Howl

  Howl's a rare thing: a modern attempt to make a honest horror B-movie here in the UK. With werewolves, no less!
 OK, so it really is setting itself up for failure, since there's no way it can live up to Dog Soldiers, right? Right. To be fair to it, it doesn't even try; Howl is perfectly happy to wade neck-deep in clichés, stock characters and pull all its plays from the beginner chapters of the siege horror playbook. The thing is that for a while, it works; It sets expectations low, and within that space it manages to be pretty charming. Again, for a while; glaring script issues soon bring it crashing down.

 Joe (Ed Speleers) is a put-upon train guard who the script quickly establishes as having a terminal case of wounded masculinity. I mean, the script comes out and has an alpha idiot (who got the supervisor promotion Joe was also gunning for) accusing him of not being man enough. It apparently took two people (Mark Huckerby and Nick Ostler) to write this shit.

 Joe is browbeaten into working on the last service to a far-away station. The only bright spot is that his crush (Holly Weston) is also on the train, serving drinks. She's nice to him, but of course the film shows her being flirted with by more effective, manly men. Everyone else on the passenger train is either mean or disrespectful to poor little Joe.

 But soon a chance to man up comes up: While crossing a dark patch of woods, the train rolls over a deer, which causes it to stop.* The conductor (Sean Pertwee, in a fun callback to Dog Soldiers) goes out and disappears, causing a sort of passenger mutiny led by an alpha douchebag in a suit (are you seeing a pattern here?); Everyone tries to trek back towards civilization, against Joe's better judgement - but they're soon attacked by a werewolf, so they go back and hole themselves in the train.

Joe's looking pretty unimpressed with the creature design there.

 And this is where things get kind of interesting, because even as some tensions rise, the crew and passengers actually make an effort to reach out to each other and work together to survive the night. And for a while, it's engaging enough: it's not an original theme by any conceivable metric, but compared to the meat-headed rise-to-the-occasion bullshit the film seemed to be headed towards, it's pretty refreshing. There's a couple of solid jokes, e ven a likeably daft 'rallying the troops' speech delivered over the train's PA system. Dumb, but cute. It works better than you'd expect, especially when it becomes clear that the film is not fucking about with its furry menaces - people are wounded and killed at the drop of a hat with a head still in it, and the gore effects are plentiful and surprisingly graphic.

 So yeah, for a while I actually got my hopes up. But unfortunately the script gets stupider as it gets along, and once again its macho macho themes are pushed to the forefront. That could work in a better-written movie, but here the protagonists heroically establish that no one gets left behind... only to leave behind the (by far) most heroic character in the movie to the wolves (literally) without a single fucking comment. The last thirty minutes are a depressing mess of incompetent narrative choices and dumbass posturing, all in pursuit of delivering an incel-friendly fantasy to its obvious conclusion while taking the dumbest possible route at every turn. Oh, and it has the balls to completely rip off John Murphy's work on 28 days later for its final scene. Fuck this noise.

 Good movies get your complicity in suspending your belief. For a while, I didn't really care how patently ridiculous the idea of a ravenous tribe of werewolves living in a stretch of woods not ninety minutes away from London. Let alone highly infections werewolves that can turn a lovely old woman into a ravening cannibal beast in a matter of hours. So that's a lot of goodwill the film managed to piss away.

 As mentioned earlier, there's a secondary character who basically is the hero of the piece, though the movie hilariously fails to recognize it. And the tiny bit we get of his backstory is a thousand times more poignant and interesting than the shitrag that passes for a protagonist. I do wonder if the other guy was actually supposed to be the protagonist for a while, that'd explain at least some of the script's problems.

 Director Paul Hyett, a veteran makeup and regular F/X artist (the guy has a really impressive CV), has a good grip on low-budget atmospherics - it's pretty funny that he worked on most of Neil Marshall's movies... except Dog Soldiers. The effects crew does an admirable job with CGI-assisted practical makeup effects and wolf suits. The critters sadly, don't look all that great - they belong to the goofy orc / cavepeople tribe of Garou - but at least they have triple-jointed hind legs. That's a very cool, difficult touch, pulled off pretty well... but they still look pretty goofy; The film's final, supposedly badass closeup of a werewolf had me (wait for it) howling with laughter. The perfect capper to a mismanaged, ill-conceived train (please kill me) of events.

* As someone who's often travelled in these exact same trains, I can attest that just about anything can bring them to a halt - from "the wrong kind of rain" to, my favorite, "leaf blow".