werewolves

Famous Monsters Gone Off-Brand

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One of The Prytania’s Classic Movie selections this Halloween season was the 1958 Hammer Horror adaptation of Dracula, starring Christopher Lee as the famous vampire. It’s a gorgeous picture in the exact way that most Hammer Horrors are, but it’s also one that doesn’t take a lot of risks in its transformation from page to screen, to the point where its US release had to be retitled The Horror of Dracula in order to distinguish it from the decades-old Bela Lugosi classic from Universal. If anything, Hammer’s Dracula film goes out of its way to streamline and normalize the Bram Stoker source material, consolidating characters and skipping over the novel’s strange fixations on real estate deals & oceanic travel. As a result, I greatly enjoyed looking at The Horror of Dracula but didn’t think much about it after leaving the theater, since it deliberately made itself more inconspicuous so as not to be dismissed as a silly novelty. I believe this was a mistake. By the 1950s, the first run of the Universal Monster movies had established a concrete canon of iconic horror villains in Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, and the Gill-man (with no offense meant to my egomaniacal bestie the Invisible Man). Those famous creatures’ early outings in the Universal Monsterverse defined the look, feel, and tone of horror cinema (if not only by bringing some dark German Expressionist magic to Old Hollywood), so that any reiteration in subsequent decades would have to stand out as a silly novelty in order to stand out at all. Restaging Dracula in sumptuous 1950s Technicolor is not enough; you need a fun, memorable gimmick to zhuzh up the material. Even Universal knew that by the 1950s, when they regularly dispatched their Famous Monsters to terrorize Abbott & Costello in a series of slapstick comedies for children. And so, I left The Horror of Dracula craving the goofier, zanier side of Count Dracula in a novelty take on the character, and I’ve spent the rest of this Halloween season tracking down similar goof-offs from his Famous Monster brethren.

Of all the silly Dracula-adjacent novelties that called out to me this month, 1977’s Dracula’s Dog barked my name the loudest. In this far-afield deviation from the original novel, the Dracula surname has carried down through multiple generations all the way to Michael Dracula, a suburban dad who loves spending quality time with his middle-class family in sunny California. During an especially sun-dappled camping trip, Michael Dracula and the rest of the Dracula clan are attacked by a vampiric Doberman that once belonged to his ancestor, the Count Dracula of Dracula lore. The undead, ever-loyal Doberman attacks whomever has the misfortune of crossing his muzzle from scene to scene, but the real way he continues his former owner’s legacy is by biting and converting all nearby dogs into his canine vampire army, further ruining Michael Dracula’s family vacation on an escalating scale. You won’t be surprised to learn that Dracula’s Dog (aka Zoltan . . . Hound of Dracula) is not an especially well regarded addition to the Dracula canon, but I think that’s a shame. Anytime the hellhound Zoltan leapt out of his little doggie coffin to expose his bloody vampire fangs and gently nibble on his victims’ exposed necks, I experienced pure childlike delight, and that’s exactly what the Famous Monsters are good for. Sure, Zoltan and his loyal vampire-dog army trap Michael Dracula in a locked car and viciously attack him from all sides in a living-nightmare sequence straight out of Cujo, but any movie with the title Dracula’s Dog is going to feel like it was made for children, regardless of its content (a dissonance that director Albert Band would later push to further extremes with this son Charlie under the Full Moon home video brand). It’s not as controlled nor as respectable as the Hammer Horror take on Dracula, but it’s undeniably more memorable. You’ll never get the details of Dracula’s Dog mixed up with other Dracula adaptations in memory. For better or worse, it’s its own thing.

Maybe if the goofier, off-brand versions of Famous Monsters are going to primarily appeal to children, it’s best not to torment the little tykes with nightmare fuel like Dracula’s Dog; maybe the kiddos should just be pandered to. Universal realized this as early as their Abbott & Costello Meet The Monsters series in the 1940s & 50s, and they continued the tradition through the end of the millennium with another kiddie-friendly IP in 1999’s Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein. By then, the appeal of marketing directly to children was that their little brains are soft and malleable for advertisers, which is why this direct-to-video Frankencomedy doubles as a tourism ad for the Universal Studios theme park. You see, while Alvin and his band of chipmunk brothers are between rock gigs at Universal Studios, they discover that the real Dr. Frankenstein has also been employed by the park’s haunted house attraction and, of course, has released his lumbering undead creature into the wider park. Selling children on the timeless fun of the Chipmunks brand, the Famous Monsters brand, and the in-house amusement park brand, this disposable Halloween Season novelty is more a relic of shameless corporate synergy than it is a sincere addition to the Universal Frankenstein canon (even if its black & white opening positions it as a direct sequel in the James Whale lineage). By the time Alvin and the boys are performing a high-pitched Ozzy pastiche or rapping about fighting the monsters under their bed, however, the artistic merit of the project becomes a secondary concern. Much like Dracula’s Dog, it’s funny enough that it simply exists. Not for nothing, it also works as a great educational tool for young children who have not yet met everyone’s good friend Frankenstein and don’t know that he can be a big old sweetheart if you don’t treat him like a monster. Once loose, the creature quickly proves to just be a big, dumb kid, much like the suckers in the audience who begged their parents to buy this promotional video in the first place.

