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Review by Quin

Perhaps the one thing that every zombie movie is missing is a little smooth jazz. Maybe that’s the thing that makes the undead chill out and forget all about eating brains for a second. I mean, wouldn’t it be crazy if it took Chuck Mangione to save the world from a zombie apocalypse? For the most part, smooth jazz gets a bad rap. I mean, “Angela (Theme from Taxi)” is smooth jazz. “Suicide is Painless,” the M*A*S*H theme, is smooth jazz. Basically, all great smooth jazz songs are also T.V. theme songs. If we all agree to never, ever play Kenny G over loud speakers, I think I could live in a world where smooth jazz keeps zombies calm and docile. I know some living people who could use some calming down from smooth jazz too. The world as it comes to be in Life After Beth is one where smooth jazz is a weapon – a very powerful one.

In case you couldn’t tell from all that smooth jazz talk, Life After Beth is a movie that takes everything you know about zombie movies, looks at every possible place that it can go with the material, and then doesn’t go to any of them. But how can it do that, you ask? All movies go places and surely that means it goes to one of the possible places it can go. Sure, ruin my point with logic. After all, I’m having this argument with myself. Lucky for you, I didn’t sign up for the full course and I’ll just be having the one. But seriously, these little things I write shouldn’t be called movie reviews – they’re movie arguments where I present a collective series of statements to establish a definite proposition. It must be an intellectual process, and not just contradiction. So, now that we have that established and I’ve informed you of how completely crazy this movie is – let me tell you more about it.

Beth is a young woman. When we first see her, she is on the first of many hikes she takes during the film. This one is special because it’s the one where she dies. We don’t see it happen, the scene cuts away just after we see her attention occupied by something happening on her smart phone. But we soon learn that she stepped too close to a poisonous snake and that was the end of Beth…until she comes back. The new Beth doesn’t remember dying, she still thinks she’s in high school and is perpetually worried about tomorrow’s exam, and she loves attics and hikes and her boyfriend Zach and smooth jazz. Her parents make the decision not to tell Beth that she is dead, or was dead; but her boyfriend thinks that she should know. A large chunk of the movie is made up of humorous scenarios around this premise – that is until more of the undead start to return, building to a full scale zombie invasion like you have never seen before in a movie. Although I must admit that there must have been maybe an unconscious influence on Life After Beth from the 1993 Bob Balaban film My Boyfriend’s Back. The former is not even in the same universe when it comes to quality, but I must admit I do have a fondness for that film.

The originality of the humor that goes to strange and surreal places is the main reason this movie works so well. The script is filled with amazing lines that should be quoted by fans when Life After Beth achieves the cult status it ultimately deserves. Just to give you an idea of the kind of writing we’re dealing with I’ll give you two examples that I particularly enjoyed: “I’ve had enough of this Dracula shit!” and “Fuck you! I’m Beth and I’m alive! AHHHHHHH!!!” Yeah, Beth gets really angry, which is unbelievably hilarious, thanks to the great Aubrey Plaza. She often plays characters that will eat you alive, and I get the feeling that she’s kinda like that in real life, but here she gets to do it literally. It’s also worth mentioning that Beth’s parents are played by Molly Shannon (who reminds me a little of Catherine O’Hara in this) and John C. Reilly. Beth’s boyfriend’s parents are played by Paul Reiser (who I feel like I haven’t seen in ages) and the wonderfully funny Cheryl Hines.

Life After Beth does tend to try and reinvent the zombie mythology a touch. The need for brains and human flesh is downplayed and doesn’t seem like a driving force behind a zombie’s existence. Also, Aubrey Plaza’s character seems more possessed by a demon at times than infected by the traditional zombie making virus or whatever it usually is. That aspect is different in pretty much everything, so it doesn’t really matter much. If you have a sense of humor you will laugh. If you like horror, you will most likely enjoy the dark, dread that is achieved with both the writing and the visuals. Oh and about that smooth jazz and Chuck Mangione reference I name dropped earlier – I just did that so people googling it would end up here.

Life After Beth is available now for digital download from A24 and Region 1 DVD from Lionsgate.

