology, and makes The Wolf Man stand out in its depiction of a man tragically caught in an evil cosmos with no way out.

Jack Pierce s makeup makes the werewolf come alive with a feral humanity missing in today s CGI lycanthropic concoctions. The painstaking lap dissolve process that appears for seconds on screen took hours of laborious work and filming as layers of yak hair were applied to Lon Chaney s face and photographed. The mist-enshrouded forest sets, with their gnarled tree limbs and dark landscapes, give The Wolf Man a claustrophic and eerie tone of desolation, as Larry Talbot struggles against, and succumbs to, his inevitable fate.

Lon Chaney Jr. reprised his signature role as the Wolf Man in four more Universal films, but The Wolf Man remains his most poignant performance as a man cursed, through no fault of his own, to walk on padded-feet by night, when the moon beckons, with the unquenchable thirst for blood.
Once upon a time, I could rattle off the whole Taco speech from Reservoir Dogs, or maybe even Tarantino s Madonna monologue.

I can remember a lot of lines, from a lot of movies. But there are some lines, some snippets of dialogue, that are so burned into my brain as to be unforgettable.
I d rather not spend the rest of this winter TIED TO THIS @!

#%ING COUCH! is one. They re coming for you Barbara is another, naturally.

But one of my personal favourites is I m a little too old to be playing Hardy Boys meet Reverend Werewolf!
It s difficult to imagine anyone other than Gary Busey delivering that line, and I m glad I live in a world where I don t have to. Silver Bullet, based on the Stephen King novella Cycle of the Werewolf, is probably Busey s finest hour.

He s magnificent, plain and simple. It s the kind of performance you can watch time and again, and it always makes me smile.
Corey Haim s not bad either as the young protagonist confined to the titular wheel-chair.

His performance here predates his turn in The Lost Boys, and at this point I m sure he never expected to turn up in anything like Prayer of the Rollerboys. Megan Follows, Everett McGill, and Terry O Quinn fill out the rest of the cast nicely.
Silver Bullet is a film I always loved as a youngster and still adore now.

It s got the brother and sister bonding, the cool uncle, the neat gadget (even if it is a wheelchair), and a werewolf! It s not a bad one either, as screen werewolves go; standing formidably tall and looking a lot like the Bernie Wrightson artwork in the novella, if memory serves.
It s tense, funny, and emotionally involving; one of the better Stephen King adaptations - and there have been many; and one of the finest werewolf films ever made.

Bad Moon gets off to a pretty bad start with a clich e d opening which is at least set in an unusual location. Ted is a photo-journalist on an expedition in the jungles of Nepal with his girlfriend. While their native guides sit around the fire, Ted and his girlfriend slip off to their tent for the obligatory pre-gory death scene bout of sex.

While they rsquo;re occupied, the rest of their party are killed off by an unseen creature. In an extreme case of coitus interruptus Ted rsquo;s girlfriend is pulled out of the tent, and savagely killed by what turns out to be a werewolf. Ted himself is bitten before putting an end to the beast by blowing its head off.

(It rsquo;s always seemed to me that the jungles of Nepal is an odd location to find a werewolf in, but hey, what do I know!)
We then flash forward to Ted, having returned home, camped by a lake in his trailer. He contacts his lawyer sister Janet, and she and her son Brett drive up to see Ted along with their German Shepherd Thor.

Janet invites Ted to come and stay with her, and once the police discover the mangled body of his latest victim, Ted decides to accept her invitation, and parks his Airstream behind her house (conveniently situated out in the woods).
This is where the film separates itself from the usual werewolf tale. Thor (that rsquo;s right, the dog) suspects that something is not right about Ted and follows him on one of his late night jogs into the woods.

The good old family pet discovers a transformed Ted, who, fully aware of his problem, has handcuffed himself to a tree to protect his family. What follows is a tense game of cat and mouse (or should that be dog and werewolf) as Thor determines to fulfil his role as family guardian and becomes increasingly hostile towards Ted.
Directed with brisk efficiency (the film only runs for 80 minutes) by Eric Red, writer of two classic horror movies, Near Dark and The Hitcher, Bad Moon is a very entertaining entry into the werewolf genre.

Red also wrote the screenplay based on Wayne Smith rsquo;s novel, Thor (which is apparently told from the dog rsquo;s point of view). There rsquo;s a wonderful score by composer Daniel Licht (who also scored Showtime rsquo;s brilliant series Dexter).
The usually wooden Michael Pare is effectively cast against type as Ted and actually turns in a pretty good performance.

Mariel Hemingway does a decent job of playing Janet, who gradually begins to suspect that there rsquo;s something a bit odd about her brother, and Mason Gamble manages the tricky feat of playing the kid in a horror movie without being whiny and annoying. But the real star of the film is Primo, the German Shepherd who plays the hero of the film,Thor. He has an incredibly expressive face, and his scenes with Ted are superb.