The next year’s follow-up, Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet The Wolfman, was a bit of a letdown in comparison to the Frankenstein one, but that disappointment can be a useful educational tool for children too. It sets healthy expectations for what kids will find when they’re old enough to watch the actual Universal monster movies; the Wolf Man is kind of a drip. 1973’s The Werewolf of Washington is aware of this, making sure that its lycanthropic protagonist is recognizable as a dipshit putz long before he’s bitten by a werewolf. Dean Stockwell stars as a Washington D.C. political reporter who’s sent on assignment to Eastern Europe, where he annoys the local yokels until one of them gets fed up and bites him during a full moon (while disguised in werewolf form, of course). Back in Washington, he becomes increasingly fraught & paranoid as he transforms into a werewolf himself, in what gradually reveals itself to be a caricature of Richard Nixon’s then-deteriorating mental state. If it had been released a few years later, The Werewolf of Washington might be understood as a parody of the era’s political paranoia thrillers like Three Days of the Condor or All the President’s Men. Instead, it’s just one of that genre’s goofier contemporaries, complete with very silly jokes about mixing up the words “pentagram” and “Pentagon,” among other groaner one-liners. And because Universal’s Wolf Man movie starring Lon Chaney Jr. established so much of the core iconography of the werewolf genre, it frequently pays homage to that specific iteration of werewolf lore, including fixation on the werewolf-smiting power of a silver-handled walking cane and its own low-budget recreation of Jack Pierce’s time-elapse makeup transformation effects. Like Dracula’s Dog, The Werewolf of Washington is both too preposterous to take fully seriously but also frequently too beautiful to dismiss as a throwaway novelty. Both movies are built on ridiculous premises, but they play them admirably straight for all they’re worth.

As much as the Wolf Man is a remarkably bad hang in the Universal Monsters crew, the Mummy is the biggest bummer of all. Most of the Mummy movies in that monster’s initial run are so punishingly boring that they’ve been forgotten to time entirely — their memories replaced with visions of Brendan Fraser & Rachel Weisz looking hot & sweaty in the big-budget desertscape of the late-90s reboot. The Mummy is the only Universal Monsters movie whose cultural memory has been surpassed by its derivatives’ and, as a result, most of the more prominent Mummy knockoffs are to be found in that late-90s era. Take for instance 1998’s ridiculously titled Bram Stoker’s The Mummy, a double-edged mockbuster of the then-upcoming Mummy remake and the long-cooled Bram Stoker’s Dracula, “starring” the third-billed actors from some of the 90s’ blandest sitcoms (Caroline in the City‘s Eric Lutes, Home Improvement‘s Richard Karn; Tubi is a truly magical place). Better yet, take 1999’s even more ridiculously titled The All New Adventures of Laurel & Hardy in For Love or Mummy: an Ernestless outing from Jim Varney collaborator John Cherry, improbably cashing in on the era’s Mummy revival by resurrecting Laurel & Hardy from the dead to star in their own Abbott & Costello Meet the Monsters comedy. Now that’s what off-brand Famous Monster movies are all about. Never at any point in For Love or Mummy‘s runtime do you believe that it exists or that you’re spending your precious time on this Earth watching it. It’s also, admittedly, pretty funny. “Laurel” (Bronson Pinchot) & “Hardy” (Gailard Sartain) fit right into the Dumb & Dumber mold of the era’s comedic sensibilities, landing easy laughs as they prattle & pratfall their way through their run-in with a magically resurrected Egyptian mummy. The mummy itself has a pretty cool design to it too, even if it is a remarkably stupid one. The head from a sarcophagus is propped up on a traditionally-bandaged mummy body like a giant papier-mâché mask in an image that would feel more at home in a Saturday morning cartoon than in live action. It’s just the right kind of dumb.

