Review by Ben Bussey
Okay, so we really shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, nor make our minds up about what looks like an absolutely appalling microbudget horror movie within the first 15 minutes – but sometimes you just know. Sometimes all the signs are there from the word go, and there can be no mistake that you’re in for a truly painful hour and a half.
There tends to be this veneer of romance about indie filmmaking, a notion that it’s a breeding ground for true, untainted creativity which invariably spawns singular filmmakers of real vision; so when we’re told a movie like Crying Wolf was made over the course of three years with only £12,000 to its name, there’s a sense that we should be automatically impressed by this. But again, I defy anyone to get just a quarter of an hour into Crying Wolf without concluding that there is absolutely nothing to be impressed about. Lest anyone thinks I’m being dismissive based on first impressions, let me reassure you (not that ‘reassure’ seems the most appropriate term under the circumstances): I sat through the entire 91 minutes, and I felt every second of it like a fingernail scraping a blackboard in ultra-slow motion. Misconceived on every level, horrendously executed, and almost entirely devoid of redeeming qualities, Crying Wolf is without doubt the worst new movie of the year thus far – and though we’ve only just made it to February, I suspect it’s a firm contender for the worst of 2015 overall.
Opening with a largely irrelevant cameo from that seasoned genre icon Caroline Munro (who gets top billing based on maybe three minutes of screentime – not that I can hold the makers of Crying Wolf too much at fault for that time-honoured exploitation tactic), the clunky framing device sees a private detective with an improbably overdubbed movie trailer voice – indeed, from the sound of things there isn’t a second of sound in the film that wasn’t looped in afterwards (and boy does it show) – settling down in a pub with an aged-looking leatherbound book which somehow tells the story of events which occurred, er, maybe the previous week. Perhaps if movie trailer voiceover guy only appeared in bookend scenes it might have been tolerable: as it is he pops up with grating regularity to bring us up to speed on what’s going on in an agonisingly overwritten manner. Now, it’s not hard to see why it was decided that such explanatory narration might be helpful, as Crying Wolf throws in so many incongruous flashbacks and superfluous backstories that it’s almost impossible to follow. However, it doesn’t take long to realise that a) it’s not you that’s struggling to keep track of things, it’s the director and writers, and b) absolutely none of it is worth paying attention to anyway.
The real tragedy of this is that there’s actually the seedling of a half-decent idea in here. Starting out like a standard backwoods horror/slasher, we have a bunch of mismatched individuals heading out into the countryside for a camping trip as some sort of team-building exercise; ordinarily we’d be sure they’re being set up to fall into the trap of a homicidal maniac and/or flesh-hungry monster. But the twist here is that rather than being in danger, these guys are the danger (Breaking Bad reference in no way a reflection of quality here), as they are the werewolves of the title out for a weekend’s hunt. Handled differently, this might have been a compelling concept, but – as I suspect you’ve gathered by now – the only compulsion it leaves one with here is the urge to gouge out your own eyeballs and puncture your eardrums rather than have to endure anymore of this torture. The characters are the least endearing, two-dimensional cardboard cutout caricatures you’ve ever seen, spewing reams of vomitous dialogue into festering piles of execrable subplots, all brought to almost-life by actors who either have no business in front of a camera or were given the worst direction imaginable (bit of both, I suspect). The ‘comedy’ and ‘horror’ are almost entirely absent; about the nearest it ever comes to raising a smirk is when an old geezer mentions going out with another character’s mum who “liked it up the wrong ‘un” (but then, I’m easily pleased when it comes to cheap humour). And on the horror side, the werewolf design is atrocious, the CGI with which most of it is brought to life is utterly tenth-rate, and you’ll find more suspense and scares in your average CBeebies programme.
Okay, so it does boast a few passable moments of practical gore, and there is a smidgen of your standard gratuitous nudity (topless sunbathing, in the shade? Really?), but even I’m not so easily pleased as to give Crying Wolf a free pass for that alone when everything else is so… damn, I think I’ve run out of synonyms for ‘very bad.’ Hang on, let me consult Google thesaurus: awful, dreadful, terrible, frightful, lamentable, disgusting, deplorable, disgraceful, reprehensible, shameful, abominable, abhorrent, loathsome, odious, heinous, hateful, detestable, despicable, foul, vile, scandalous, contemptible, repugnant, repellent, revolting, unspeakable, wretched, abysmal, diabolical, shocking, rotten, woeful, lousy, dire, the pits, God-awful, chronic, pants, a load of pants (these came up in Google thesaurus, honestly), crap, shit, egregious.
You get the picture. Crying Wolf doesn’t have a release date set but I wouldn’t worry too much about that as this is one to avoid at all costs.
(Note: the poster art mentions the film being in 3D; I didn’t see it in this format, and I can’t imagine how it would in any way change the quality of the film. You know what they say about polishing a turd.)