Review by Quin

It should be no surprise to anyone that Wer is a werewolf movie. For some reason, the term “werewolf” isn’t muttered until the final word in the last scene. I know it’s not customary to talk about the end of a movie in a review, but I want to point out that it feels like the screenwriter thinks that it is some sort of twist to present the revelation that a werewolf had been responsible for all of the carnage. Even M. Night Shyamalan would be shaking his head at that twist. There are enough clues and completely obvious, well-marked road signs adorned with flashing lights and reflectors, that if you had never seen a werewolf movie, you’d still know that this is one. But even if everyone watching knows of the lycanthropic tendencies of one or more of the film’s characters, the characters themselves certainly have no idea. But why would they? Werewolves don’t exist. I hesitate to call it a gripe, it could just be a structural device for framing a story where the characters are trying to get to the bottom of a mystery. And if I look at it that way, I can easily forgive it; but luckily, other than that, I found virtually nothing wrong with this movie. It’s definitely one of the best werewolf movies of the last several years (I know there aren’t exactly oodles to pick from) and along with Wolfen from 1981, Wer is one of the most original ever.

Wer doesn’t have much in common with Wolfen, other than that both involve police investigating strange murders. Wer begins like most found footage films – a family of three are on a camping trip in the woods and they are videotaping their evening of sitting around the fire and enjoying the fresh air. Suddenly, something attacks them from the bushes. Via shaky cam, we see the father picked up and dragged away, all while we hear screams of terror. For the next few minutes we get news footage of the attack. We find out that the mother was the only survivor and she is interviewed by police on camera. She describes the thing that attacked her family as large, hairy and with gigantic hands. Police quickly find a guy who fits the description and take him into custody. The woman who initially survived the attack soon dies, leaving no witnesses. And so begins the process of piecing together the events of that night in the woods. While the police work on their investigation and build a case against their suspect, a public defender and her team of two assistants are brought in to represent the hulking, hairy man. You’ll all be happy to know that this is where the found footage look to the film comes to a close and we’re still less than ten minutes into the story.

While the young team of lawyers go to work, we learn that the woman and one of the men used to be a romantic item. This makes the third team member uncomfortable and things between the gentlemen get a bit hostile. This is mostly just character development, and it doesn’t get too soap opera-ish. We also learn more about the suspect. His name is Talan and he seems shy and reserved. His mother is interviewed and it becomes clear that he would never hurt anyone. One of the legal team members reads about a disorder called Porphyria. Talan fits the description of someone with this disorder. If they have him tested and he proves to have it, it would prove that he is incapable of committing the crimes he is accused of. During testing, doctors induce a seizure, he flies into a rage, killing several people and flees into the city of Paris. From here on Wer is mostly an action film, but an exciting one.

Wer was directed by William Brent Bell. You may remember his previous work on The Devil Inside. I remember not hating that movie as much as some people, but the little that I recall about the story – it was about as scary and as original as an INXS video. For me it was mostly forgettable. At least it did well at the box office, because I’m pretty sure that’s why Wer turned out so much better. Wer hasn’t had the wide release of The Devil Inside, at least not in the States, which is pretty odd to me, because I think it might have done really well. It has so many elements that make a marketable summer blockbuster. But it doesn’t use movie stars and the story isn’t quite as predictable.

The acting in Wer is excellent. A.J. Cook is great as the compassionate yet aggressive public defender. But Brian Scott O’Connor as Talan steals the show, as he should in a film like this. He speaks very little in the role, but has the ability to be both scary and sympathetic. Certain moments I would compare him to Lou Ferrigno as The Incredible Hulk or even Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster. Rock n’ roll fans may recognize O’Connor as the touring bass player of The Eagles of Death Metal. He is naturally extremely hairy and has enormous hands, in fact his nickname when he plays with Eagles is Big Hands. He is also super tall and his facial features look a bit like someone with Acromegaly – for example, actors like Rondo Hatton, Richard Kiel, Ted Cassidy and Andre the Giant. When he transforms into the werewolf, there is very little that changes about him physically. This adds to the ambiguity over what is going on in the film.

I will admit that my expectations were low going into Wer. I also had not seen any trailers, or stills and knew very little of the plot. But the moment Wer snaps out of found footage familiarity, and thank God it’s early, my eyes were glued to the screen. I had fun watching it, even when it got into action movie territory. I will also tell you that the ending makes it possible for a sequel, so if everybody sees this maybe we’ll get to see that. And maybe the sequel will actually be a good one.

Wer is out on VOD in the United States now from Focus World.