The knockoff Gill-man movies of the 1960s are even dumber. During the era’s beach-party craze, the latecomer Universal Monster was resurrected for two cult-classic creature features in 1964’s The Horror of Party Beach & 1965’s The Beach Girls and the Monster. Together, they teach the ultimate lesson to studios like Hammer and, more recently, the failed grim-dark Universal Monsterverse reboots: have fun. It turns out that making movies is easy. All you need to do is pay some twentysomethings to dance in bikinis to surf rock and point the camera in the right direction. The only hard part, really, is convincing them to also let you pour chocolate syrup on them while getting pawed at by a man in a rubber suit; it sounds sketchy out of context. The monsters in these two beach-party monster movies are both instantly recognizable as direct descendants of the Gill-man. More specifically, the one in The Beach Girls and the Monster looks like a child’s crayon drawing of the Gill-man (complete with goofily round eyeballs) and the one in The Horror of Party Beach looks like a wax figure of the Gill-man that has melted in the beachside sun, but they’re both honorary Gill-men all the same. The Horror of Party Beach even goes the extra mile by including some underwater cinematography in wimpy homage to the original Creature from the Black Lagoon, demonstrating in time-elapse photography how fish DNA, human skeletons, and nuclear waste have mixed to create its not-quite-Gill-man creature. The resulting monster looks a little like if Big Bird’s cousin was a fish and his only known photo was taken at the height of a hotdog eating contest. Then, the goofy beach party fun goes sour during his routine monster attacks, wherein the chocolate-syrup blood looks shockingly brutal in black & white contrast. The Beach Girls and the Monster puts less effort into its own monster mayhem, but it hits just about every other entertainment metric you would want out of a so-called Bad Movie. Its performances are perfectly stilted, its knockoff Gill-man is perfectly doofy, and anytime they’re not sure what to do between kills everyone starts aggressively go-go dancing to surf rock & stock footage. Perfection.

None of these Famous Monster knockoffs are nearly as handsome nor as respectable as the Hammer Horror adaptation of Dracula, but they’re all much more memorably bizarre. Why make Dracula’s tactics & motivations more logical & methodical when you could also choose to mount him on a surfboard while bikini babes go-go dance on a nearby beach, cheering him on? The original run of Universal Monster movies are not only perfect pieces of pop art, but they’re also warm, unrepeatable introductions to cinephiles’ best friends. We’ve already met Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and Gill-man in their prime, and we’ll always primarily remember them as they were in that black & white heyday. So, my impulse with their later films is to watch my ghoulish friends have a little fun. Let them enjoy time with their family pets or get into buffoonish mishaps with the biggest dum-dums within striking distance. There’s no need to take any of this kiddie stuff at all seriously. Now, please remember to excuse my hypocrisy when I fall in love with Robert Eggers’s super-serious “werwulf” picture next month, negating everything I just said.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Undying Monster (1942) & 13 Ghosts (1960)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss a double feature of high-style Gothic horror stories: John Brahm’s The Undying Monster (1942) and William Castle’s 13 Ghosts (1960).

00:00 Freaky Fridays at Double Trouble
10:00 Friday the 13th Part VIII – Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
16:53 Video Diary of a Lost Girl (2012)
23:45 Dial M for Murder (1954)

32:12 The Undying Monster (1942)
55:35 13 Ghosts (1960)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Wolf (1994)

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Wolf is an oddity. I went on a little bit of a werewolf movie sidequest earlier this year viewing The Wolf of Snow Hollow and Wolfen, and when I borrowed the latter from the library, I thought Mike Nichols’s Wolf was what I was getting. I have very strong memories of the evocative movie poster for this one in at least one of the video stores of my youth, and I’ve always been curious about it. How can you not have some curiosity about a werewolf flick helmed by the director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, two years before he made The Birdcage? Starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Jack Nicholson, and James Spader, no less. Ultimately, this isn’t a bad movie, but it’s not a particularly noteworthy one either, which is likely why it gets mistaken for Wolfen. 

Will Randall (Nicholson) is the editor-in-chief of a major New York publishing house, although he’s a relatively mild-mannered man—at least as mild-mannered as any Nicholson character can be—for someone of such prestige. He has a loving relationship with his wife Charlotte (Kate Nelligan) and the respect of his peers and subordinates (David Hyde Pierce, Eileen Atkins), as well as a strong affection for his protege Stewart (James Spader). While driving down a Vermont road one evening, he hits a large dark mammal with his car, and when he gets out to check on it, the beast bites him. Despite his doctor’s insistence that wolves are extinct in New England, Will is convinced that this is what bit him. At a party hosted by the owner of the company, Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer), Will is told that a new editor-in-chief has been appointed, and that Will can either transfer to an undesirable position manning the publisher’s office in Eastern Europe. Will immediately realizes that his “best friend” Stewart has stabbed him in the back, and he meets Alden’s daughter Laura (Pfeiffer) as he wanders the grounds, taking in the betrayal. Meanwhile, Will also starts to experience unusual physical changes, as the area around his wound sprouts long fur and his senses grow more enhanced, as he is able to smell tequila on the breath of a colleague, doesn’t even realize that he doesn’t need his glasses to read, and can hear conversations occurring in other parts of the office. Returning home one night, he smells something familiar on his wife’s clothing and confronts Stewart at the younger man’s front door before bounding up the stairs and animalistically and discovering his wife in Stewart’s bedroom, but not before snarling at (and perhaps biting) Stewart. 

