Some people like scary movies. The sweating, the heart racing, the jumping in your seat; some people actually like all that. Not me. In a past life, I was surely a rabbit or a rat or something like that—a prey animal—and in this lifetime, I retain a deep-seated phobia of loud noises, things that jump out at you and pretty much everything that makes a horror movie enjoyable. So when I tell you that Dog Soldiers is one scary freaking movie, you should remember that this is coming from somebody who sobs into his pillow for weeks every time a car backfires in the neighborhood. It's possible that Dog Soldiers is some kind of camp masterpiece, and you'll just giggle through the whole thing. But that sure wasn't my experience; I'll probably be having nightmares about this stupid movie for the rest of my life.
See, as monsters go, werewolves are among the nastiest. A vampire isn't that scary; they stand around with their capes flapping and their nostrils flaring for half the movie, brooding about some lost love and how they can't see themselves in the mirror and all of that. They're just undead Eurotrash, nothing to lose sleep over. The Frankenstein monster and the mummy are both inhumanly strong, seriously ugly bastards with a predilection for crushing people's windpipes, but while they would seem to have plenty of potential as nightmare fuel, they both move so damn slow that a little girl in a wheelchair could easily outrun them. At least vampires can devise a good scheme; mummies and Frankenstein's monster are both so dumb they make George W. seem marginally less dumb by comparison. The Creature from the Black Lagoon is just some sweaty guy in a rubber fish suit, and Godzilla and King Kong are both so obviously, adorably fake that even I can't work up a good panic attack about them.
Now, when it comes to the monsters who are actually capable of scaring last night's lasagna out of you, zombies top the list. Yeah, they're not much faster or smarter than mummies or the Frankenstein monster, but according to the movies, zombies tend to arrive en masse and they usually make short work of busting through whatever obstacles you've set in their path. (Besides, they're walking corpses who eat your brains. Aiiiiieeeeee!)
But after the zombies, the werewolf is a close second, not only because they leap out at you with the claws and the fangs and the glowing vulpine eyes, but also because if one of those hairy fuckers happens to bite you, you turn into one, too! That's some scary stuff, yo; imagine waking up a couple of mornings per month in some unfamiliar place, sore all over and caked with dried blood, not knowing what happened the previous night but with the distinct feeling that you'd committed some horrifying act and you were surely damned for all time. Actually, I have mornings like that already, but you get the idea.
Dog Soldiers is a U.K. import that manages to scare you witless despite the obvious poverty of its production. Its wolfmen are mostly seen in glimpses, with none of the glam closeups you'd get in a modern Hollywood picture; we never even see one of those seemingly obligatory modern special effects shots where a man morphs into a wolf before our eyes. If this restraint sounds like it would make the film's creatures less scary, such is hardly the case, for what little we see of the werewolves here is just enough to make us really not want to see any more.
The film takes place among a platoon of soldiers (a bunch of limeys you've never heard of) who are attacked by a group of lycanthropes in the woods and seek shelter in a small cottage; the werewolves try to force their way in, people are bitten, hair and fangs are sprouted, much blood is spilled. The plot is uneven, and the film's attempts at humor mostly fall flat (there are some rather unfortunate film-geek inside jokes tossed in, such as one of the soldiers being named Bruce Campbell, a shout-out to the jut-jawed star of the Evil Dead pictures), but really and truly, this is some crazy-scary stuff. As our heroes are horribly dispatched one by one, don't be surprised if you find yourself wishing the theater's concession stand stocked silver bullets beside the JuJu Bee's.
In the age of the blockbuster, it is a sad truth that the good, old-fashioned monster-movie trash that once filled movie houses with happy Americans has been forced to go straight to video, or sometimes (as in this case) to the art houses, the last place you'd expect to find it. With its very low-tech thrills and B-picture exuberance, Dog Soldiers is a quaintly delightful curio from a vanishing era—albeit a quaint curio that will probably make you soil yourself from fright. Aooooooo!
Dog Soldiers screens at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 466-FILM; www.americancinematheque.com. Thurs.-Sat., Sept. 12-14, 7:15 N 9:30 p.m. $6-$8.
