Dog Soldiers Movie Review:


Squadies, Woods, Fullmoon, Farmhouse, Sausages
Or
Werewolves ate my platoon.

Dog Soldiers is a war movie. With Werewolves.

Our six man squad of soldiers are inserted deep into Scottish woods for a routine training exercise. This is no ordinary woods however, this is a woods where STRANGE THINGS? are know to happen, with several unexplained disappearances occurring each year. The next day they find the bloody remains of another military unit and the badly wounded Captain Ryan (Liam Cunningham), a Special Operations soldier.

With their own radio seemingly sabotaged and faced with an unknown but extremely dangerous enemy, things are looking bad, especially as it will be dark in 10 minutes.

Attacked and pursued through the forest by what seems to be a pack of wolves, they are rescued by a woman, Megan (Emma Cleasby). She uses her Land Rover to takes them all to a nearby farmhouse so that they can apply medical treatment to the badly ‘sausaged’ Sargent Wells (Sean Pertwee). Unfortunately it seems that the beasties outside are not interested in leaving them in peace and, well, trapped, horror movie, isolated farmhouse.

Despite, or perhaps because of this slightly clichéd plot, Dog Soldiers is actually very entertaining in a gory way and also incredibly funny. Writer/Director Neil Marshall seems to know not to make the movie take itself to seriously and the movie is littered with in-jokes, references and homages. After all two of the characters are named Harry G. Wells and Bruce Campbell, while the character of Spoon seems to have been named just as an excuse to use a bad Matrix joke near the end of the movie. The acting, apart from the dog, Sam, who was apparently replaced half way through filming, is of a good quality with the squad of soldiers coming across as both likable and believable. The werewolves, all 7 muscled, hairy, teethy feet of them are animatronics suits instead of the now almost standard CGI. While impressive, they occasionally do not completely work in looking menacing or real. Their operators are using stilts to give them an impressive height that gives them a rather beautiful grace in some scenes, while in others the same height makes them seem slightly slow and awkward as their operators try not to fall over. On the other paw they look a LOT better then the werewolves on Buffy and no one seems to complain about them.

The first quarter of the movie is unfortunately not the best. The two campers in the pre title scenes could of come from any number of movies and for a military unit on maneuvers, the squad spends a lot of time smoking, whistling, telling ghost stories and sitting around large camp fires just waiting for cows to fall on them.

For those without the DVD or those who don’t like commentaries, there are a few fun things to watch out for. The reason our hero Cooper’s (Kevin McKidd), second punch against Sargent Wells looks so realistic is that he mistimed the swing and actually connected Sean Pertwee full in the nose. In the same scene, Pertwee, in a selfless attempt at realism in his acting manages to convince the director let himself get completely pissed to simulate the effects of several shots of morphine. Not every actor would be willing to suffer for his work like that. Later the strange scaffold and laddering that can be seen around the back of the farmhouse in one of the werewolf point of views shots is actually the scaffold and laddering holding up the set.

Overall Dog Soldiers comes across as a very slick movie that hides its non Hollywood budget rather well. Due to editing some of the sub plots, the prior relationship between Ryan and Megan being the major example, come across as illogical and confusing in post movie retrospect. Probably not everyone’s bowl of ‘pork’ stew with large amounts of swearing, violence and gore, but then again, you ARE watching a werewolf movie.

REVIEW BY MUDCRAB

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