Wolves

I'm generally not one for werewolf movies. I think it has something to do with the monster being human some of the time. I like my monsters monstrous and my humans monstrous without changing into a different creature altogether. Maybe I just find the whole werewolf metaphor a bit too on-the-nose.

There are exceptions of course. An American Werewolf in London, obviously. Gingersnaps. Dogsoldiers. I like these movies because their stories deal with the change and what it represents in interesting ways. David doesn't understand what's happening to him and has trouble dealing with his guilt; Gingersnaps is as much about sexual maturity as it is about subverting conformity; and Dogsoldiers is a cautionary tale about trusting women, I guess.

Wolves, David Hayter explained at the North American premier, is a kind of homage to the monster movies he grew up with. He must mean Teen Wolf because I didn't see a lot of American Werewolf or The Howling in Wolves (I've yet to watch In the Company of Wolves because I'm scared of the box art). And even though he's too old to have grown up reading young adult fiction, Wolves reads more YA than it does straight-up monster movie.

Looking back over his writing career, it's easy to see Hayter's influences for Wolves. X-Men and Watchmen are about special, outstanding individuals, supermen who are different from the rest of us and who sometimes have trouble with human ethics and morality. In Wolves, Cayden first struggles with being a “monster” then find peace and meaning in a new home with people who are just like him.

Star quarterback in a small town, Cayden's got everything going for him until a make-out session with his girlfriend triggers his first transformation and he turns violent. Further violence that same night prompts him to run away from home and he drifts aimlessly, not sure about himself of what he's doing. He tries to use his powers for good, but he can't control them. A chance encounter with another werewolf leads him to Lupine Ridge where he hopes to find answers. There, he finds standoffish townsfolk and more trouble, until a farmer takes him in.

Cayden's peaceful sojourn on the Tollerman farm is short-lived. Not long after his arrival he's tempted again to transform and although the experience is a positive one, it results to him learning more about his past and where he fits in with the rest of the wolves of Lupine Ridge. Cayden is even more special and important than he ever imagined and he believes he's the only one who can bring a lasting peace to the wolves of Lupine Ridge.

Wolves (much like Chronicle) is cinematic YA, which is just a way of saying the movie is best enjoyed and understood as a mature teen melodrama. Granted, there are only two young people in the movie, but that only serves to highlight Cayden's struggles; Cayden is fighting against a power greater than himself, meaning the wolfpack that lives in the hills and his own lycanthropy.

Speaking to the After Dark audience, Hayter talked about how, as a writer-director, no one other than himself is making changes to his script. One the one hand, I can understand how great that must feel, to be able to see your script made the way you imagined. On the other hand, this kind of auteurship can blind you to the problems in your story. And Wolves is not without its problems.

A big exposition dump late in the movie reveals story developments that should have been teased out over the course of the film. Nothing is gained by holding back this information from the characters. In fact, had Cayden known Connor's side of things, it would have added more depth to their relationship. Moreover, a great deal of the film's backstory involves Cayden's grandfather, who isn't present in the movie. He, in addition to Connor, seems to be the root cause of all the conflict in the story but he's not around to sway opinions one way or another. Rather, someone else in the present has gone to great lengths to manipulate Cayden but this character is so marginalized that when he makes his motivations known, it just feels tacked-on.

Everything else about the movie is well done and Hayter made of point of having his werewolves look and fight like human animals. “I wasn't going to put a snout on an actor,” he said, preferring instead a creature design that allowed his actors to emote through the makeup. Jason Momoa does such a fabulous job being powerful and overbearing in human form, the werewolf seems almost unnecessary, which is the point, but everyone else does a good job balancing their human-shaped civility with their werewolf-shaped brutality.

As a YA genre tale, Wolves checks all the boxes and will certainly delight young horror fans. Whether the film will resonate with the old school monster crowd remains to be seen. The film opens in the US and Canada on November 14.

Hemlock Grove (season one)

Of all the things to adapt for television, why would anyone choose a debut novel? Indeed, some books debut to fanfare, the authors lauded for their literary skill but Hemlock Grove and its author, Brian McGreevy, don't belong in that camp. McGreevy's publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, have published award-winning authors, but again McGreevy isn't one of them.

I vaguely recall seeing this book at the bookstore and I might have been curious about it. But then I likely dismissed it because I don't like werewolf stories. I'll admit, this does bias me somewhat. And I'm not a fan of Eli Roth, either. So there's that. But I do like mysteries. I was willing to give a werewolf mystery TV show produced by Eli Roth a fair chance.

Truth be told, I did kind of enjoy the first half of the season. It had intrigue: brutal murders; a shady medical research facility; church-sanctioned monster hunters; a gypsy werewolf; a would-be vampire; teen pregnancy. I was curious to see how all the characters' stories would intersect, what the outcome would be. Would the unlikely pair of Roman and Peter identify the crazed werewolf that's eating the townsfolk before Dr. Chasseur finishes her investigation? What is project Ouroburos and is it connected at all to the various dragon references made throughout? And what, exactly is Oliva's role in everything that's taking place?

The answers, when they finally came, ranged from stupid to disappointing. Hemlock Grove, more so than any other horror TV series in recent memory, managed to piss away its potential resulting in what appears to be a hastily-assembled mash of plotlines. Hastily-assembled, and it took nearly thirteen hours to tell the story.

All of Hemlock Grove's story is crammed into the back end, and the final episode is less an end and more of a waypoint, a place to check your progress along a tiresome winding road. This kind of story telling is at best amateur, at worst deceptive. Moreover, there's very little investigation that takes place in what is, ostensibly, a murder mystery. Rather, the show's running time is devoted almost entirely to relationships and feelings, and what little horror there is exists only in terms of premise and special effects.

