Is DOG SOLDIERS 'The Queen Bitch Of Werewolf movies'' Click and see!

Hey folks, Harry here... I get to see DOG SOLDIERS next week here in Austin at a special screening here... more on that later... But I saw a bad transfer video tape that was sent to me by the producers, and liked the film. It made me want to see it on a big screen with an audience. If for no other reason than to see these Bernie Wrightson looking werewolves on the big screen. Here's a couple of reviews. One from JazzSinger and the other from the most beautiful boy in Manchester... Reni...

Ok Harry. I don't know if you'll want to use this, but for the first time ever I felt compelled to put a review down and send it to someone. Whether you use it or not, I enjoyed reliving the movie as I wrote about it, so I'll thank you now for that opportunity, whether you post the review itself or not.

If you do, you can call me "JazzSinger"

Here goes:

In a nutshell? - Dogs Soldiers is the puppy's privates.

The advertising here in the UK has been pitching this as "a bitch of a werewolf movie". I would go a bit further - it's the QUEEN BITCH of werewolf movies!!!

Before I get into the whys and wherefores, let's deal with a bit of background. The story....

A squad is helicoptered into an exercise in the Scottish Highlands - their objective: to penetrate enemy defences. Spotting a weakness in the enemies position, they set off. En route they see a signal flare, wondering what is going on they rush to investigate only to discover the entrails of another unit spread around a camp site. Only one member of this unit survived, horrifically wounded, and babbling hysterically - "there was only supposed to be one" over and over.

Darkness falls, and the forest comes alive with howling. A frenetic chase through the woods ensues, and eventually they stumble across a zoologist who takes them in her jeep to a nearby cottage to seek assistance. When they arrive however, the cottage is deserted - but food is cooking on the stove and the table is set for dinner.

Holed up in the cottage, the jeep destroyed by the werewolves, the squad fends off attack after attack, trying to survive until morning. But they also have to solve a few mysteries along the way. Why were the enemy unit in their exercise armed with live ammo? Where are the owners of the cottage? Just who is this zoologist that happened to be passing by?

Pretty simple fare. But I do have some minor grumbles, so let's get them out of the way first, then we can concentrate on the fun stuff.

At times, most especially early on, the production values slump a little, betraying the low budget nature of the movie. Cheap fake blood can look as good as expensive fake blood, but if you can't afford to enlist the services of a genuine military helicopter for an important establishing shot, that civilian chopper with a few army emblems slapped on it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Likewise the score - whilst more than adequate for the most part, sometimes (but I emphasise "not often") the score just didn't fit with the action on the screen for me. Not jarringly so, and not even particularly distracting, just a niggling feeling that something wasn't quite as good as it could have been. A more generously financed picture may have found the time to address this but I got the feeling in this case that they just had to go with what they got.

By far the biggest distraction early on is a hyperactive camera - never settling for more than a second or two at a time on any one character, and seemingly constantly in motion. This could have been an attempt to seek a "reality show" feel, to give the impression of a documentary rather than a movie. Or it may have been an attempt to unsettle the audience. Either way it didn't quite work.

And it was a shame, because the exchanges between the characters in these early moments, as is the case throughout, are extremely well written, setting up characters nicely. But without a proper opportunity to register who is saying what to whom it makes it tricky to decide just which character it is that has been established at any point!

Fortunately things soon settle down, and once the action becomes confined to the central location in the movie, with darkness having fallen and the tension rising, none of these problems rear their heads again, and apart from one jarring moment toward the end of the movie it's a smooth and thrilling narrative ride from beginning to end.

And the creature effects themselves, perhaps the most susceptible to "budgetitis", were not affected one little bit. In fact, quite the reverse - these are some of the scariest critters I've seen in a movie for a long, long time. Not just horrific, but truly scary. As in "nervous-driving-home-after-the-movie-can't-help-feeling-there's-something-i n-the-back-of-the-car-with-you" scary.

So along with that, what about the good stuff.