It’s a pretty rote werewolf story, all things considered, and one that would have entered a market that was already saturated with American Werewolves, Teen Wolves, and Howlings. The script was co-written by Wesley Strick and, bizarrely, poet and essayist James Harrison. It is not based on Harrison’s novel Wolf: A False Memoir as one might suspect, and Harrison seems to have been involved initially simply because he and Nicholson were friends. This was Harrison’s second (and last) attempt at working in Hollywood, as he quit the film in exasperation over creative differences with Nichols. “I wanted Dionysian, but he wanted Apollonian,” he was quoted as saying (in literature, Dionysian attributes are those of intoxication and thus ecstasy, emotion, and disorder, while Appolonian attributes are logical, clear, and harmonious). That makes a certain amount of sense, but in the same interview, he then said, “[Nichols] took my wolf and made it into a Chihuahua,” which is less clear as a complaint. Strick, for his part, had risen to some prominence as the co-screenwriter of horror comedy Arachnophobia and had recently penned the script for the similarly messy 1991 Martin Scorsese picture Cape Fear as well as uncredited rewrites on Batman Returns. After 1997s underrated Val Kilmer vehicle The Saint, his credits take a steep nosedive, as his credits include the much-maligned 2005 video game adaptation Doom, the ill-fated and poorly conceived 2010 Nightmare on Elm Street remake, and the 2014 rotten erotic thriller The Loft. I want to say that some of the weakness was already present in the script here, but it’s really impossible to tell what parts came from him and which were from Harrison, and that’s not even getting into the fact that Elaine May was brought in for some uncredited punch-ups (although the fact that Wolf is two full hours long and meanders in the middle shows her fingerprints if nothing else). 

Pfeiffer is excellent here as she always is, and it is interesting to see Nicholson play a more subdued character than he is normally known for. Spader is effective as the smarmy sycophant who turns out to be aiming for Will’s job (and bed), and it’s no surprise when he turns up late in the film undergoing his own lycanthrope transformation, although I couldn’t help but think about how much I would have enjoyed this film a little bit more if it had been Christian Slater in the role. The film’s supporting cast is quite good. Although Pierce gets very little to do, Eileen Atkins does very solid work as Will’s secretary. Richard Jenkins appears as the detective investigating the sudden death of Will’s wife Charlotte, and he’s paired with veteran TV actor Brian Markinson. Perhaps one of the biggest standouts is Om Puri, who appears as Dr. Vijay Alezais, the folklore specialist that Will tracks down in order to get a handle on all the changes that his body is going through. Alezais tells him that it’s less a transformation than it is a kind of possession, and that the wolf that now lives inside him isn’t evil, but will only make him “more” of whatever he currently is. He even gives Will an amulet that will keep the beast inside, and it does seem to be working until the moment that Will must remove it in order to gain the wolf-strength needed to save Laura from Stewart. 

There’s simply nothing special about Wolf. If anything, it’s pretty rote. A perfectly serviceable mid-90s cable afternoon feature, but no staggeringly clever take on any of its component elements. Pfeiffer is serving looks in this one that are so 1994 Eddie Bauer coded that you’ll get something out of this if that’s of interest to you. There’s a lot of slow-motion werewolf leaping that gives the impression that Nichols has never seen a single episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, because all that’s missing is that bionic sound effect to complete the tableau, and I’m afraid that’s not complimentary. The film does make good use of the Bradbury Building, most notable for being the place where the climax of Blade Runner takes place but I also recently saw in D.O.A., and it’s always a comfort to the eye to see it in use. Still, it’s telling that I’m closing out this review of a werewolf review by praising the architecture. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Wolfen (1981)

