Review of Dog Soldiers (2002)

Moving picture, 105 minutes

Soldiers on an exercise in the Scottish wilderness encounter “classic” (1930s-style) werewolves.

Fantasy action. People who turn into vicious man-eating anthropomorphic wolves under a full moon are my least favourite pop-mythological creature trope. They are worse than, for example, vampires, zombies or mummies: all four were canonized by Universal Pictures in the 1930s, werewolves specifically in Werewolf of London (1935).

As seen here, the werewolf condition spreads in surviving victims, and the creatures are supernaturally vulnerable to silver but supernaturally resistant to everything else, regenerating from massive trauma almost instantly. In order for these symptoms to fit inside a remotely consistent universe, that universe has to look very different from our own, and yet the “only” result here is a badly clichéd siege of a house in the middle of nowhere. There is no big picture, no believability. This is why I don’t like werewolves.

References here: “Shape-Shifters” (2019).

moving picture fiction