Gripping werewolf murder mystery or prime-time family drama?

Rich pretty-boy Roman is the only character with any arc, and even he takes a powder halfway through the season. To suggest that Hemlock Grove's twisting plot is what keeps the show interesting only proves that you don't know what a plot twist is. Hemlock Grove holds no surprises, or any real closure for that matter. Character plots don't intersect in any way that make sense and the various stories being told are properly developed to provide the viewer with any sense of forward momentum.

In short, the story goes nowhere and then, as if realizing it took too long, it rushes toward an end that defies logic and undermines expectations. It's disappointing in the extreme and upsetting to think everything that happened was just laying the foundation for a second season. I haven't felt this cheated since Underworld.

Hemlock Grove has all the potential to be a really good mini-series. A shorter format would cut out all the fat, but alas the greedy folks at Netflix had to go whole hog with a whole thirteen episodes of what is mostly filler. But maybe it's not their fault. Maybe that's just what you get when you pick a first-time novelist to write you a TV show.

Never Cry Werewolf

I should stop watching TV on Sunday mornings.

When Jared moves in next door, Kyle befriends him right away but his older sister Loren is less taken with the man. In fact, she thinks he's kind of strange. Loren takes to spying on him and she soon concludes that he's a werewolf. No one believes her, of course, and when she confronts Jared he tells her that she's the reincarnation of his dead wife and they're meant to be together. Loren decides she has to kill Jared and enlists Steve to help her. After an unfortunate series of events, Loren and Steve are joined by Kevin Sorbo in their mission to rid the town of Jared.

I've said it before, I don't watch a lot of werewolf movies, so I don't know if this film is a ripoff of another werewolf movie, but I can tell you it sort of feels a bit like Dracula. It's that whole reincarnated loved-one business. I'm also unfamiliar with the werewolf mythos, but I've always assumed that werewolves a) don't choose to become werewolves, and b) only change at the full moon. Jared breaks the mold, in first choosing to be werewolf, and then in chagning at will with the help of a strip of human flesh torn from a man who hanged himself during a full moon.

In addition to the strange, new, and jarring laws for werewolves, Jared and Loren's age difference makes the whole movie feel vaguely inappropriate. A gap of at least 15 years separates the two, which isn't the problem per se, really it's more the way in which the filmmakers deal with it. Jared aggressively pursues Loren, uses overt sexual metaphores to express his feelings, and forces her to strip. Loren dreams of kissing Jared, which is both innocent and confusing because she's not attracted to him, but when she arrives at Jared's house to kill him, she's dressed in a sports bra and jeans. There's no subtlety to Jared's character which has the unfortunate effect of turning him into a pervert. And Loren has absolutely no character at all, which just makes it all the more confusing when she appears as a black-clad, overly sexualized demon hunter at the end of the film. Where Jared more covert, and were Loren to experience a sexual awakening, then maybe this film could have gone somewhere. As it is, Jared is a sexual predator who preys on teenaged girls.

And then there's Kevin Sorbo. He plays washed-up TV star Redd Tucker. In much the same way that Jared and Loren had the potential to be star-crossed lovers, Kevin Sorbo could have stood to represent the loss of innocence that comes with adulthood. When Loren asks for his help, Kevin Sorbo admits to being a fraud and is of no use to her. So what could have been a coming-of-age tale of kid ingenuity and female empowerment is instead just a film about a girl who kills a werewolf.

Skinwalkers

I don't watch a lot of werewolf movies. Not for lack of werewolves, I just usually pick something else. However, whenever I do watch a werewolf movie, I'm usually surprised by how much I liked it. Skinwalkers is no exception.

There are two kinds of werewolves, those that feed on humans and those that don't. The pacifist werewolves live peacefully with humans and lock themselves up during the full moon. The anarchist wolves see humans as little more than talking meet on feet. It has been prophesied that a child will bring about the end of werewolf kind, and the child's coming is heralded by a red moon. Unbeknown to Tim, he is the child of prophesy and when he turns 13, he will have the power to defeat the wolves. But no one knows exactly what he's supposed to do. As Tim's birthday nears, the anarchist wolves take to the road to track him down and ultimately kill him.

Skinwalkers, though it follows the general conventions of modern versus horror movies (a category I just made up), has none of the convolutions or epic story of similar films. Meaning, it fucking ends. And ends well, if not a little contrived. But I'm willing to overlook the contrivance because the rest of the movie is pretty good.

Everyone likes each other, for one thing. You don't see that a lot. These days, horror films are populated with dullards and idiots who would never, ever hang out. In Skinwalkers, the good guys are all friendly, and even the bad guys function well as a group, working together to achieve their common goals. And when intragroup conflict does arise, it's not forced, but follows naturally from the decisions and actions of the individual group members.

One of my roommates sat down to watch partway through the film. He snorted at the wolf makeup, saying werewolves don't look like that. We then had an argument about American Werewolf in London. He said that wolf was a muppet, that it was made by Jim Henson's creature shop. I said that "muppet" won an academy award. Score one for me. Personally, the makup effects in this movie didn't bother me; I bought into the film's premise, thus I bought into the film's werewolves. I don't know what a werewolf is supposed to look like, but how each film chooses to present its monster I think speaks to the film's overall commentary on the human animal. And Skinwalkers' more-human-than-wolf werewolves suggests that we are all capable giving over to our base animal nature, but, equally, we are all capable of overcoming it. And this opposition is further identified in the film's good vs bad story as well as its (slightly contrived) ending.