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When collecting The Wolf of Snow Hollow at the library recently, I saw Wolfen sitting next to it on the shelf and thought, “Hey, why not?” Wolfen is a not-quite-werewolf movie that has been largely lost to time, as it was released the same year as more notable (and well-remembered) definitely-a-werewolf films An American Werewolf in London and The Howling. Although a bit slow, it is an interesting little oddball, and another contender for one of the better films made by a “one-and-done director.” Of course, that’s only technically true if you exclude his 1970 documentary release, Woodstock, which won Best Doc at the 1971 Oscars while also picking up a nomination for Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing. Still, this is his one and only directorial feature, from a screenplay that he co-wrote with David Eyre, who was fresh off of his work on Cattle Annie and Little Britches, making this his sophomore effort. Stranger still, it was based on a novel by Whitley Strieber, and if that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve seen this book cover before: 

And if you haven’t seen that, then you’ve probably at least seen the parody of it on The X-Files:

(This is my favorite episode, by the way.)

Strieber is no stranger to adaptations. Wolfen was his first novel, with his second, The Hunger, becoming the 1983 Tony Scott-helmed David Bowie vehicle of the same name, and his non-fiction book The Coming Global Superstorm is the basis for 2012’s Rolan Emmerich disaster film The Day After Tomorrow. This one seems to deviate pretty far from the source material, at least inasmuch as the titular “Wolfen” are handled, but we’ll get to that. 

It’s New York in the early 80s, a place and time where blight and crime were apparent and plentiful. Following a ground-breaking event, an entrepreneur, his wife, and their bodyguard make a stop in Battery Park, where the two were married. Shortly, however, all are slain by an unseen force or being, one that’s animalistic in some ways but also capable of neatly severing the hand of the bodyguard before he can finish drawing his sidearm. The bizarre nature of the crime prompts Captain Warren (Dick O’Neill) to call in Detective Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney), who’s been forced into semi-retirement due to personal issues and alcoholism, from which he seems to have recovered. Wilson ends up working closely with two others: Whittington (Gregory Hines), a coroner in the overworked morgue, and Dr. Rebecca Neff (Diane Venora), a criminal psychologist. At the top of the suspect list is a recently released felon Eddie Holt (Edward James Olmos), a (tribe not specified) Native American who was previously incarcerated based on his supposed involvement with a paramilitary terrorist organization. Of course, all the forensic evidence indicates that no knife or blade was used in the killings, and the only physical traces left behind all point to a wolf as the killer. 

In his contemporary review, Roger Ebert was quick to say that Wolfen was not a werewolf movie, which plays out in a scene that bears remarkable similarities to American Werewolf and Howling – until it doesn’t. Olmos (young and shockingly fit)’s Eddie strips down at the beach and begins howling at the moon and making dog-like prints in the sand with his hands, with the audience prepared for him to morph into a wolf of some kind, and then … he doesn’t. Dewey approaches him at the beach, having followed him from a bar, and Olmos stops in the middle of what would be a transformation scene in any other film, to taunt Dewey for his superstitions. Having semi-defined what Wolfen is not, we can say that Wolfen is a lot of things; it may, in fact, be too many things. The deceased billionaire killed in the film’s opening was the owner of a security firm whose budget apparently dwarfs that of the NYPD, complete with a monitoring system that looks like NASA launch command. Their network of surveillance borders on the futuristic, and that sci-fi boundary is crossed when we get to witness several interrogation scenes that feature impossibly advanced lie detection equipment. Wolfen is also a murder mystery that evolves into the pursuit of a serial killer as more bodies (well, more body parts) start popping up all over the Bronx. It’s a parable about ecology and colonialism that draws a comparison between the European slaughter of indigenous animals and humans. And, perhaps the most detrimental blow to the film, it’s a movie that has that New Hollywood zhuzh that makes it more interesting in some places and unfortunately bloated in others. 

Visually, this one is a stunner. A few years before it would be put to use in Predator, Wadleigh shoots a lot of footage from the point of view of the Wolfen using a technique that mimics thermographic filming. Many scenes are set in the penthouse of the first victim, which features a panoramic view of the city that can be enclosed by long, slender mirrored blinds which lend themselves to great multi-mirror shots and other less conventional uses. The dilapidated church in which the Wolfen are (probably) hiding stands alone amidst a pile of rubble of the surrounding buildings as starkly as if it were on a flat plain, and its burn-darkened exterior lends it a tremendous sense of ominousness. Large areas of urban terrain are composed of nothing but bricks and detritus that look like something out of The Third Man as Dewey seeks answers amidst the decay. The first scene in which Dewey and Holt meet is set atop Manhattan Bridge in a dizzying sequence that follows Dewey carefully treading along a narrow bit of scaffolding before the two of them face off at one of the bridge’s highest points, and it’s positively vertiginous. It’s cleverly and atmospherically photographed, but I can’t help but take some issue with the many instances in which the film goes on just a minute too long, and these add up to something that’s a little too stilted in places. 