Review by Matt Harries

Ooh, a video nasty! Unhinged, made when I was a mere pup, is one of the 72 infamous films that made it onto the BB of FC’s tabloid bothering list back in 1983. I must confess I haven’t exactly gone out of my way to hunt down all of these documents of unbridled savagery. Nonetheless I was quite interested when the chance to review one came along. How would the once great threat to western civilisation stack up? Would the nasties become a hit list of future viewing material or, in the age of ‘torture-porn’ an object of faint ridicule?

Let’s face it, the noteworthiness of Unhinged is all about that early notoriety. The cover of one version has ‘BANNED IN THE UK’ plastered across it. By association it becomes part of that group of films which have entered the realms of the public conscience as being ‘dangerous’, or at least regarded as such by the nation’s moral guardians of the time. Despite the aura some of these old films give off their power as pieces of cinema is often rather less than horrifying. So it is with Unhinged, which although not a particularly violent or bloody film by modern standards, does have a limited lo-fi appeal.

In some ways, Unhinged strays into similar territory to Texas Chainsaw Massacre. A house in the isolated countryside, a strange family. Violence more often hinted at or suggested than actually witnessed directly. One thing it clearly lacks in comparison to the fully fledged cult classic that TCM has become, is an iconic figure such as Leatherface. The sight of him swinging his buzzsaw around in gay abandon, or hanging bodies on the meathook, is something that remains in the memory long after the rest of the film fades away. I honestly doubt I’ll be recalling much from Unhinged in a few years’ time. Having said that the closing revelation did make me chuckle, harking back to Psycho somewhat in its gender -ending climax.

The basis for the story is a road trip through the wilds of America to attend a jazz festival. Our three intrepid explorers are of course all female; greenhorn Terry (Laurel Munson), the more experienced Nancy (Sara Ansley) and Gloria (Barbara Lusch) who, er, doesn’t really establish much of a character before the fateful car accident that irrevocably changes the course of their journey. As they wind through the forested hills they enjoy a spot of mary jane and a bit of gossip. A sense of foreboding is delivered through the time honoured technique of the overhead helicopter shot, accompanied by some heavy handed John Carpenter by way of Airwolf-era Tangerine Dream-style synth work. There’s not a single car on the road as they drive on into isolation, the radio telling them of another in a string of missing girls reported in the area. Down comes the rain and off the road they go, crashing into a ditch. Terry comes round in bed, in an old house. Her eyes focus upon the rather imposing sight of Marion Penrose (JM Penner), who lives in the house with her battle-axe mother (Virginia Settle). Naturally, their relationship is not the happiest, nor the most conventional.

Being saddled with the ‘banned’ and ‘video nasty’ tags seems to promise violence, blood and gore, perversion and blasphemy. And that is precisely the problem with Unhinged; there really isn’t a great deal to get worked up about. Sure, we see a couple of the girls in some gratuitous (but rather un-erotic) shower scenes. There’s a bit of blood flying around, most of it on Steve Lamacq-in-drag Marion at the film’s conclusion (speaking of which I thought the fake blood was quite good – no tomato soup looking stuff here). However the impact of the scythe or machete is never seen in any detail. Even at the end it’s hard to shake off a sense of disappointment. Although hardly one of the most infamous of the banned films, Unhinged rarely deserves the notoriety that comes from being on the ‘banned’ list.

Far too much time is taken up with exposition, as the girls sit to dinner with the dysfunctional duo, or later when Terry speaks with Marion alone, her friend Nancy having made the predictably fatal mistake of attempting to walk for help. The backstory is told mainly through Marion, recalling the murky past of her family through these wearisome conversations, all the while accompanied by the increasingly plodding synthesiser which really begins to grate. The acting is what you’d expect from a low-budget slasher like this. The problem is we have to sit through far too much of it. Screaming wide eyed and flailing around in puddles of blood – in fact the general overacting required by all good cheapo horror – is where these unknown thespians really come into their own. The cast give the actual acting their best shot, but the lulls when they do so are quite pronounced.

Still, it only runs to just over an hour, and there are a few enjoyable moments that make Unhinged reasonably watchable all told. My pick of these came right at the end, as Marion finally relaxes those vocal chords and the startled Terry catches a shocking glimpse of thick chest hair where there should be ladylike decolletage. For Terry her final moments are spent in realisation that what she thought she knew was a lie. Having watched Unhinged I almost understood that feeling of being cheated. I didn’t shudder or gasp or recoil at any time during this semi-infamous, once banned video nasty. It wasn’t at all what I thought it would be. Have we as an audience really become so desensitised that what once inflamed the moral crusaders of the not too distant past now appears faintly amusing and rather dull? Maybe so. I’m hopeful though, that most of that list of 72 contains much greater levels of horror than we witness here.

