Slap her she's a lycanthrope

Dog Soldiers

A surprisingly good werewolf movie, and made all the better so because it's British. It's a simple idea, squaddies on a training exercise in the remote highlands get attacked by werewolves, but it's nicely handled all the same.

The acting is strong, and you believe a real sense of comraderie between the squaddies. The two main leads deliver strong performances. The development of character is done well and without too much patronisation.

The werewolves stay in the dark for much of the film, hunched figures with canine faces darting about the woods surrounding the farmhouse. Obviously, British Film = British Special Effects Budget, but they use what they have well, and the werewolves never come across as Man-At-Hallowe'en-Party (like Oz in Buffy the Vampire Slayer). They can't do a lot with the wolf-faces, but what they can do looks fairly impressive. It's down to claws and furry hands and yellow contact lenses and, yes, even a classic Man-Falls-Behind-Furniture-In-Pain-Comes-Back-Up-As-A-Werewolf scene[1].

There were moments of levity amongst the horror, and most of it worked well. Occassionally something slipped through that you felt was supposed to be a serious attempt at fear or drama but they were few and far between.

I was disappointed with the arrival of the attractive female lead. On reading a brief synopsis of the film I had thought that for once they'd be able to avoid the trap of having a female character just to attract a female audience. I mean, it's a group of soldiers on exercise in the fricking highlands! 50miles from the nearest 'population centre'. There's just no reason for an attractive young woman to be there, other than a). potential love interest, b). to gradually strip off layers of clothing as the action hots up, or c). both. If they had to have a female character, why couldn't it be your typical highlander woman (ie. wilder than the werewolves and twice as hairy)?

I did have an issue with the plotting towards the end as well, but as that's spoiler material I won't go into it any further.

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[1] Which is always, in my opinion, more scary than actually watching them change. Impressive as the standard of modern CGI is, it's hard to watch a face morph from man to wolf without laughing. When they fall behind the furniture, trailing one clawed and increasingly hairy hand, there's always that moment of doubt. They might have just died. You don't know just what they're going to look like when they come back (even if you've seen the werewolves already by this point). Yes, it's a cheaper way of film-making, but cheap doesn't always mean nasty.