It rsquo;s not a great film by any means. It rsquo;s let down by a transformation scene featuring some of the worst CGI ever, and the werewolf, although brilliantly designed, is slightly lacking in execution, and in a rare misstep by Red, is shown too clearly for too long. But if you rsquo;re a fan of werewolf movies or heroic dog movies you really should give this one a look.

As far as I know it rsquo;s the only film to combine these two genres, which must be some kind of claim to fame, right?
In 2006, director Neil Marshall made his debut on the big screen in the US with the supremely scary The Descent. Now, if you have not seen that film, do yourself a favor, go rent it, buy it, whatever, just treat yourself to a horror film that has genuine scares and chills.

Neil Marshall s story does not begin there, it actually goes back a few years, 2002, to be exact, he made his American debut in a rather inauspicious manner when Dog Soldiers premiered as a Sci-Fi Original Movie on the Sci-Fi Channel. If you watch any of those movies, you will know that quality is not always their primary concern, however, every once in awhile a gem will slip through and prove to be well worth seeking out. Dog Soldiers, edited for content, premiered on October 15, 2002.

This is a movie that combines the survival horror and splatter elements from sources like the Evil Dead series (and actually naming a character Bruce Campbell), as well as more suspenseful horror from the likes of Jaws, and the action driven suspense of Aliens. It combines all of that in a werewolf movie that reinvigorates the lycanthrope genre. Marshall emerged here as a smart new voice on the horror landscape.

The film opens with a couple camping in the woods, just as they are to get intimate, the tent zipper starts to open and the young woman is dragged out in a shower of blood. Fast forward a few weeks, and a regiment of British soldiers are in the same woods on maneuvers. They are split into two groups and sent out into the tangle of trees.

It is not long before they are surprised by a gutted cow dropped into their midst. They set out to investigate, not liking what they find. They soon find themselves being chased through the dark by an unseen enemy.

Eventually, the fast-dwindling group find themselves holed up in an empty farmhouse. It is here where they make their stand against the foes that have surrounded them and have no intention of allowing them to leave.

Dog Soldiers is a movie that is firing on all cylinders, deftly blending horror, comedy, and action in a cohesive film that thrills all the way through.

Aside from references to other films, Marshall stages some very impressive action scenes, from the initial chase through the woods, to the multiple sieges on the home. The action is cut very quickly, but perspective is never lost, and we see a good variety of weapons used in the attack, from the standard issue guns, to a sword, to a truck, to homemade flamethrowers.

Overall, this is a film that helped reignite my interest in werewolves, and also showed that Sci-Fi Originals need not always be dreck, though I do recommend seeking the DVD release, which is uncut.

If you want blood, guts, bullets, laughs, a few surprises, and a spiffy werewolf design, this is definitely one for the books.

Marshall even gets in a Matrix quote, something I didn t realize until I rewatched the film recently. Another piece of notable trivia is that Jason Statham was originally set for the lead only to leave for John Carpenter s Ghosts of Mars, while Simon Pegg was offered a small part, but was talked out of it by Edgar Wright who wanted Pegg s first horror role to be in Shawn of the Dead.

When is a werewolf film not a werewolf film? When it rsquo;s Romasanta.
There aren rsquo;t many werewolf movies that can claim to be ldquo;Based on a true story rdquo; but Romasanta can.

The film takes the ldquo;Werewolf of Allariz rdquo; murders in 19th Century Spain as its source material, with Julian Sands playing Manuel Blanco Romasanta, the man who confessed to thirteen brutal murders and had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment after claiming he was a werewolf.
There are some things you never expect to say, either out loud or in print, one of them is: Julian Sands gives an excellent performance. Yet there is no denying it, Sands is good, very good in fact.

Werewolves are often depicted as cinema rsquo;s most sympathetic monsters, not so here. Romasanta is a sexual predator, seducing lonely women before murdering them and, as a gruesome sideline, using their body fat to make soap. Sands shifts (pardon the pun) from charming seducer to murderous psychotic in the blink of an eye and he rsquo;s never less than convincing.

The real scene-stealing performance however, comes from Elsa Pataky. Apart from being incredibly beautiful, she rsquo;s also a damn fine actress. She starts the film as a lovesick young woman infatuated with Romasanta but when she discovers his secret she sets out on the werewolf hunt of the title, determined to see him brought to justice for killing her sisters.

She rsquo;s definitely a star of the future and commands attention whenever she rsquo;s onscreen. As for the nude bath scene hellip;
Producer Brian Yuzna rsquo;s Spanish sojourn has produced far more misses than hits. Romasanta represents, along with Stuart Gordon rsquo;s Dagon, the peak of his output in that country and one of the best films he rsquo;s ever put his name to.

Combining both the serial killer and werewolf genres this is a visually stunning historical horror from director Francisco Plaza. It rsquo;s a film that deserves to be better known, so seek it out and spread the word.