Arooo, it’s Burl, here to review a new werewolf picture for
you – a low-budget lycanthropic tale called WolfCop that I just now saw in a
big, if largely empty, movie theatre! Ha ha, I have to say up front that it’s
always a pleasure to see a low-budget horror movie in the theatre, no matter
the quality of the actual film!
I’ll tell you, I didn’t know what to expect, but I was
hoping for something good, and if not good, then fun and gory! And to an extent
I got what I hoped for! The picture begins with an alcoholic cop named,
ahhh-ha-ha-ha, wait for it, Lou Garou, who is not just a bad cop, but probably
the worst cop I’ve ever seen portrayed on film! I don’t mean he hits people
with truncheons or anything, ha ha; he’s just remarkably terrible at his job!
He gets bopped on the head and ritualized in the woods
somehow, and the next thing you know he’s not getting five o’clock shadow, but
five-second-later shadow! And, as in other werewolf pictures, such as An American Werewolf in London just to
cite one example, small dogs take a strange interest in him! But the town is
meanwhile beset by many travails, including missing pets, a drugs gang, a
robbery gang, mysterious occurrences of all kinds, and a mayoral election, so
the newly minted wolf cop is kept very busy! All of this is very fuzzily
sketched out, with some things left, or made, much more confusing than they
ought to be, usually by the omission of some basic information! Frankly, it was
almost as bad as Bad Meat, ha ha –
but not quite, because nothing could be!
This brings us to the picture’s most pressing and dire
problem: poor storytelling! Some of the character confusion is explained near
the end by the introduction of shapeshifting frog people to the brew, but in
general everything the movie attempts, whether it be the main narrative, the
perplexing back story (something about Lou’s father, who was a cop, and the
lady cop’s father, who was a bartender, and something something mysterious
deaths?) or the attempt to mint a unique mythology, is scuppered by the
writer-director’s dearth of storytelling skill!
There are other problems too: the lead actor, with his Danny
Huston hair, is weak (though considerably better in wolf form); the staging is
often inept, particularly in the action scenes; and there are too many bad
lite-metal songs on the soundtrack! Ha ha! But this is not to say the picture
doesn’t have its charms, because it most certainly does! The other performances
range from competent to good, with a cracker moustacheman played by Jonathan
Cherry a particular highlight! The trick effects by Emersen Ziffle are, in
general, excellent (though the wolfcop makeup looks a little raggedy in some
scenes, ha ha), and there are touches of cleverness scattered throughout the
film!
But the resolution makes so little sense that even the
wolfcop questions it! Ha ha! I mean, how could someone lead a drugs gang and be a police chief at the same time?
Or tend bar and be a mayor? And where
did the frog people come from originally, and why do some of them burst into
flames when shot, and others do not?
There’s no point in asking these questions, I realize! For
me there was much sublime pleasure simply in going to the movie theatre to see what
Joe Bob always called the three essential Bs: blood, breasts and beasts! This
picture has them all, and if the werewolf looks a little more like the one in Death Moon than the one in American Werewolf, well, no matter! I’m
impressed with this picture for even existing! I’m going to give WolfCop two Liquor Donuts and urge you
to check it out at your earliest convenience!
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