Once Dewey can no longer pretend that something clearly supernatural is at work, he confronts Holt at the bar and gets the whole “Wolfen” thing explained to him. I won’t spoil it for you, other than to say that it does apparently differ from the book (in which the Wolfen are a semi-sentient parallel anthropomorphic evolution to humans who descended from a common ancestor with wolves). I’ll also say that it’s a little more heady than one would expect, and one that resonates despite some early invocation of “magical Native American” stereotypes. In that scene, Holt talks about how men may have the technological advantage over the Wolfen, and the film plays with this visually by showing us that the same kind of thermal imaging presented as being from the predator’s point of view is also in use in the lie detection software, showing that science is closing the gap, further enclosing the metaphorical (and perhaps literal) hunting grounds. 

Despite the occasional dragging and the very New Hollywood touch of forcing a romance plot between two formerly married people (Dewey and Neff, who have little chemistry), this one is solid, and worth checking out.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

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When watching Last Stop in Yuma County last year, my viewing companion mentioned that he had quite enjoyed The Wolf of Snow Hollow, another vehicle for Yuma lead Jim Cummings. Cummings first gained recognition for his feature film Thunder Road, which was an extension of his earlier short film of the same name. I remember seeing the trailers for Thunder Road at the Alamo Drafthouse during that summer that MoviePass was acting as a real-life free movie hack, but its time in theaters was relatively brief and I still have not managed to check it out. Per some contemporary reviews citing Cummings’ character in Snow Hollow as merely a variation on the one that he portrayed in Thunder Road (negatively), that may be for the best, as I came into Snow Hollow with no expectations. 

The film opens on the arrival of a young couple to a short-term rental in Snow Hollow, Utah. After the two relax for a bit in the hot tub, PJ (Jimmy Tatro) goes into the house to shower (and grab the engagement ring with which he is about to propose) while his girlfriend turns off the hot tub, but she’s attacked by someone or something that tears her to pieces. The local police arrive, and it becomes clear that deputy John Marshall (Cummings) is covering for the failing health of Sheriff Hadley (Robert Forster in his final film role), who also happens to be his father. John’s dealing with other issues in his family life as well, as his ex-wife serves as a thorn in his side in his relationship with his teenage daughter Jenna (Chloe East), who is set to start college early that January on a gymnastics scholarship. Further, he’s an alcoholic in recovery, having been in AA for six years and sober for three. His fellow law enforcement officers are largely inept and lazy, pleading to let state or federal officials take on the investigation, and the only other person on the team with any real interest in stopping the killer is Officer Julia Robson (Riki Lindhome). Matters only get worse when another body pops up, this time with evidence that the victim was killed by “a wolf the size of a Kodiak bear,” and the local citizens start to wonder if there’s a werewolf in their midst. 

This is a neatly constructed little mystery, although I would have preferred if some elements of the mystery were played a little closer to the vest, or for longer. Early on, there are a lot of potential suspects for who might be the werewolf (or the serial killer, as John forcefully reiterates time and again). There’s a local dudebro (Marshall Allman) with whom PJ got into an altercation at a local watering hole over the former’s use of the f-slur; Sheriff Hadley’s medical complications may bely that his body is undergoing changes, as poor health can often be an indicator of lycanthropy in horror; the owner of the short term rental (Will Madden) is suspicious since we saw that the AirBnB had all of its knives removed at the start of the film, as if setting up a victim to have no way of defending themself; even John himself could be the “wolf,” since we see that he’s short-tempered, and lycanthropy could be used as an effective shorthand for the complete personality change that alcohol abuse brings on. Subversively, the film shows us a potential suspect whose name we never learn and only ever see from a rear or ¼ rear profile, and who mostly resembles PJ, whom we know can’t be the killer since we saw him in the shower while the first murder is committed. Later, this character dies of an overdose and, because of feasible but circumstantial evidence, the werewolf’s killings are pinned on him, but by this time we’ve seen enough of the actual killer to know that he’s still out there, even if we have yet to identify him. I was expecting the film to get a little more mileage out of the “Which characters have we met could the killer be?” a little longer, but this is still a mostly elegantly constructed mystery regardless. 

