DarkWolf (2003)

"A vicious werewolf stalks the streets of Los Angeles. Between killings, its desperate goal is to mate with unsuspecting Josie, who is unaware of her special power attracting the beast."

This is an extremely insipid direct to video offering. I actually had to watch most of it on "fast forward" as to sit through all that "blah blah blah" and turgid characterisation was more than I could bear tonight.

So it's a werewolf movie. With the exception of "Ginger Snaps" there hasn't been a decent werewolf movie for years... and this is no exception.

The pity of it is that all the elements were in place for this to be a good one. It has a very good looking cast, a fairly decent budget (which seems to have all gone on booking the urban location sets), even quite a good werewolf suit at certain points. Unfortunately the werewolf transformations appear to have been done by computer games programmers and the CGI is laughably terrible.

I'm not even going to bother with a full review of this because it bored me too much. The script was absolutely terrible (and borrowed heavily from "Terminator") and if there was actually a director involved in more than name only I'd be very surprised. As something that is supposed to be just a little bit higher up in the food chain than a typical B movie this was worse than all of the ones I've seen recently put together!

So where was all the erotic stuff? Well there are a lot of boobies on show due to starting the movie in some kind of strip club. What a cop out! I also have to mention the important rooftop photoshoot that was used as padding. This "erotic scene" occurred halfway through with two girls wearing nothing but body paint kissing and touching while having their pictures taken in a modelling session. It didn't do anything for me even though one of the girls used to be a "Power Ranger". It was intercut with scenes of the werewolf ripping apart the boyfriend of one of the girls in a warehouse and that sort of took the edge of things considerably. I couldn't enjoy the nudie bits or the gory bits. One after another works. Mix the two and it doesn't.

The only claim to fame this film may have is that it features Tippi Hedren for about five minutes (probably less than that). It must be an LA thing but I really can't understand how credible actors ever get mixed up in these gigs unless they are just doing it for the money or out of boredom. Maybe someone will enlighten me about that one day.

Forget any atmosphere or scariness in this movie, there just isn't any. There is also very little gore. You never really see a kill just all the torn apart body parts afterwards. Could this film possibly leave the audience feeling more cheated? They might as well have left out the boobies, cut the gore entirely, and gone for a PG-13 rating!

The only real way to ever make something like lycanthropy scary is to show the kill. Apart from the agony of transformation, it's what the audience are waiting for. You'll wait forever if you expect to see anything like that here though.

I suppose I will rate this as 1 out of 10. I'm tempted to give it absolutely nothing at all. This was a complete disaster.