BEFORE: OK, I know that this one's labelled as a horror movie, which means it rightfully belongs in October, but it's not connected to any other horror movies, so my chances of getting around to it in any given October are rather slim. But it WILL connect me with the first film set for February, so that has to take priority. I've got a while before I need to start thinking about the other horror films I'm tracking, to see if I can connect THIS group of 12 films to THAT group of 10 and try to fill up the month, or if I can just put a chain of 15 together out of some smaller blocks and just call that a month. Maybe sometime in early summer I can take a look at where things stand, but for now, rounding up one of the strays and crossing it off the list shouldn't do much harm.
Jimmy Tatro carries over from "The Machine". I'm dropping another film with Jimmy from the schedule, the talking dog film "Strays" - I'll reschedule it for some future date, it links to enough other films, and I dropped another Brendan Fraser film, "Mrs. Winterbourne", because who cares about that, and I'd only added it to pad out the month anyway. It stays on the list, everything stays on the list until I can get to it or I die, whichever comes first. But yeah, I'm doubling up today so I can finish January's over-packed schedule on time, and now that's possible.
THE PLOT: Terror grips a small mountain town as bodies are discovered after each full moon. Losing sleep, raising a teenage daughter and caring for his ailing father, officer Marshall struggles to remind himself there's no such thing as werewolves.
AFTER: It's been a week for sheep farmers, sexually harassing producers, body-swapping wizards and now possible werewolves. Sure, these films are all over the genre map, unless you look hard and find the common threads - fat guys and overbearing fathers. It's not much to hang my hat on, but hey, that's January.
It's a bit odder that my TV viewing is suddenly tying in with my movies, that's not typical. "Fargo" just ended and "True Detective" started up again, and both shows are taking place in winter climates now that "True Detective" is set in Alaska (aka "Night Country"). Fargo, of course, usually has a sheriff as an important character, and season 5 was no exception, but the sheriff this time was the villain, played by Jon Hamm, and he was also sort of a Trump analogue, a frequent wife-beater and the de facto leader of the local gun-nut militia - I'd suggest that playing the song "YMCA" while they locked down the compound was a bit of a tip-off. But "True Detective" is kind of the liberal counterpart, perhaps, with mostly strong female characters investigating the disappearance of an international team of men researching climate change on the frozen tundra. There was a group of caribou that unexpectedly all jumped off a cliff, just before I saw a flock of sheep do the same thing in "Far from the Madding Crowd". "True Detective" also has a father & son team of police officers, and so does tonight's film, and both also seem to be mixing a bit of the supernatural in with the deadly crimes. Collectively there are ghosts and spirits and maybe werewolves, along with local Native American lore, but all of that is common to horror movies, maybe.
(Today's film is not the weirdest werewolf movie ever made, for sure, because that title belongs to "Slice" - I'm not saying "Slice" is a great film, but it is quite weird.)
The central character here, Deputy John Marshall (the actor also directed the film), is convinced that werewolves are not real, despite all the evidence of wolf hairs and pawprints found at each murder scene, and the severity of the injuries, which also suggest they were done by some kind of giant animal. Marshall believes in his heart that a human killer is to blame, however his history of alcoholism and anger issues make him an unreliable person, and also he clashes frequently with his fellow officers, the coroner, the witnesses, and, well, everybody. Also he argues with his wife and daughter, because she's 17 and can't wait to leave for college, and can't stand her father's over-parenting and/or him never being around when he's needed. Um, he's a bit busy trying to solve a murder AND attend his AA meetings AND trying to convince everyone that werewolves don't exist, so could we maybe cut this guy some slack? Sure, I don't like him either, he's got a short fuse and a very punchable face, but he seems to think he's the only one who can solve this case, and who knows, maybe he's right.
There were a few ways they could have gone with this story, beyond the simple track of "Oh, yeah, werewolves." A werewolf has to turn back into a human, so I tried my best to figure out who that could be - maybe Marshall's own daughter, that might have been interesting, I haven't seen a female-based werewolf film in a while. Marshall's father, Sheriff Hadley, was another possibility because he had some kind of health problem (heart murmur) so there were long stretches of the film he wasn't in, and you never saw the werewolf and him at the same time, so there you go. (Marshall's father has a different last name, and this was a bit distracting only because it was never fully explained. I guess he split with his son's mother at some point, but these details are important and should at least be acknowledged.)
Another thing I considered was that Marshall himself might have been the werewolf, more likely once he started drinking again and blacking out, that would have kept him from remembering that he killed those women. Maybe he became an alcoholic in the first place to not remember certain things. But no, I was overthinking it, this film is under 90 minutes long so there's not really any time for something that complicated. When a man from a trailer park has an overdose, though, and he's got a wolf tattoo and they find evidence buried near his camper, then the police think they have the whole thing solved, but then the ultimate answer turns out to be more complicated, and at the same time much simpler. And also more complicated again.
The IMDB lists this as horror, mystery and comedy, but I'm only willing to agree with two of those, I didn't find this funny in any way. Oh, sure, there's dark comedy, but I didn't really see any evidence of that either, not as I define it, anyway. But it is a winter film, I think it's set in Utah, so I'm fine with it ending up in January, during the week of the Sundance Festival, because that's what I associate with Utah. God knows there's probably nothing to do in Park City for 51 weeks out of the year except for skiing, eating at diners and OK, let's say solving crimes.
I can't tell if nobody saw this film because of the pandemic, or because it was just a little indie film that flew under everyone's radar, but it only grossed $266,000 and cost $2 million to make. That's not good, but OK, let's say it was the pandemic.
Also starring Jim Cummings (not the same Jim Cummings heard in the "Sinbad" movie, though), Riki Lindhome (last seen in "My Best Friend's Girl"), Robert Forster (last seen in "Acts of Vengeance"), Chloe East, Will Madden, Annie Hamilton (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Hannah Elder, Kelsey Edwards, Skyler Bible (last seen in "First Man"), Anne Sward, Demetrius Daniels, Kevin Changaris (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Chase Palmer, Daniel Fenton Anderson, Rachel Jane Day, Marshall Allman (last seen in "Hostage"), Barbara Whinnery, Amanda Brown, Kenneth Applegate, Branden Mankin, Dominique Noelle, Alexis Boss, Christian Jensen, Bijan J. Hosseini, Howard Hong, Dustin Hahn, Ben Lokey, Colleen Baum, Avonlea Roy, Jared Lynton, Laura Coover.
RATING: 5 out of 10 plastic evidence bags
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