Unhinged is out now on Region 2 DVD from 88 Films.

Review by Ben Bussey

At the risk of sounding like a broken record bringing this damn film up at the start of every comedy horror review, there’s a key reason Shaun of the Dead is held up as a modern classic: it took a very silly pun title, and transcended it. At a glance, we’d be forgiven for expecting nothing more than a dumb but fun Romero spoof, yet Wright and Pegg went way beyond that, crafting something genuinely witty, sophisticated and cinematic whilst paying homage to the genre. As has been remarked many times, negotiating comedy and horror can be a tricky proposition, with one element tending to overwhelm the other, and Shaun of the Dead is one of the few to get the balance right – yet it all began with the kind of title one might blurt out jokingly after a couple of pints. Many other such titles have been cooked up since: Boy Eats Girl, Lesbian Vampire Killers, Cockneys Vs Zombies, Strippers Vs Werewolves, etc… and not one of them has exceeded the expectation their title put forward. Indeed, many of them fell short of even that.

So now we have another of those crazy sounding comedy horror movies: Zombeavers. I won’t deny it, when I first heard the title I went into full-on Beavis and Butthead “hur-hur-hur-hur” mode for a bit, and I was responsible for at least a couple of the 2 million + views the trailer got on Youtube in its first week or so. But my expectations were in check: the title and trailer sold a crude comedy with zombie beavers, and that’s just what the film itself ultimately delivers – nothing more, nothing less. On the one hand that does feel like cause for disappointment, when one of the wackier concepts that a studio horror movie has boasted for some time results in something that’s ultimately pretty average in every capacity: a bit funny, a bit sexy, a bit gory, but ultimately nowhere near as out there as we might have hoped. It doesn’t surprise me, then, that Steph hated Zombeavers when she caught it at this year’s FrightFest, and I can totally understand her chief complaint, “it’s a dumb movie that thinks it’s being clever.”

Even so – I have to admit that I found Zombeavers an agreeable enough way to blow and hour and a half. Yes, it’s low on wit and the characters are largely unlikeable, and no, it isn’t as sexy, gory or outlandish as it might have been (Piranha 3D it ain’t), but it’s one of those bog standard schlock horror movies that brings just enough to the table to keep you entertained if you’re in a particularly undemanding mood – and toward the end, it actually has a few genuine surprises in store.

Plot-wise, it is of course the standard college kids in cabin set-up – but it seems in the wake of the Evil Dead remake’s “taking our junkie friend to go cold turkey” angle, there needs to be a bit more to it now. So it is that our three heroines head out to a remote woodland location so Jenn (Lexi Atkins) can get over her failed relationship with Sam (Hutch Dano). Naturally they all spend most of their time wearing little more (and occasionally less) than bikinis, and they get no signal on their phones, and they promise it’s no boys – and of course the boys soon enough show up, shortly before they all find themselves under siege from flesh-eating, living dead, semi-aquatic rodents. It’s like Assault on Precinct 13, by way of the gopher scenes in Caddyshack. But in the midst of all this, the relationship drama subplot thickens. Is anyone likely to give a shit about that side of things? Doubtful – though, to be fair, the romantic issues do kind of pave the way to the slightly unexpected developments of the final act.

It probably goes without saying that Zombeavers doesn’t come close to achieving that rare comedy-horror balance thing we mentioned earlier – although this may not be for lack of trying. The beavers themselves are for the most part endearingly obvious puppets, and are certainly utilised to comedic effect at some points – one scene turns into a game of Whack-A-Mole, for instance – and yet for the most part the creature attack scenes are played relatively straight, particularly toward the end as things go in a slightly darker direction than we might have anticipated. Still, if the plan was to catch us off guard with sudden bursts of raw emotion amidst all the madness (much in the spirit of the death of Shaun’s mum in that other comedy horror we can’t stop talking about), then I’m afraid they shot a bit wide of the mark there. Indeed, they shot a bit wide of the mark everywhere.

Still, though it’s lightyears away from the trash masterpiece it aspired to be, Zombeavers is watchable enough. Go in hoping for bona fide subversive humour and outrageous content, and you’re likely to be disappointed – but if you can content yourself with some cheap innuendo, mild splatter and a few tit shots, this’ll see you through a six pack just fine.

