Halloween Horror Marathon: WolfCop

poster - WolfCop30 seconds into WolfCop, and I desperately wish I’d bought the Shooting Guns score One Way Static put out for MondoCon. It’s Sabbath-y blues rock, and it sets the scene for the movie absolutely perfectly. The music, much like the movie, is tongue-in-cheek over the top. It’s a hell of a fun flick. WolfCop is silly enough to keep things light, but bloody enough to make the movie worthy of calling itself a horror film. The transformation our hero Lou Garou undergoes is fucking brutal in and of itself, to say nothing of the first few kills.

There’s something about WolfCop that’s hard to put your finger on. Maybe it’s the way it devotedly follows horror movie tropes — especially those of the the werewolf variety — while winkingly acknowledging them and tweaking them. There’s some showing of the seams here and there — Lou Garou’s werewolf makeup is considerably less detailed for action scenes, and you only get one really great transformation scene, but that only adds to the charm, because once you’ve seen them, your imagination fills in the later gaps.

The seams are obscured by the editing, which early on is could stand to be a lot less jump-cutty. Too many jittery zooms and weird pans during the standard scenes, but once it gets all bloody, it works. You could alos likely justift it as a way of implying Garou’s constantly drunken state, but the connection’s not made emphatically enough to make the point effective.

The dialogue, though: ACES. It’s the one-liners which make or break a good dumb movie, and goddamn me if WolfCop doesn’t have them. The greatest work best in context, but the fact that it was desperately hard for me not to yell across my local library, “Hey! You got any books on Satanism?” the next time I was there is a pretty strong testament to how many quotable bits WolfCop brings to the table.

The only real downside to the film, aside from the seam-showing, is that while WolfCop is a werewolf movie, it’s also a cop movie, which means equally as many shootouts as maulings, and that’s not what I signed up for. Werewolf means people torn limb from limb, not gunned down. On a positive note, shit gets super weird near the end, which certainly more than makes up for the dragging banality of the gunfights.

Tracking this one down’s a bit difficult, as WolfCop saw release on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK last Tuesday, but won’t make it to disc stateside until March. It’s making the festival rounds, though, so check the official wesbite for dates and details.