What doesn’t quite work is the way that John’s alcoholism is portrayed. After his AA self-intro that functions as his character exposition scene/thesis statement, every time that we see him afterward, he’s clearly a hothead. He pops off at the first crime scene, berates his subordinates (who, since they’re all deputies, are really his peers) at a diner, and screams at Deputy Chavez (Demetrius Daniels) at the second site where a body is discovered. We understand why he’s so stressed, but he’s not a man that’s barely holding it together in the face of tending to his ailing father while facing pressure to find a killer, and is a man who’s already experiencing outbursts of anger long before he falls off the wagon. In the midst of these pre-relapse tantrums is a sequence that actually works, when John meets his ex-wife and Jenna at a diner and the former works to elicit a promise that John will be able to be present at their daughter’s college orientation, and he remains calm and speaks directly to Jenna while clearly struggling not to lose his temper at his ex at the same time. After a second body is found, John finally digs out the beers he has stashed away in the top kitchen cupboard, but there’s very little change in the way John treats the people around him. 

Cummings has the face of a movie star from a different era; when you look like he does, you don’t have much choice but to put it up on a screen somewhere. When it comes to this particular performance, however, it remains pretty flat from start to finish, which makes it seem like he only has one setting, and that static nature of this character takes a little shine out of the movie’s luster. Where we do see some escalation from his drinking comes as he falls completely off the wagon. After collapsing on his oven door and shattering it before passing out in the detritus, there’s a scene in which Jenna comes home to find John passed out on the living room floor, and after some struggle she manages to get him upstairs and into his bed. John, completely inebriated, breaks down into barely coherent sobs about his failures while Jenna stands in the hallway begging and pleading through her own tears for her father to just go to bed, screaming that he’s scaring her. It’s harrowing, even more so than any of the murders or crime scenes we’ve witnessed. More than that, it proves that Cummings does have more than one performance style in him, and it just makes me wish that I had seen a greater degree of difference between John before and after his demons got the better of him. 

This is a fun little horror comedy (with occasional heaving helpings of drama) with a talented cast and good inspiration. There are elements of Jaws at play here as the police force finds itself under intense scrutiny and pressure in order to make sure that the town doesn’t miss out on its annual cash injection from ski tourism. There’s great ambiguity throughout about whether there really is a werewolf in Snow Hollow or if there’s a seven-foot serial killer using folklore and superstition to cover for their compulsions. There’s some fun misdirection throughout, as it at first seems that the connection between the victims has something to do with the elementary school that they attended, but this is either a subplot that was dropped or it’s an intentional red herring, and I’d say that the scaffolding of the story is otherwise solid enough that I’d vote it’s the latter.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #197: The Wolf Man (1941) & Other Wolf Men

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Welcome to Episode #197 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss four horror movies about werewolves, starting with Universal’s genre-defining classic The Wolf Man (1941).

00:00 Welcome

04:29 Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
09:50 Saw X (2023)
11:52 They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969)
18:02 The Royal Hotel (2023)
20:07 Hotel Coolgardie (2016)

22:06 The Wolf Man (1941)
40:05 An American Werewolf in London (1981)
56:03 Dog Soldiers (2002)
1:10:06 Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope (1975)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: The Company of Wolves (1984)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli continue their celebration of Angela Lansbury by discussing the coming-of-age werewolf anthology horror The Company of Wolves (1984).

00:00 Welcome

00:55 Knife+Heart (2018)
03:52 The Menu (2022)
05:00 Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2022)
08:20 Andor
09:58 Weird (2022)
13:50 Fire of Love (2022)
16:10 Barbarian (2022)
17:25 Fifty Shades
20:07 Do Revenge (2022)
22:14 Don’t Worry Darling (2022)
25:25 Bones and All (2022)
29:10 The Eternal Daughter (2022)

32:48 The Company of Wolves (1984)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: Ginger Snaps (2000)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the lycanthropic puberty horror Ginger Snaps (2000).

00:00 Welcome

00:50 We Need to Do Something (2021)
10:40 Ghost Stories (2018)
13:30 Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (1988)
15:25 Possession (1981)
20:20 In the Earth (2021)
23:00 The Langoliers (1995)
26:00 Lifeforce (1985)
29:45 Candyman (2021)
36:15 Lamb (2021)

40:00 Ginger Snaps (2000)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

The True Battle in Underworld (2003) Wasn’t Vampires vs. Werewolves, It Was Practical Effects vs. CGI

