No. 144 : Werewolf the Devil’s Hound (2007)

Werewolf The Devil's Hound at the IMDb

When you undertake a worthy quest like watching over 100 movies that start with a ‘W’ you inevitably see a lot of wolf and wolf-men based pictures. The standard of these vary considerably and quite often the pass/fail tightrope is judged by the creature effects and the deviations from the standard template.

This film is by no means a masterpiece but at least it attempted to do something a teensy bit different with a tired old genre. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its flaws but, as with a lot of cheapo horror flicks, the restrained budget can be half the fun.

The film opens “in the near future” - why, I have no idea as it looks exactly like today. The opening scene is in ‘Germany’, although I suspect it’s the director’s back yard, and three men with night vision goggles are on a hunt. A familiar lupine howl is heard before one gets a really sore throat from a beast that looks a lot like Chewbacca’s albino cousin. Another man manages to tranquillise it and stick it in a big box reminiscent of the one in that ‘Creepshow’ film. I doubt this was a homage though but simply the box they had. After making a vague comment in fractured English about transformations he sends the box off to an unspecified destination.

Meanwhile in the States a man is awaiting a delivery of some big boxes of fireworks for his pyrotechnics business. When too many appear he thinks he’s getting a good deal but that extra box looks a bit familiar! Predictably the beast is soon on the loose and bites the hand of Kevin who thinks it’s his neighbours dog. Obviously he has never done a ‘W’ movie quest as the wolfie symptoms of acute senses and a feeling of invigoration completely fail to warn him of the wolf man curse that now flows through his veins. Elsewhere the hungry beast is racking up the victims with a lazy fire officer and a lady the first snacks.

The middle third of the film is a bit slow as our man slowly realises that he is becoming a werewolf which causing obvious ructions with his wife, especially when he hooks up with the werewolf, who is a foxy chick in her day clothes. It is worth sticking with the film though as the last half hour is totally nuts with all sorts of weirdness going on. I liked the werewolf fighting the robots which the company had in stock and when the Germans appear for the finale any sense of realism goes out the window. Things pan out as you’d expect, if you expected aliens and explosions.

The actors were uniformly awful and I’d be surprised if there was one trained thespian among their number. Especially bad was the nerdy intern who at least offered one laugh when he arrived with some Sellotape to help secure the door which was being attacked by wolfie. The lead did a poor job of conveying his angst and surprise at being a werewolf, as was his dad who didn’t seem fazed in the slightest.

Although this film seems to have a budget in the hundreds rather than the thousands I did quite enjoy it, especially its quirky touches like an impromptu animation to explain a small plot point. I also liked some of the direction which made the most or rather the least from the wolf suit (that looked more like a yeti than a wolf man) - disguising it by only showing it during gun shot flashes was a decent way of not ruining the illusion.

Sometimes the director goes a bit far, with the arty shots coming thick and fast like he’s running through his film school idiot’s guide on speed. The film enjoys a meagre score of 3/10 on IMDb and that seems harsh when you consider some of the crap that gets a mighty 4/10. I’d say half marks for a good honest effort which doesn’t take itself too seriously would be fair. The film does end with an ominous ‘The End?’ - let’s leave it there chaps even our low limits can be tested!

Best Bit : Nerd loses his head
‘W’ Rating 13/23

No. 143 : Wedding Crashers (2005)

Wedding Crashers at the IMDb

Here’s a film that looks like it will be good for a few laughs but when you sit through the thing you realise that it’s a lot of preachy sentimental guff. And I love you man for hearing that.

Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn are the titular crashers, a laborious process that seems to involve a lot of work to get some free canapés and score some chicks - haven’t these guys ever heard of the free buffet at Hooters? Basically they finagle their way into weddings and work hard at being the life and soul of the party. They don’t mention how they get in the seating plan for dinner but for my money I imagine most hosts would welcome them as most weddings painfully dull.

The first 20 minutes is basically an extended montage of various weddings and demonstrates the versatility of our fellows - they can do Jewish, Indian you name it. As the montage closes we see them bed an unfeasible parade of lovelies and frankly we’re all as jealous as Hell. But wait! Are they really happy and fulfilled? Who cares? Let’s have more laughs. Sadly no, the remainder of our film deals with the realisation that the fun times are fleeting and we should get married to be really happy.

The turning point comes at a wedding hosted by a US senator played by Christopher Walken, who seems in strangely muted form. After our guys steal the show they are invited back to the family spread for the weekend. Owen is keen to go as he’s taken a shine to Rachel McAdams whereas Vince is less so due to the amorous attentions of the clearly loopy Isla Fisher. Of course they go and over the course of the weekend have various misadventures with Jane Seymour’s horny mother and the artist brother who takes a shine to Vince.

All is not well however as McAdams' slimy fiancée smells a rat and exposes our guys fabricated tales. They rightly get booted out but their friendship suffers as the love struck Wilson can’t cope with rejection. Vaughn meanwhile is still seeing Fisher leaving Wilson no choice but to seek council from the legendary crasher Chazz, Will Ferrell, who has now graduated to crashing funerals. With the family now strangely happy for Vaughn to marry their daughter it’s up to Wilson to crash one last wedding in the hope of a happy ending for all.

I enjoyed this film a lot less than I should have done given the talent on show. The leads are all likable when they are misbehaving but as soon as it gets serious it goes downhill fast. Some of the sentimental pap is barf inducing especially from Wilson whose serial stalker comes out with some real mawkish rubbish. Vaughn is little better offering hugs and ‘love yous’ every five minutes. The only one who comes out with any credibility is Ferrell who sticks to the mantra and seems to be doing fine despite being painted as a loser.

I did feel sorry for the fiancé character who seemed the only one on the ball and gets vilified for exposing the con men. His character gets assassinated when he’s rude to the servant and eyes up some chicks but at least he is up front about it. His downfall at the end isn’t really earned although I did like Vaughn’s ‘Ike Turner’ line.

The other thing that irritated me was the constant quoting of the rules - yeah like they’re going to learn over 100 nuggets of wisdom and live by them. Beer and chicks should have covered it. There were a few good bits including a Milftastic turn by Seymour but overall the message was too in your face and it smothered what comedy the film may have had. It was also troubling to see Wilson with a suicide book only months before his own attempt - sloppy work props department!

Best Bit : Feel them
‘W’ Rating : 11/23

No. 142 : When Saturday Comes (1996)

When Saturday Comes at the IMDb

Sean Bean stars in this grim up north working class hero drama. We open with a young Jimmy at careers day ‘It’s factory or t’pit’ say the helpful man as the rebellious Jimmy refuses to straighten his tie. He and his slightly simple bother try for a fly pint but are rundown by their shiftless father who tells them they won’t amount to anything. Remember all these put downs for later folks!

Jimmy does defy the career man’s predictions however and we find him grown up and working at t’brewery instead. The place seems like good craik apart from a nasty stereotype they’ve strangely employed as foreman. At home the slightly simple brother has amassed a valuable collection of football programmes while Dad is still a loser looking for cash - guard them programmes for goodness sake!

Jimmy is quite happy playing for the pub team and drinking with his mates until a date with the new wages clerk suggests he may be destined for bigger things. The wages clerk, played by Emily Lloyd is more Irish than a leprechaun’s arse but she inspires our man to look for a trial for the local team despite being 36 already.

We then beat a familiar path of small setbacks and wins including a fortuitous walk by the pit just as it caves in on a loved one and a bet on an inappropriately named nag that comes in at 20-1 just in time to pay the gas bill. It can be no surprise that he eventually makes the grade, given the DVD cover and all, but it’s a reasonably fun ride getting there.

The film is written and directed by a lady so you can forgive a few sporting clichés and some pretty poorly set up footballing scenes. Her romantic vision of the game is quite innocent really and it’s almost like a fantasy football reconstruction of someone who in actual fact got his leg broken in the first five minutes in the rain.

The film gets into its own when Jimmy gets his chance with Pete Postelthwaite’s wise uncle with the nasty fellow pros hoping to upset his chances. The baddies are all pretty harmless and a good job is done of setting them up only for our hero to triumph. As always in these things a few real pros are roped in to give it a sense of realism and for them to embarrass themselves in the acting stakes; so take a bow Tony Currie you were nearly as animated as your football sticker.

Mr Bean clearly is having a good time throughout and who could blame him when the script demands he cavorts with strippers as well as Lloyd and gets to play for his favourites Sheffield United. Good work if you can get it! Of the characters I liked the Dad and the foremen best both of whom would give Dick Dastardly a run in the moustache twirling stakes.

The script is pretty pedestrian but as a working class factory worker wish fulfilment you could do a lot worse.

Best Bit : Sean gives Emily a necklace
‘W’ Rating : 15/23

No. 141 : Woyzeck (1979)

Woyzeck at the IMDb

A bit more highbrow fare here at the 100+ ‘W’ Movies quest with a German language period piece directed by Werner Herzog and starring his usual favourite Klaus Kinski. To be honest I didn’t fancy it either but for £3 at Fopp who could argue?

The film opens with Kinski, who is a lowly army private, being run around the parade ground. After this he earns a few extra coins by shaving his Captain who must be a brave man to let Kinski near him with a razor. He also works part time for a doctor who is as mental as he is having Kinski eat nothing but peas for months and catching his falling cats.

If these points sound a bit whimsical they aren’t. There are no laughs at all in the film, just a lot of philosophising and gnashing of teeth. At home Kinski has a pretty lover and a bastard child. The lover takes his few coins but is being distracted by a drum major who has a nicer jacket. The stress of his life and all pea diet is sending Klaus around the bend and he starts to hear voices and imagines the earth is hollow with doom on the horizon.

After a few distressing episodes he goes and buys a knife and stabs his lover down by the river. Once he’s stabbed her for a full five minutes he retires to the bar where his blood soaked clothes draw attention causing him to flee. He returns to the murder spot to retrieve his knife and tries to dispose of it in the river. He convinces himself that each throw isn’t far enough and wades in each time to collect the knife and throw it further.

The film closes with the undertakers recovering the dead girl and we are left to guess if Klaus joined her by drowning. The film ends with a helpful caption that this was a ‘good murder’.

I wasn’t looking forward to this film and the sleeve notes which stated that it made a nod to Becket and Brecht inspired even less confidence. My fears were realised with a rather boring and ponderous film that seemed very nihilistic throughout. Klaus’ early comments that the poor didn’t have the luxury of virtue sealed his fate from the off and his downward spiral was relentless. The film looks pretty enough but has only 28 cuts in total meaning we get lots of drawn out scenes and moody silences. At one point I had to check that I hadn’t pressed ‘pause’ in error as Klaus just stared at me wordlessly for three minutes.

I’m sure this kind of film would go down a storm in the art houses and with pretentious students but as an exercise in enjoyment and entertainment it failed miserably. Think I’ll go and watch an autopsy to cheer myself up!

Best Bit : Cat-astrophie Averted
‘W’ Rating : 9/23

No. 140 : Welcome To Spring Break (1989)

Welcome to Spring Break at the IMDb

This film is also known as ‘Nightmare Beach’ but that’s a rubbish title seeing as hardly any of the action takes place at the beach and of course because it doesn’t start with a ‘W’.

The film is one of a raft of teen slasher films that were rushed out to cash in on the home video boom. It is terrible, and to be honest it’s hard to find many positives in the mess but let's have a look anyway. Someone may not have to suffer because I did.

We open with a pre-credits sequence of a man being executed by electric chair. A gang of bikers pays silent vigil outside and apart from a promise to seek revenge from beyond the grave things go to plan. After the credits we meet the motley cast. Skip and his buddy are in town to get over Skip’s disastrous performance in a football match. They drink at a bar tended by the sister of the girl that the executed biker murdered and run into the ‘Demons’ biker gang too.

We also meet the corrupt police chief played by the usually reliable but not here John Saxon and the mayor, who wants nothing to upset his lucrative spring break trade. Filling out the roster we get a party girl and her priest father who warns of doom for all sinners and a man who shouts ‘Go Gators’ in almost ever scene. The party is going well with wet t-shirt parties all the rage until a hitchhiker foolishly accepts a lift from a mysterious biker who has his own rock sound track. His bike is modified to electrocute any passengers to the extent that the girl ends up looking Kentucky fried.

Further murders follow including a hooker and a peeping tom before Skip’s pal gets set alight by the baddie after a kicking from the bikers. Amazingly the police chief and coroner agree to dump the body in a mine rather than suffer some bad publicity. Skip enlists the help of the bar girl and soon they are unravelling the web of conspiracy. With the body count rising so is our list of suspects - could the electrocuted biker be making good on his deathly promise or is it the police chief or the priest?

The best thing about this film is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously and rightly so. The guy playing Skip has to be the worst actor I’ve ever seen and it’s no surprise that this film killed his career stone dead. His eulogy over his dead, but salt covered, friend was indescribably bad with Saxon arriving just in time to save us all more misery.

The deaths come at a steady rate and some are quite imaginative although not too realistic - who’d of thought that a small electrical cable would have enough juice to cook your head and make your eye pop out? The budget is clearly miniscule with gaggles of real spring breakers roped in as extras and to take their tops off.

The ‘mystery’ killer was so obvious from the start I’m surprised that he bothered to wear a helmet. If you confess to not getting it straight away you should say your prayers and hope he gets collared soon. It was the priest. Although how he got away with those tight leathers and a big souped up and modified motorbike I can only imagine. Oh wait, a catholic priest - standard dress and behaviour then!

This is by no means the worst teen slasher flick you’ll ever see but it’s awful acting and non existent plot means that you’ll just have to make the best of the bikini girls and wet t-shirts, which is fine.

Best Bit : Peep show gets closed
‘W’ Rating : 11/23

No. 139 : While She Was Out (2008)

While She Was Out at the IMDb

Call me an old chauvinist, but when I saw this was a revenge thriller written and directed by a lady I thought that the male characters may not come across too well. But you know what they say about making assumptions, don’t you? Yes, that’s right they are quite often correct.

Kim Basinger plays Della, a put upon housewife. She is the mother of twins and the wife of a right bastard who expects the house to be a bit tidy when he comes home from work. “What do you do all day” he reasonably asks only to be rewarded with some attitude and no martini. It happens to be Christmas eve so after her hard day of slobbing about Della decides to go to the mall for some wrapping paper.

Della’s tough day soon gets worse however when she has trouble getting a parking space (on Christmas eve - go figure!) and a coffee server spells her name wrongly on her cup. - no wonder she’s ready to burst. She manages to get her stuff despite another crisis with her credit card and she heads for home. She does however regret leaving a pissy note on a badly parked car when the occupants show up to tell her off.

Luckily Paul Blart is on duty as he tells the four thugs to move on but gets a couple of slugs in his head for his trouble. Della manages to get away with the foursome in pursuit but rather than head home or to a police station she dives off into a half built housing scheme before crashing her car. The bad guys, lead by an unthreatening Lukas Haas, are white, black, Asian and Chinese - a multi cultural cadre of evil! I suspect their ethnicity was a deliberate ploy to show that ALL men are bastards, regardless of colour.

Anyway the baddies have Della trapped in the housing scheme or is it she who has trapped them? What follows is a series of unfortunate events where Della, armed with her trusty tool box, systematically takes out the bad guys with various implements - you go girl! Before long it’s Della vs. Lukas and it’d be a brave man who’d bet on the bloke!

I quite enjoyed this film but it was let down by its feminist agenda and ropey last 15 minutes. The male characters are awful to a man and you can see this as nothing more than female wish fulfilment from a bunch of angry and possibly menopausal dungarees wearers. If this were made the other way around there would be a justified outcry, but as it is, it just comes across as silly and illogical.

Della is obviously near breaking point due to the many traumas we see her suffer in her domestic life but how this transforms her into an SAS survival expert isn’t fully covered. I did like some of the gory deaths though with the tyre iron a genuine classic.

Basinger does well with the weak material, but I bet inside she’s thinking ‘I won an Oscar why am in this crap!’. Haas is very poor as the lead villain and spends most of the film shouting ‘Dell-a Dell-a’ like he’s auditioning for a dyslexic production of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’. His demise is the most far fetched of all and highlights that it’s a woman writing the script - if I’d seen three of my pals butchered I’d be running for the hills not getting amorous with the strangely willing assailant!

If you add up my various moans you’ll probably think the film is a waste of time but I enjoyed it and it’s rather blinkered view of humanity. Possibly not one to watch with the good lady however - maybe suggest she gets on with the laundry will you partake of its dubious pleasures.

Best Bit : I’ll just loosen those face nuts for you
‘W’ rating : 14/23

No. 138 : What Doesn’t Kill You (2008)

What Doesn't Kill You at the IMDb

Here’s a film that’s familiar on many levels but still offers enough nuggets of interest to garner pass marks. It opens with a botched armoured car robbery with an off duty policeman interfering with the sloppily planned job. Ethan Hawke pulls off his mask and strides towards the have a go hero with his gun blazing. Before we find out the outcome of the shoot out we dissolve to the past and learn that this is one of those films where we’ll have to watch for 90 minutes just to get back to the starting point.

Hawke and ‘W’ thread friend Mark Ruffalo are a pair of tearaways who grow up on the tough streets of Boston. We see them as teenagers running errands for the local Irish villain and then 15 years later, still doing the same petty crimes. They try to branch out on their own but an early heist involving dodgy TVs sees them sent down for five years.

Ruffalo eventually makes his parole but Hawke gets an extra six months for bashing a nonce. Our man finds it tough on the outside and soon the nuns and the gas board are looking for their overdue cash. With jobs hard to come by Ruffalo struggles with staying away from petty crime and the bottle. With breaking point reached Hawke gets out and suggests that the end to their trouble can be found with one last big job. With the stick up fast approaching we have to guess who’ll be on the crew and whether it’ll be successful.

We’ve seen most of this stuff before with films like ‘The Departed’ and ‘The Boondock Saints’ heavy influences here. The two leads are excellent and I thought Hawke in particular was very reminiscent of his recent outing in ‘Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead’. This film isn’t as good as that one but that’s obvious seeing that it doesn’t have Philip Seymour Hoffman or Marisa Tomei displaying her charms. We do get Amanda Peet as Ruffalo’s wife but all she does is moan a lot.

The idea that the two protagonists are on a road that has no exits is, again, a well worn one but they could have jazzed it up somewhat as they were basically saying that if you can only get a crappy job you may as well rob banks. The bad guys lacked a bit of menace and while I’m sure their casual threats delivered from their cosy bar was meant to be reminiscent of ‘The Sopranos’ they served only to show their shortcomings next to that series.

I did like the interplay between the two leads with some of their capers such as dognapping clearly played for laughs. Ruffalo was a bit too anguished as the tormented family man trying to do the right thing but overall I cared a bit so something was right. The ending delivered a rather unearned surprised and my usually favoured ‘what happened next’ captions seemed somewhat out of place here, reminding us that it was a movie rather than a gritty drama.

Despite the various nits the film is better than average but not as good as any of the other stuff I’ve compared it to in the review. So there you have it, if the faint praise doesn’t kill you it’ll only make you stronger.

Best Bit : Nonce Gets His Dues
‘W’ Rating 15/23