The timing, wit and humour in this film is priceless. If you don't laugh out loud AND jump at least six foot high from your chair in this movie then you should seek medical attention. From the one-liners to the slap-stick to the sit-com, everything that is supposed to make you laugh, makes you laugh. But importantly at no point does the humour detract _anything_ from the tension. It is used effectively as a tension breaker just as people tend to do, and so it fits. It works even in the context of the desperate situation that the people are in. Instead of laughing at them but then thinking how odd that they should be joking at a time like this, you laugh _with_ them, feel their relief along with them, knowing that it's a survival mechanism.

The oft mentioned references to THE EVIL DEAD are obvious, but respectful, but in one key respect DOG SOLDIERS differs from that movie - the gore effects are sickeningly convincing

When one of the squad is slashed by a werewolf, his guts spill out onto his belly. Now, I've never seen human guts so whether they were realistic or not I have no idea. But that doesn't matter - they were _convincing_. I really believed that his comrade was trying to stuff his mates guts back into his abdominal cavity.

The werewolves themselves are kept in shadows and restricted to fleeting across the field of view for most of the early part of the film. But when the director does choose to let us see them, he holds nothing back. Some may say that this was a way of keeping costs down, but I don't buy it - I think this was good old fashioned tease-'em-'n-please-'em film making. And it works.

The werewolves are bipedal, rangy and lean with an effective and huge mane. This top-heavy design makes for some interesting shots, not least a shot that I took to be a reference to a certain James Cameron film that also features a beastly "Queen Bitch". And they are menacing, every attack on the cottage comes with a ferocity and intensity that is quite literally breathtaking. For these creatures do not merely try and batter their way in - they possess animal cunning and use the co-operation of pack hunters, probing the various means of entry into the cottage, setting up diversions and generally doing a fine job of terrorising the squaddies and the audience alike.

And that would have been enough. But on top of the mayhem, a mystery is established for our heroes to solve, about which I shall say no more except to say that it is relatively easy to spot the solution from the comfort of the theatre chair, allowing us, the audience, to sit back and enjoy the characters on screen figuring it out for themselves among the carnage.

A final twist is handled fairly clumsily (and shouldn't be a "twist" at all for anyone watching with their brain running even on idle). This makes for an awkward moment during the transition into the closing set-piece, but this failing is soon [instantly] forgotten as that set piece unfolds. And although distracted by the transition, I found myself immediately discarding my concerns and simply enjoying the imagery that accompanied the moment, as the entire werewolf pack... but that would be saying too much.

This moment plays into the final struggle between the remnants of the human group and the werewolves, and of course leads to the ultimate conclusion.

I do wonder however, how this movie will play to non-British audiences who may be confused by some of the language used, although some of it is helpfully explained along the way. But the obsession that one of the characters has with a particular football (soccer) match may go over the heads of some, as indeed may the final words spoken in the movie.

But that should not matter - the football angle is not crucial to the story or the understanding of the characters, and those final words stand on their own, albeit with less impact if you aren't equipped with the British/English cultural reference that it leverages.

Knowing full well that theatres will soon be packed to bursting for the forthcoming Episode II consumer rip-off, it is nothing short of criminal that I saw DOG SOLDIERS in a cinema with no more than a dozen other people. But judging from the reactions around me, all of us came out wholly, and completely satisfied. Well almost - this is not a perfect picture, but it comes close within it's own terms of reference, especially given that as far as I know this is a first time outing for the writer/director, at least on a project this size.

Finally, a British horror movie that can legitimately compete in the premier league.

Oh, one other thing. I enjoyed another "wolf" movie last year. BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF. And I swear blind that the gorge through which our British heroe trudge at one point in DOG SOLDIERS is the exact same one that featured more extensively in BROTHERHOOD (I seem to have an eye and a memory for attractive landscapes and features).

That's the sort of factoid that will no doubt crop up on IMDB at some point, but you saw it here first folks.

And folks, this comes from a right wicked bastard I love to hug and kiss called Reni. Just a right decent Manchester lad that packs down the ale and parties till dawn and is gung ho enough of a film lover to fly an ocean to attend BUTT NUMB A THON - like every good geek should be willing to do. Here's what he thought... "Think SOUTHERN COMFORT meets THE HOWLING." fucking ace Reni, you rule...