|
|
Dog Soldiers
Be kind to dogs
2002
Review: December 5, 2006
Director: Neil Marshall
Starring: Sean Pertwee, Kevin McKidd, Emma Cleasby, Liam Cunningham, Thomas Lockyer
Sure, why not.
THE SETUP:
Platoon of soldiers is attacked by werewolves.
DISCUSSION:
From Neil Marshall, writer / director of The Descent, comes his movie prior to that, his first film. And while it’s decent, compared to The Descent, it definitely seems like a first film.
First we see a couple camping, and the woman gives the guy a silver knife. Then we’re told it’s 2 hours earlier and join a soldier guy on a training mission. I still don’t know what the two have to do with each other, or why it matters that it’s 2 hours earlier. The soldier guy is a ninja that knocks out about 5 men with his flashlight-centered martial arts, but his commander, Ryan, catches him and orders him to shoot and innocent dog. The guy, Cooper, refuses to do it, meaning he fails whatever test he’s doing, and then Ryan shoots the dog anyway.
Then it’s four months later in the Scottish Highlands, with this platoon on some training mission. They are dropped off, then stop to have a chat, while we notice that the hand-held camera is quite self-consciously reframing the guys every few seconds in this faux-documentary style. I recognized this technique from The Descent, where it seemed to work better, but that could be simply that it was new and didn’t seem quite so self-conscious then. One does have to admit that director Neil Marshall does have a distinctive style, however, and it is all over both films.
So the guys are all sitting around telling what scares them most, and the rather attractive Sarge tells of his friend who got blown to bits by a land mine. Then a carcass falls on the guys, and they run around looking, finding a bunch of abandoned camps [there were other platoons on the training mission] with a ton of blood and guts, but no bodies. There is one survivor at one of the camps, who just happens to be Ryan, the guy who wanted Cooper to shoot the dog at the beginning. He keeps saying “there was only supposed to be one!”
Soon they are set upon by the werewolves, and Sarge gets a claw across the stomach, which causes his guts to spill out and lay on his stomach, which his buddy later stuffs back in and makes him walk on. It’s just not something you see every day. They run through the woods when suddenly they see a truck, and they all get in with the female driver. They drive to an abandoned farmhouse, and the rest of the movie is a night-long siege on the house.
SPOILERS > > >
So it’s all attack, attack, attack, with a few moments here and there in between. In here we find out that Ryan is becoming a werewolf, and he transforms, then runs off with a sword stuck through him. Sarge, whose abdomen has been super-glued shut [no kidding], is also turning. We find out that Ryan was trying to capture what he thought was the sole werewolf and bring it back to the military. The other platoon was bait. The farmhouse they’re in belongs to the family who are now werewolves. They have to just make it ‘til morning, but it’s always so bright outside [seriously, light streaming in through the windows] that you keep thinking “is it day now?” At the end the dog at the farmhouse ends up saving Cooper, repaying his kindness to dogs at the beginning. Please be kind to our furry friends. They may save you from a werewolf one day.
Toward the end there is a notably homo moment, when Ryan the werewolf comes back, sword still run through him. He and Cooper have been having this test of wills all along, and now he tries to force his sword into Cooper’s mouth. Please consult the helpful illustration above. You know, I guess power struggles between men always come down to who's going to suck whose dick. Maybe if Cooper had just offered to blow him at the beginning, none of this would have happened.
< < < SPOILERS END
I got bored. I admire that he’s making a fully-formed movie out of two basic locations, but after a while it’s just a constant siege with not much variety or interest. The other thing is that the characters just weren’t interesting to me. The guys were mostly interchangeable, and there just wasn’t enough story—not to mention that all the macho blather about honor and leadership and stuff has no impact on me. In The Descent not only did we have a great situation [the two movies are very, very similar in a number of ways], but there was a really interesting character dynamic and one wanted to see how it would be resolved. That made the whole thing more than just a series of beasties jumping out at regular intervals. Plus I feel that Marshall was able to get a lot more out of a limited setting, because it was natural that you would only have one location in a cave. Here it feels a little cramped in such a way that one becomes aware of their budgetary constraints.
The featurette on the disc is useless, with long stretches of footage from the film, and actors or crew either recapping the story or giving you information devoid of insight.
Don’t get me wrong, this was a decent-enough horror movie. But now that we have The Descent I think it has been made somewhat obsolete. If you’ve already seen The Descent and need more, go for it, but if you’ve seen The Descent and don’t need to see it again with its elements switched up [and a lot less interesting on the character side], there are lots of other good movies out there.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you’ve already seen The Descent and need more.
RELATED MOVIES:
THE DESCENT is Neil Marshall’s next movie, about women being menaced by nasty creatures in a cave, and is similar but better than this one.
