Dog Soldiers is a very low budget monster movie, one that will appeal largely to genre fans, thanks to its clever writing, funny dialogue, and imaginative action sequences. It's not really a film non-horror fans are going to enjoy, with the hilariously-cheesy "man in suit" werewolves, cliched characters, and constant violence and profanity, but if you like intelligent shoestring film making, and horror, and monsters, you could have a good time with this one.
It's a movie that you're likely to end up feeling rather fond of, in a "root for the underdog" sort of way. It's got a lot of witty touches and one clever film homage after another, and while it won't wow you with its quality, it's not bad. Malaya and I had zero expectations going into this one, and laughed aloud at the home-made werewolf costumes, but the movie soon won us over with funny dialogue, earnestly-amateurish acting, and interesting scenarios. It's even got a decent plot, with lots of early scenes intelligently foreshadowing later developments.
To the scores, which are
explained here:
Dog Soldiers, 2002
Script/Story: 6
Acting/Casting: 4
Action: 5
Combat Realism: 5
Humor: 5
Horror: 6
Eye Candy: 2
Fun Factor: 4
Replayability: 6
Overall: 6
This "man in suit" horror film was recommended to me by a reader, long ago, and when I saw it on sale as a used VHS tape for $2, I bought it. At least a year passed before we finally got around to watching it, and while it's clearly a very low-budget, amateurish production, it's fun, and has some nice ideas, and does pretty much the best it can with the tools at its disposal.
The film is set in Scotland or Wales or some cold, northern area of the UK, and all of the actors sound like locals, or at least authentic Brits. Yes, we could have used subtitles a few times, since their accents are thicker than pea soup. The plot involves a group of army soldiers on a training exercise in the remote countryside, who are beset by a mob of werewolves. The soldiers hole up in a farm cabin, and fight off the attacking werewolves for a while, doing the best they can despite the fact that bullets don't seem to do much more than tickle the monsters.
The beasts are scary, in the best old style costume terror sort of way. There's not a bit of CGI in the film; it's all guys in wolf suits and masks, and while you're never able to forget the fact that it's guys in suits, they aren't bad suits. It's certainly more believable than the constant cartoon-y CGI bullshit in big budget films like
Van Helsing and
Underworld, at any rate.
There is a plot to the madness, sort of. While on patrol the soldiers find the mauled and murdered remains of a group of special forces soldiers, with one lone survivor. He's their commanding officer, and we know the Captain, since the opening scene of the film was a flashback to a year or two ago, when the leader of the soldiers was trying to become a member of some special forces outfit. This captain, the one survivor of the werewolf attack, was the leader of those special forces, and he flunked the lead soldier out when he would not shoot a dog at the conclusion of his final training exercise. Guess whether or not that plot point will come back later, while he's fighting werewolves?
Other connections come through also, with the one female civilian helping them turning out to be more than she seems, the Captain's presence there being far from an accident, the house they end up hiding in being all too convenient, and so on. It's definitely more clever than most horror films, and the battle scenes with the werewolves are pretty imaginative as well, with fights to keep them from coming in windows, through doors, around furniture and so frequently amusing.
I can't really recommend
Dog Soldiers, since it's just so shoestring budget and production values and amateurish in the acting, but if you like horror films with more imagination than special effects, you might enjoy this one for a cheap rental. It's more fun than a lot of big budget films of its type, at least, and so long as you go in with reasonable expectations, you won't be disappointed.
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