No.220 - Wolfcop (2014)

Wolfcop at the IMDb

I wasn't expecting much from ‘Wolfcop’ and in that regard at least I wasn't disappointed.

It certainly does what it says on the tin in that it has a cop who is also a wolf - what surprised me was that the cop/wolf actually kept up with its law enforcement duties. Can’t fault the commitment to the job there, Officer.

Our hero is Lou, played with scuzzy understatement by Leo Fafard, who is an under-performing policeman in a small town. He’s an alcoholic and ignores various small crimes such as vandalism as he makes his way to the police station. He has his boss on his back but has an able co-worker in Tina, who wins the employee of the month prize every time.

The towns is in the midst of a mayoral election and the annual ‘Hunt and Drink’ day is coming up. Lou does as little work as possible and spends his day getting drunk with a barmaid and his loser pal. Things change however when he wakes up with a pentangle carved into his chest and he is unable to shave due to immediate hair regrowth. He scratches his hairy chin and remembers flashes of creeps in monk habits carving the pentangle on him whilst another chap is scarified.

We soon learn that the victim is a candidate for mayor giving the incumbent no challengers to returning to the office and the excuse to cancel the Hunt and Drink day which coincides with a solar eclipse which strangely happenes every 32 years. Lou does some research and learns that by having a sacrifice a group of shape shifters can regenerate for another 32 years if they drink the blood of a werewolf during the eclipse. You can't argue with science like that!

Lou confides in his friend who locks him in a cell to witness the transformation and unusually Lou, despite a wolfy appearance, decides to put on his uniform and modify his police car before going on patrol. As the full moon  and eclipse move closer Lou has to keep a watch on who are his friends and who are the shape shifters. Can the curse be broken and will Lou find redemption after years of mourning his dead father?

This is a strange sort of film - It doesn't take itself seriously and there is a lot of gore but it is also played for laughs as well as drama. Just when you think it’s going down a familiar path Lou gets out his angle grinder in full werewolf mode and starts to customise his patrol car with big ‘W’s - possibly in tribute to this blog, it isn't clear.

The shifts in tone are a bit jarring but if you are watching a film called ‘Wolfcop’ you can hardly complain. The special effects were half decent with plenty of glycerine used for the transformation scene. There are also a couple of gruesome deaths and I especially likes a skull revealing ‘face off’ moment.

At a trim 79 minutes the film doesn't outstay its welcome but by the same measure you aren't baying for more. The thin plot played out satisfactorily and the cast mostly did well with some preposterous dialogue. The exception would be the bad guy leader who had a tear tattoo and no menace whatsoever.

I'm not inclined to hunt down the sequel promised in the credits but there are worse ways of spending an hour or so on Netflix.

Best Bit : face off in the corner
‘W’ Score 15/23

No. 146 : Werewolf Woman (1976)

Werewolf Woman at the IMDb

We round off our recent trio of werewolf films with perhaps the most mental and skuzzy offering you’re ever likely to see. Seemingly a favourite of Quentin Tarantino ‘Werewolf Woman’ is a tacky Italian offering that marries soft porn with people being eaten.

We open with a group of villagers hunting a monster with torches, perhaps 200 years ago. A naked woman dances over the front credits before she is cornered by the townsfolk and slowly transforms into a kind of Chewbacca sex doll. This outfit, complete with four inch nipples, has to be seen to be believed. Not overly turned on by her charms the mob readies to burn her before a woman identical in appearance to the pre-wolf wench wakes up. It was all a dream or was it? No, it was the lady’s ancestor and we have to worry that the wolfie gene may still be active.

The lady is called Daniella and she suffers from voices in the head and an aversion to clothing. Her Pop takes her out to the country to convalese but before long the urges take her over and she takes a bite out of her sister’s husband - at least the sister can take solace in the fact that he enjoyed several minutes of graphic lovemaking before he got chomped. Daniella is understandably committed the to the nut house but she is soon free when another patient loosens her bonds so they can enjoy some explicit lesbian sex. Any theme starting to show up yet?

Daniella takes to the road and is offered a lift and lodgings by a balding and badly dubbed man who, after getting a surprising refusal, announces "You whore, I’m gonna rape ya” before getting his just desserts. Daniella takes flight once more but is again offered a ride and a place to stay, this time by a far sexier man who is a movie stuntman who naturally lives on a wild west set. Although the bloodlust grips her again, Danielle manages to overcome her bitey habits due to love. Obviously we can’t have that so three men break in to rape her and kill her beau. Can our girl exact her revenge and will she overcome the curse once and for all?

This is a really awful film that comfortably fits in the ‘so bad it’s good’ category. The title is a bit of a misnomer as Daniella never becomes a werewolf but only acts under its spell or influence. This is fine by me as the make up in the opening scene was dreadful and I can only assume the director ordered a rewrite to keep it off the screen. Although they persist with the mystical gubbins the obvious answer is that the woman is totally bananas and just likes biting throats. The lead actress, Annik Borrel, is pretty enough but she takes her clothes off so often it gets to the stage where you think ‘C’mon luv put ‘em away’ just before she gets them out again. I’m all for nakedness but she does a good job of seeming mental so it’s not so much a turn on as pretty unnerving.

Sometimes in a dubbed film it can be hard to judge the acting but here it’s mostly bad given the reactions and facial expressions. The pursuing cops are your usual gang of nitwits while the bad guys still have the outline from where the cookie cutter stamped out their characters. The director does his best with a bad lot but must be held accountable for a really poor ‘falling in love’ montage. The lover is a stuntman so we get three separate scenes of him executing a stunt before they embrace - those saloon windows don’t come cheap you know!

The dubbing and translations are laughably bad with great outrages greeted with the most sober of responses such as the man on finding his lover being gang raped by three men = “hey”. It is of course tailored to a certain market of exploitation fans with the next death or nude scene never more than five minutes away. No effort is made to explain the curse or to find a cure and the ending can be described as enigmatic at best. Overall ‘Werewolf Woman’ does what it says on the tin. As long as the tin says ‘naked women and grisly deaths’.

Best Bit : Opening wolfiness
‘W’ Rating : 14/23