Dog Soldiers (2002): C

Strong creature design is the sole calling card of Dog Soldiers, in which Scottish military men engaged in a training mission in the deep dark woods square off against a pack of tactical werewolves. In his feature debut, writer/director Neil Marshall (The Descent, Doomsday) falls back mainly on army squad clichés and rote conflicts, along the way delivering a group of protagonists woefully short on personality. Aside from Kevin McKidd’s team leader, who squandered a spot in special forces by refusing to follow his commander’s orders to murder a dog, the only person with anything resembling a characteristic is the grunt who’s angry about missing an English soccer match. Tonally, Marshall straddles the lines between humor, action and horror with relative aplomb, but his scripting is stolid, resulting in a story that alternates between generally pointless exposition (since most of the soldiers are destined to be wolf food) and skirmishes that are hectic and bloody in all the routine ways. Once McKidd and his men meet up with a suspicious zoologist (Emma Cleasby) and take refuge in her remote forest cabin, the film becomes a cross between Night of the Living Dead and [insert werewolf pic here], a combination that would deliver more thrills and laughs if Marshall were capable of crafting heroes of any distinction. As it is, though, Dog Soldiers’ inspired B-movie-cheesy premise merely rehashes old genre tricks.

Comments

[Yankee Doodle]

I thought it was pretty good. Even had explosions.