3.25.04: Of Death and Werewolves ‹ Blog

We are now up against live, hostile targets. So, if Little Red Riding Hood should show up with a bazooka and a bad attitude, I expect you to chin the bitch.
Sergeant Harry Wells, Dog Soldiers

Of Death and Werewolves

March 25, 2004

HOLY CRAP. There has been a dead body lying in a vacant lot not three blocks from my home for about a month, and I never knew about it?!?

I am SO pissed. My husband and I drove past that very spot several gazillion times in the past two days, and we never saw a thing. Dammit! I thought I had a sixth sense when it came to tracking down dead things! Grr. I am twenty years old and I have yet to see an unidentified homicide victim. Snarl.

My morbidity may seem callous, and it totally is—if I’d been the one to find that body, the police would have arrived to find me taking pictures with my digital camera and poking through the rest of the lot to see if I could find any other interesting bits. It sounds sick, but that’s just the kind of person I am. Yesterday Tony and I went for a long drive in the car, and I was thrilled because I saw an entire dead deer on the side of the road. Not that I’m happy that the doe got hit, no way; I’m just taking a clinical interest in the decomposition process. I’m just sorry that the deer was on the side of the highway, because if it had been on the side of some quiet country road I would have made Tony pull over so I could get out and poke it with a stick. Poke, poke, poke…

So… would you call that dead female deer a “Jane Doe?” HAHAHAHAhahahem. Time for my meds.

Since this post seems to be focused on the general topic of blood and gore, I might mention that I watched Dog Soldiers recently. I was not impressed. It struck me as a typical low-budget, producers-on-crack kind of debacle that shoved aside all plot and premise in favor of cheap special effects, foreseeable scares, and some of the dumbest-looking werewolves I’ve ever seen on film. They looked like naked guys wearing badly-made papier-mache wolf’s-head masks—which is, of course, exactly what they were. And the scares were non-existent; when one of the characters got his guts ripped out, I (who am generally squeamish about seeing that stuff on celluloid) merely rolled my eyes and laughed. (My mother, on the other hand, who actually did have her guts ripped out of her—okay, she was under anesthesia—was covering her eyes and instructing me to let her know “when it was over.”) Overall, I found this movie amusing, more for its delightful Scottish dialects and bad special effects than for its occasional flashes of humor. There was also the wonderful presence of Liam Cunningham, who is always a delight to look at (and listen to). I’d forgotten how much I love that fellow; he was great in Shooting The Past.

Tonight, while surfing the web, I Googled the movie, to see what the general consensus on it was. I don’t know what I was really expecting, but it was certainly not universal praise—and universal praise is what this picture seems to get! Apparently, it’s become the new standard for werewolf movies. Even the harshest, most jaded critics seem to love it. What the hell?

I’m used to being in the minority when it comes to my film views—I hated The Sixth Sense, I liked Waterworld, I’m deeply in love with Wild Wild West and will loudly sing its praises to anyone who’ll hold still long enough to listen. But never before have I faced such a solid opposition. This worries me. Was this movie brilliant? Did I, a connoiseur of horror films, a cultish devotee of such B-grade scare screeners as the Evil Dead trilogy and Night of the Living Dead, miss the value of this movie? Have I—gods forbid—lost my sense of horror?

Oh, the horror!