Bugger all extras on the DVD, but the Blu-ray reportedly features auditions, behind the scenes and FX featurettes and a deleted scene.

Zombeavers comes to UK DVD and Blu-ray on 20th October 2014, from Universal.

Review by Ben Bussey

Sometimes, it feels like you learn all you need to know about a film from a single descriptive phrase. Hammer Horror, Slasher Movie, Torture Porn, Found Footage; all these titles carry with them a weight of expectation (or, sometimes, lack thereof), and more often than not as soon as we hear them we know immediately whether or not the film in question is one we expect to enjoy.

Today, we have another such phrase that singles out a very particular brand… the SyFy Original Movie. Damn Sea Vampires (originally entitled Beast of the Bering Sea, and also retitled Bering Sea Beast) is one of those. From those words alone, I suspect many readers will have already made their own conclusions about the film… and they won’t be far off.

For the benefit of readers who may be unfamiliar with the SyFy originals, let me reel off a few titles for you: Sharktopus, Dinocroc, Dinoshark, Pirahnaconda, Mega Python Vs Gatoroid, Sand Sharks, Ghost Shark, and – perhaps the best known of them all – Sharknado and Sharknado 2: the Second One. Somehow a whole new wave of predominantly shark-based low budget creature features has washed up in the wake of The Asylum’s Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (kind of alarming to realise that The Asylum, pioneers of cheap direct-to-DVD rip-offs of major blockbusters, have prompted rip-offs of their own), all of which follow the same essential formula: take a largely young and pretty cast, generally with at least one or two former celebrities thrown in for novelty value, drop them in a reasonably picturesque coastal setting, and have them flail about while they come under attack from a very badly rendered CGI monster. However, because it’s made for network TV, gore must be kept to a minimum, and swearing and nudity are pretty much out of the question – which makes it a little odd that the cover for Damn Sea Vampires bears the (slightly censored) tagline ‘Here Comes Deep Shit,’ when no such words are uttered in the film itself. Indeed, it might have been a more apt slogan had they removed the ‘deep’ part…

Other respects in which the cover is grossly misleading (although that’s kind of a given): at no point do we see the titular beasts swarming both sea and sky – indeed, if memory serves we never see more than one on screen at the same time – nor do any women in bikinis come under attack at any point. Indeed, the cast remain fully clothed throughout, including Jonathan Lipnicki (tick the novelty casting box), AKA the kid from Jerry Maguire, who has subsequently subverted expectation by getting into bodybuilding as an adult (Google it if you must, it’s faintly alarming) – yet his well-honed physique stays well under wraps from start to finish. As does any hint of acting ability left over from his child star days, I might add.

Plot-wise, it’s simple enough. Land-lubber Owen (Brandon Beemer) joins the salty sea-dog crew of a family-owned boat which specialises in dredging for gold. Alas, their latest claim brings forth more than just treasure, as they awaken a hitherto undisturbed school of underwater bloodsuckers, who get very territorial very quickly. Soon enough it’s only Owen and sibling team Donna and Joe (Cassandra Scerbo and Lipnicki) left alive – though naturally a marine biologist from the local university shows up (Jaqueline Fleming), who realises the crew may have stumbled across the zoological find of the century or some such. But are these hard-boiled dredgers going to let Dracula’s goldfish stand between them and the loot? Well, if they did it’d be a considerably shorter movie. And this might not have been a bad thing.

The key question that comes up time and again with these SyFy Original Movies is – who exactly are they for? They tend to play on the neo-grindhouse sensibility, yet being made for TV they’re very low on the exploitation elements which fans of such movies hope for. With their cut-price FX and absurd concepts, they’re prime mirth-making material for stoners and/or those with a particular fondness for low humour, yet for the most part the films themselves are played relatively straight – much as is the case here. I suppose in a sense it’s commendable that Damn Sea Vampires doesn’t camp it up and play it as a spoof, but at the same time I doubt anyone on either side of the camera is deluding themselves that viewers are actually going to get invested in the half-baked human drama which takes up the bulk of the running time, punctuated by the occasional thirty-second bat-shark thing attack to keep you from nodding off.

As has been noted many times here and elsewhere, it’s a very tricky proposition to try and manufacture cult material – and, by extension, it may be even trickier to try and manufacture a “so-bad-it’s-good” movie. Even so, SyFy seem determined to keep on trying, and given that I haven’t made a point of watching all their output (indeed, I’ve consciously avoided the Sharknados to date) I couldn’t honestly say whether or not they’ve succeeded yet. But I can safely say that – regardless of whether you call it Beast of the Bering Sea, Bering Sea Beast, or Damn Sea Vampires – this movie most definitely doesn’t do it.

