Tour Collection…
As I mentioned in Twitter and on Facebook earlier yesterday, thanks to everyone who submitted entries a few weeks ago for their favorite werewolf movies of all time. A few of you suggested “Dog Soldiers” – a movie I had never heard of before. As it turned out, Chiller TV has been featuring “Werewolf Week” all this week and on Wednesday night, they played “Dog Soldier”.
Again, thanks to some of the people who suggested the movie to me originally, also let me know about Chiller TVs schedule and I was able to get home from the gym in time to watch it. Here’s what I thought:
“Dog Soldiers” is about a British team of soldiers during WW II that happen to come across a supposedly deserted farm house after being attacked by some horrific creatures. Of course they’re werewolves and thus, the soldiers are forced to try and survive the night in the farm house while the werewolves stalk their prey around the perimeter of the house.
Overall, I did like this movie in terms of it being a werewolf movie. Many of you already know I hate “werewolves” that turn into real or CGI wolves like the wereolves on True Blood or the CGI animals of Twilight. I prefer my werewolves to be half men – half creatures like The Wolfman, the Underworld werewolves or like An American Werewolf in London. For Dog Soldiers, although you never got a real good glimpse of the werewolves until the still shots diring the final credits, they were, indeed, of the old school werewolf variety.
Now, being that the movie was on Chiller TV and never having seen it before, there seemed to some very strange edits and harsh cuts throughout the movie. I’m not sure if that was because it was modified for Chiller TV or not but there were quite a few moments during the movie where my wife and I questioned what just happened or how characters could be outside the house and then suddenly inside. So that seemed odd but didn’t completely ruin the movie for me. I’ve seen my share of badly edited movies before.
I should also mention up front that I missed the first 15 minutes or so of the movie as I was trying to find Chiller TV on my Fios cable system. I came in in the middle of a campfire scene where the Sargent was telling a story of one of his buddies so I don’t think I missed much. That being said, I never got the feeling that the movie took place during WW II. The soldiers were all isolated in a forest so, really, they could have easily been modern day soldiers. In fact, they certainly seemed to use modern day weapons. Was Superglue even around during WW II? I mention that because one of the characters – Cooper – clearly asks for some Superglue at one time during the movie. For those of you that like to be picky about things like that, this might be a flaw for you but for me, I just quit thinking about them being WW II soldiers and just looked at them as being modern day soldiers.
There were also some very enjoyable – but somewhat predictable – plot twists but they are enough to keep you guessing until everything is revealed.
The one big problem I had with this movie was the very ending. My wife and I were both confused by it – maybe due to the lighting or the odd editing… it just seemed like the final scene was tacked on at the last minute and didn’t quite seem to fit the rest of the movie.
Overall though, I give this movie a solid 2 1/2 stars out of four. It’s certainly a good movie for Halloween!
-Chris
