DOG SOLDIERS (2002) Best werewolf movie in...uh... I had three people recommend this movie to me in the space of about two weeks, so I figured I had better hop to it and see it. Mind you, that was months ago. I'm going on notes and distant memory here. Dog Soldiers is a low-budget thriller out of England about a troop of soldiers on training manoeuvres (figured I'd use the Brit spelling) who run afoul of werewolves. The plot is your basic "survive the night" movie, which has a lot of familiar elements - periodic sieges from without, inter-human conflicts within and without, one guy getting infected and inevitably endangering the rest of the group - but it's put together with energy, likeable characters, good dialogue, and a wicked tone that blazes down a line between fun and terror, the kind of tone most of my favorite horror movies do their work in. Probably the most memorable aspect of Dog Soldiers is the best macho dialogue I've heard since Predator, like where one soldier tells a werewolf, with his dying breath, that he hopes that the consumption of his flesh causes it great gastronomic distress. Well, he was a little more blunt about it. Less tongue-in-cheek but equally testosteroney comes with another soldier's death, where he explains that when he signed his life away for king and country, he was quite serious. This is actually a pretty talky movie for this sort of thing, but I don't mind. Sean Pertwee, one of those actors I always notice and think "Hey cool, it's him!", is awesome as the squad's leader. I don't recognize anybody else, but everybody comes across well without throwing off that tone, which is extremely important for a movie like this. One bad casting decision, just one guy who thinks he's Will Smith or Jack Nicholson can fuck up the whole damn thing. Not all of the effects are top-drawer, as should be expected in a movie this cheaply made, but the only such effect that was even slightly bothersome was the fake guts hanging out of one poor bastard who spends half the movie (goddamn!) with his guts hanging out. Maybe that was necessary - if they were more realistic, a scene where an otherwise sedate dog thinks they're treats would probably be too agonizing to watch. That dog remains mostly unconcerned throughout the troops' ordeal, just kinda looking on, as if thinking "Well, what did you expect? They're werewolves!" The werewolves themselves look pretty good - we don't see a lot of them in full-body form, but they're more wolf than man (always a good thing), more lanky than most movie werewolves. Almost insectile, in a way - certainly all animal once they've transformed, and that's the way werewolves should be. We do get some shots in Monstervision, but it's nothing fancy - just black-and-white, like the way they say dogs see. Written and directed by Neil Marshall - this is his first film as a director, second as a writer. I'm looking forward to more from him, and I hope it's not just an obligatory, higher-budgeted sequel. My gratitude goes out to the three guys who recommended this movie to me - I'm so "unplugged" from horror-movie goings-on these days that a horror film festival came and went in my own town without me even knowing about it until it was over! The DVD contains the most intense menu-music I've ever heard. In a pretty much unrelated note, my favorite heavy songs about werewolves (there aren't a lot of non-heavy songs about werewolves): Type O Negative's "Wolf Moon", Iced Earth's "Wolf", Ozzy's "Bark At The Moon". BACK TO THE D's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE