Recent viewing: Sunday night we watched Dog Soldiers, a British horror film from last year.
A band of soldiers doing manoeuvres up in Scotland get besieged by a pack of werewolves. How’s that for a simple idea? I expected it to suck, to be honest, but it was okay. What, a decent British fright flick? Yep. There have been several recently, so I hear.
Some of the direction/action is a little confusing, but the acting is solid and the creatures are entirely convincing. Actually, they’re amongst the creepiest werewolves I’ve ever seen—huge, lithe monstrosities, rather similar to Bernie Wrightson’s rendition from Cycle of the Werewolf, only without the muscles. Good use of a small budget, FX-wise.
My only real gripe is the occasional black humour… mostly it’s played fairly straight, so the intermittent ‘funny’ stuff jarred a bit. One sequence shows a dog trying to pull the wounded sarge’s guts across the room, and this was just plain horrible, not funny.
Still, speaking as someone who has a downer on modern British cinema, I was pleasantly surprised. There are some interesting (if predictable) twists, and mostly it works. Worth a look if you like monster movies, and don’t mind seeing chunks of latex covered in stage blood being thrown around the screen…
You should watch 28 days later, brit-horr is alive and kicking!!
Well, it was no classic. But I expected it to be total rubbish, and I don’t think it was. I measured it against my horrendously low opinion of British cinema (1970s onwards, at least).
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