Werewolf: The Devil's Hound (2007)

Submitted by corwin on Fri, 14 Dec 2007 9:59pm

I am a huge sucker for werewolf movies, ever since the first time I saw Lon Chaney, Jr., in The Wolf Man. So naturally, when I passed Werewolf: The Devil's Hound at the video store this evening, I had to grab it and take it home. I knew it would be pretty bad. I hadn't heard of anyone involved in the picture, and it was obviously a direct to DVD production from the first glance at the cover. But I had no idea I had just picked up the worst werewolf movie I have ever seen. And I've seen Howling 7, which was filmed by a pair of rednecks with a camcorder.

The concept is solid, as far as werewolf movies go. A lycanthrope is captured and accidentally shipped to a special effects company in Connecticut. One guy gets scratched, and starts his own transformation into a werewolf. Two families must band together and stop the savagery with the help of an inept werewolf hunter. This could well have been a lot of fun, especially when the the special effects people used their teleoperated robotic creations to fight back. Unfortunately it very much was not. The original werewolf, for instance, looked nothing like any werewolf I've ever seen. I don't claim to be an expert on monsters, but I've seen enough to know that this creature looked far more like a yeti than anything else. Special effects have come a long way since 1941, but Chaney's wolf man looked a whole lot better. The transformation of Kevin, who contracts lycanthropy from her bite, is even worse, involving fangs, gluing hair to his arms, and a patchy beard to his cheeks and chin. Not a single character in the movie is at all likable. I didn't care enough to learn any of their names (I had to look up the Kevin in the IMDB entry while writing this), and I didn't care in the slightest if any of them lived or died. The climax was so contrived and could be seen coming from so early on that it became a major disappointment, and the ending, with one of the characters suddenly abducted by aliens was just plain stupid. In addition, the acting was absolutely godawful. Even Uwe Boll uses actual actors in his abominations; there were none to be seen here. Come to think of it, the whole movie was one of the dumber things I've ever seen. It was only ten or so minutes in, when watching a scene featuring an inexplicably crying Asian kid, I immediately surmised that he was sobbing inconsolably because he'd been forced to watch the whole thing. I know I wanted to cry at the end. That's an hour and a half I'll never get back. If you're a glutton for punishment, be sure to check out the trailer at the official website, where you can also buy the sound track.