Werewolves Ate My Platoon: Dog Soldiers

The United Kingdom is lousy with werewolves. Whether a tourist-turned-monster is rampaging through London or Lawrence Talbot is running rampant in remote Wales, you can't enjoy a night on those islands without bumping into a lycanthrope.

Werewolves hate hikers.

Even the military isn't safe! Take Dog Soldiers (2002): It's 105 minutes of desperate British soldiers holed up in a cottage, battling the beasts. What makes this movie a treat are the quality and care put into the production: The dark humor and dialog, the charisma of the characters, the slow reveal of practical-effect monsters. You never get a good look at them until the end--before that, and it's just a claw here, a snout there.

Dog Soldiers shares the gritty British horror cinematography from 28 Days Later (2002). The forest is a brilliant green in the day; nights and interiors are grainy and claustrophobic. None of the pyrotechnic effects look like they were performed safely. Action is desperate, frantic, funny: Werewolves don't just get shot or stabbed--they get impaled by broadswords, taunted into a fistfight, burned by the hair spray and lighter trick, jabbed in the head with a faucet and blinded by a camera's flash.

Also, hit with a frying pan by a man screaming hilarious obscenities.

If these elements seem familiar--a cabin in the woods, a squad fighting encroaching creatures, violence that borders sometimes on slapstick--it's on purpose. Dog Soldiers does not work because it's original; there's not an original bone in its body. It wears homages on its sleeve with referential quips: We've got the Kobayashi Maru, a summary of Zulu (1964), the "There is no Spoon" line from The Matrix (1999), children's stories like "The Three Little Pigs" and "Little Red Riding Hood." The final confrontation is Evil Dead (1981), it's Aliens (1986). There's even a Burke-like shill, but we know right away he's a bad guy--at least Paul Reiser had his goofy charm and smile.

All these references and callbacks give Dog Soldiers an almost retro vibe. Neil Marshall, the writer/director (who would go on to The Descent in 2005), stripped the werewolf to its barest bones--a forest-dwelling thing with a canine's teeth and hunger but man's intelligence--and installed it into an '80s throwback. The early 2000s had a number of monstrous revivals in the same vein.

Werewolves were brought back to their violent roots in Dog Soldiers, zombies got fast in 28 Days Later. 30 Days of Night updated vampires; it began life first as a graphic novel in 2002 and arrived on the big screen in 2007. Meant to return the bloodsuckers to their Nosferatu-esque stature, 30 Days of Night ends up feeling like a so-so zombie film set in Alaska. For a movie whose plot is incomprehensibly silly by the end, 30 Days of Night's tone is overly melodramatic; the filmmakers forgot that horror movies don't always have to take themselves seriously. Dog Soldiers doesn't.

Where else can you see a dog in a tug of war over a man's intestines during a werewolf attack?

Dog Soldiers and 30 Days of Night are perfect examples of how this genre can be (mis)handled. One is a scary and fun werewolf romp--the other should be renamed 2 Hours of Boredom.