Damn Sea Vampires is out now on Region 2 DVD from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

Review by Matt Harries

Anyone who reads this site regularly will know that the ‘found footage’ film inspires somewhat mixed emotions. I consider myself to be relatively un-jaded with the format, mainly because I have studiously avoided it, with the exception of the first [REC] film. I even have to admit to never watching The Blair Witch Project. So, given the opportunity to review The Pigman Murders, I thought why not? Maybe I would be more immune to the quirks and foibles of the genre. Whether the film itself would be worth bothering with would be another question.

The Pigman Murders is about a group of blokes in their early 30’s who decide to journey to the picturesque wilderness of Connemara in Ireland, to pay homage to their friend Brendan who had died of cancer almost a year earlier. They decided to have a professional cameraman join them to document the trip and eventually provide an edited version which would be a gift to Brendan’s family. The idea being to give them a document of anecdotes and stories about Brendan taken from a place which he was evidently fond. It hardly counts as a spoiler to hear that this did not go to plan, the expedition falling foul to a rampage of hideous porcine butchery. However – get this – it was all caught on film because the professional cameraman was there! The camera was recovered – found even. So it was that The Pigman Murders nestled neatly into the conventions of the genre like a proverbial pig in…well you know.

This is where I experienced my first nervous twitch of irritation. The idea that a bunch of lads would think anyone else could possibly enjoy a video of them all getting drunk and stoned seemed far fetched enough. The whole ‘professional’ cameraman angle just seemed like a crude way to shoehorn the found footage angle into the story. It felt like the makers of the film started out thinking ‘we have to make a found footage film’, then having created the clunky conceit the story would be built around that.

Anyway, so there you go – the scene is set. A bunch of good, Irish boys, off on the craic. Only this is to mark the anniversary of their friend’s passing away, so everyone gets a moment to say their piece one-to-one with the camera. These monologues all pretty much went as follows; ‘hi Brendan’s family, this is x. I knew Brendan since I was at secondary school. He was a great bloke, I miss him every day. I hope you’ll enjoy this video.’ Maybe once or twice this device could have worked, bringing a little personality to the group, some background and a sense of the reason behind the video. After four or five barely distinguishable monologues it all becomes a bit pointless.

My one other major gripe – indeed the very mother of all gripes about The Pigman Murders – is the dreadful, repetitious and unconvincing effects used to illustrate the lo-fi found footage style camera work. This meant a perpetual cycling of the same ‘camera glitch effects’, over and over. The screen goes all grainy, as if experiencing interference. The screen splits into two moving sections. The screen flashes. The screen blips. From beginning to end, the same glitches. So much for your professional cameraman. He’s shining you on boys! He’s a chancer with an old video camera he picked up in a jumble sale! Ach just thump the bloody thing for chrissakes! It all starts to resemble a late night episode of Chris Morris’s Jam, designed somehow to cause brain bubbles, strokes, seizures. Eventually I felt like Herbert Lom, wincing at the mention of Clouseau, as a spark of annoyance shot into my cortex every time the screen flickered.

Off into the wild they tramp, and the conventions of the genre continue to stack up. Being good Irish boys, a scrap is inevitable. I can’t remember what actually triggered this, but they start fighting (well, falling to the ground in a tangled heap really), and old grievances come to the surface. A couple of the group sulk off back down the road. The remainder of the party head into the wilderness with an increasingly weary trudge. There’s a camp fire. An interminable acoustic guitar sing-song. Glitch. Fuzz. Screen goes weird. Sigh…then for no obvious reason the ‘scrapping’ starts again. A gunshot sounds, once, twice. The camera hovers just above the ground as they run off into the woods… Glitch. Fuzz. Colour test thing appears.

What The Pigman Murders needed was a good monster to liven things up a bit. I had high hopes of a creature of legend, in the form of a large pink pig with a man’s head, galloping round goring people with vicious tusks, oinking with preternatural fury. Or even a bearded axe-wielding loon on a sled driving a team of horror-pigs before him with unholy yells and whipcracks. No such luck. What we get, without any preamble or back-story or explanation, are a couple of hoodies with pig masks and daggers. Okay, they make realistic pig sounds, I’ll give them that. But when a film skimps on the whole camera work thing, and then similarly fails to invest any time or effort in creating a noteworthy twist or creature or anything, it all reeks of a lack of imagination and effort.