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Despite extending its presence on movie marquees all the way into 2017 through a series of unnecessary prequels & sequels, 2003’s action-horror epic Underworld has always been something of a critical punching bag. Registering with an embarrassing 31% aggregated approval rating on the Tomatometer, this bygone nu-metal era tale of an ancient race war between werewolves & vampires was the Twilight of its day: a critically derided mall-goth romance that found the right angsty audience at the right angsty time. It’s admittedly easy to see why pro critics would be harsh on the film immediately upon its release, despite its populist appeal. It’s practically a work of mu-metal horror pastiche – combining elements of Blade, The Matrix, Resident Evil, and Romeo+Juliet into a single flavorless gumbo without contributing much spice of its own. The film was even sued (and settled out of court) for “borrowing” its elaborate vampires vs. werewolves mythology from the popular tabletop RPG Vampire: the Masquerade – which was the one aspect of its initial outing that critics did praise. Finally catching up with Underworld myself, sixteen years after it was first panned and two years after its final installments passed through theaters unnoticed like a fart in the wind, I enjoyed the experience far more than I expected to. That enjoyment was purely a result of its visual effects work, though, which may have seemed less special at the time of its release than the modern miracle it feels like now in 2019.

I’m not about to rush out and gobble down all four sequels to Underworld or anything. Its vampires vs. werewolves race war mythology isn’t that exciting, nor is its star-crossed interspecies romance across those battle lines. Even the novelty of seeing legitimate actors like Kate Beckinsale, Michael Sheen, and Bill Nighy occupy this leather-fetish mall-goth fantasy space could only lead to diminishing returns, as I imagine the star power in, say, Underworld 4: Awakening is much less luminous. I enjoyed Underworld for exactly one (admittedly shallow) reason: the werewolves look really fucking cool (despite being referred to in-canon as “lycans,” which is not cool at all). Whenever you look back to creature features from this early 00s era, it’s always best to brace yourself for some horrifically shoddy CGI. Contemporaries like Ghosts of Mars, Queen of the Damned, and Spawn all feature early-CG monstrosities whose ambitions overshot their means, resulting in visual effects that have aged about as well as diapers on the beach. I couldn’t believe my eyes, then, when the werewolves onscreen in this Hollywood action-horror were genuine rubber-suit creations from practical gore artists. There’s so much physical blood, fangs, werewolf hair, and leathery nipples onscreen here when the standard for its era would have been a shapeless CG blur. Underworld is stubbornly committed to practical-effects gore (for its time at least) in a way I can’t help but respect, even if I can’t extend that same dorky enthusiasm to its romantic drama or its gothy worldbuilding.

You can get a concise snapshot of this stubbornness & dorky enthusiasm on the Special Features menu of the Underworld DVD, which includes a 12min featurette titled “Creature Effects.” Director (and all-around Underworld mastermind) Len Wiseman’s dorkiness just oozes from the screen in this behind-the-scenes interview. Dressed up like a mall-metal dweeb himself, Wiseman recounts meeting special effects artist Patrick Tatopoulos on the set of Stargate (where Wisemen was working as a props manager) and dreaming up ways to use the veteran’s expertise to craft a gothy creature feature of his own design (with some help from plenty of pre-exiting genre films of a higher caliber, of course). As Tatopoulos takes the audience on a backstage tour of the massive teams & teams of creators needed to achieve the film’s practical effects, it becomes apparent why CGI became the dominant industry standard. Animatronics tech, stilts, silicone body suits, and post-Matrix wire work all needed to operate in tandem to make just one werewolf crawl across the wall—and then CG effects were still used after the fact to smooth out the details. Watching artists work tirelessly to punch individual yak hairs into a werewolf mask or airbrush purple veins onto actors to indicate they’ve been poisoned with silver bullets is astonishing in its commitment to the value of real, tangible effects, even when they’re bolstered by CG touchups. Wiseman & Tatopoulos citing tiles like Aliens, the Predator, and Pumpkinhead as influences or insisting that they “wanted the werewolves to be sexy” really helps contextualize the horror nerd enthusiasm necessary to pull those effects off in the CGI-worshiping days of 2003 when the preference would be to just do it all on computers. It also helps explain why Underworld has aged (at least slightly) better than its contemporary critical reputation might have prepared us for.

Over time, Wiseman & Tatopoulos lost the war over preserving practical effects artistry in the face of CGI dominance. By Underworld 4: Awakening & Underworld 5: Blood Wars, CGI was no longer used to enhance their “sexy,” in-the-flesh werewolf creations, but instead had replaced them entirely. That’s a shame, since the obviously physical presence of those “lycans” in a time when everything was fading away into a CG blur was the one saving grace that makes Underworld something of a modern novelty. It would have been so cool to see that nerdy stubbornness extend into the 2010s, and might have afforded the series a second populist wind. Oh well, at least we can still revel in that dying artistry in the film’s behind-the-scenes tour, which some kind, copyright-infringing soul has uploaded to YouTube:

-Brandon Ledet