I didn’t hate The Pigman Murders – well, I hated the rubbish lo-fi camera effects – but so little effort went into making an interesting or unusual element in the film, I have a hard time recommending it. A bit of blood gurgling aside the gore is not much to get excited about. The characters are all fairly accurate renditions of ‘normal’ blokes, and I suppose at least they didn’t populate the film with the usual cliched stereotypes (nerd, stoner, jock etc). Unfortunately that means you don’t really care when things start to go awry.

So, in summary; only recommended to fans of unimaginative, low budget, found footage type horror. Hmm, perhaps I’m more jaded than I realised.

The Pigman Murders is out now on Region 2 DVD from 88 Films.

Review by Nia Edwards-Behi

Sometimes, you’ve really got to admire a particularly high concept film. ‘Small-town cop turns into a werewolf’ was a concept that had me hooked quite easily. The excellent promotional material helped a lot too, as well as the great wolf design and make-up, and the retro 80s vibe that’s so in right now. In advance of seeing WolfCop then, I was well on board with the idea and was looking forward to enjoying a snappy 80-ish minutes’ worth of gore and fun.

Alas, that was not what the 80-odd minutes provided. I enjoyed watching the film well enough, the gore that was there was good, and there was the odd laugh, but overall the film was just devoid of the inspiration of its entertaining premise. Ultimately, I think what left me cold with WolfCop was not how silly it was or anything like that, but rather that it was far too much cop and not enough wolf. The plot of the film is surprisingly convoluted, with the small town’s police force sharing an inexplicable backstory brought to life by present day events involving occult curses and mayoral campaigns, and I just wanted to see a werewolf doing stupid stuff.

The lead character, the wonderfully monikered Lou Garou (Leo Fafard), is likeable enough for an irresponsible police officer (his alcoholism is basically an unfortunate shorthand for ‘lazy bum’), but I found it quite hard to root for him. His friend Willie (Jonathan Cherry), a paranormal enthusiast, is much more compelling, as is his colleague Tina (Amy Matysio), a no-nonsense, efficient cop who blissfully doesn’t lack a sense of humour. It’s no surprise that a film like WolfCop relies on relatively stock characters – the abrasive sheriff, the vampish bar owner – but WolfCop, to its credit, doesn’t deal in absolute stereotypes, which is refreshing, except for, crucially, in the case of Lou Garou. While he does come into his own by the film’s close, he’s otherwise a somewhat under-developed protagonist.

Lou Garou also spends quite a bit of time as the titular WolfCop. As I mentioned at the start of this review, I’ve liked the WolfCop design since promotional images of the film emerged. It doesn’t always seem up to par in action though, but for a low-budget film with the guts to go for extensive practical make-up effects, that’s really quite a minor gripe. The film’s two transformation scenes are great, with one particular detail so excessively and unnecessarily gross that it immediately got me back on board with the film. The practical effects on display really are to be commended here, and it’s nice to see a desire to avoid the use of CGI. These effects are put to good use when WolfCop takes out a few ruffians, with heads flying around and arms getting torn off. Despite all this, sadly WolfCop just isn’t as fun as he could have been. His punny one-liners don’t really work, and the distorted voice work just isn’t all that great either, making some of his (limited) dialogue hard to make out.

I’d be tempted to compare WolfCop to Bad Milo, which is a much more successful, for me, creature-feature-with-a-heart. WolfCop does have a heart, which I wasn’t expecting, but it’s not fully explored, leaving the plot to seem, well, half-hearted, and the real silliness of the film seem lacking. Bad Milo gets this balance right, with the gross-out and gore moments working alongside a touching plot about a man reconnecting with himself and his family. WolfCop had potential to make Lou Garou immensely sympathetic as the centre of a small-town’s twisted history, but he seems to be absent from his own plot-line, and instead pops up every now and again to either be an incompetent cop or to be hulking werewolf.

Overall then, WolfCop’s not quite the rip-roaring, Friday-night, six-pack-and-snacks film it could have been, but it’s not a horrible failure either, and worth checking out if you like a bit of silliness. Here’s hoping WolfCop II achieves the potential that this first try doesn’t quite manage.

Wolfcop is released to UK Blu-ray and DVD on 13th October, from Studiocanal.