Friday, November 20, 2009

Rage of the Werewolf (Werewolf #5 of 5)

See this lackluster poster? It's one of the highlights of this story.



Genre: Horror, Sci-Fi (as inevitably anything is that opens up with the shot of a comet zooming across the sky with voice over)


Premise: In Rage of the Werewolf, a comet collides with the moon, knocking it out of its orbit. As a result, people with latent werewolf genes becomes werewolves and start killing large amounts of people. So the characters do what anybody would in this situation, they capture a vampire and start experimenting with mixing vampire and werewolf blood.

About: I don’t know too much about this film besides the fact that the posters awful, and there were a lot of bad special effects. Not sure about box office, or critical reviews. Rage of the Werewolf seemed to fly in under the radar.

Writers: Kevin Lindenmuth (who has a lot of unheard of credits for writing, directing and producing films about aliens, werewolves and vampires) co-wrote the script with Santo Marotta (this is his only credit, and his only acting credit besides Jake in this film was as Victim #1 in another B-movie)

So I couldn’t find the script for 1983’s Wolfen. And for that, I apologize. So I scanned elsewhere on the internet, trying to think of other Werewolf films (there really aren’t a terrible large amount of them). And while Teen Wolf would be a fun review, I decided to dive into the B-movie territory where Werewolf films traditionally go. So I found the fourth draft of The Rage of the Werewolf, which was written in 1998.

I got about two pages in and thought, well this is cheesy but it’ll probably work out to be a pretty decent script. Then, I got about ten pages further and thought, this is really terrible and underacted. You could go through a smorgasbord of bad script elements in this film, but suffice it to say I’d rather focus on the very worst of this script.

The largest failure of this script is it has no main thrust. The plot is crackpot enough for Ed Wood. Werewolves meets Zombies meets Comet Collision. That’s nuts. Like, really, really nuts. In no way can I follow this. And then, this storyline is populated with characters who I can’t possibly get behind. They’re flat, underdeveloped, and don’t talk to one another unless it’s directly for the purpose of furthering the story’s events. Nor would you read this for laughs, spooks, or thrills. And themes? Haha. There’s no reason anybody would read this script for a story. Making it the most problematic existence of all the Werewolf films. American Werewolf in Paris at least had a good budget, and some bottom rung Hollywood dialogue. Rage of the Werewolf has none of this.

Is it an entirely bad ride? It’s quick. And it’s interesting to follow along because there was enough random, strange crap that it held my interest. And the dialogue is the type that attempts to portray life, but is obviously not very similar at all.

All these bad things taken into consideration, the film does not fall into the loveable genre of bad B-movies. Rather, the script reads like a terrible low-budget film, which it became eventually. I thought the lesser known Werewolf films were going to be better than the big Hollywood affairs, but for this script it wasn’t the case. Werewolf films just aren’t very good. Everyone seems to write a direct horror storyline, without a great purpose, without a good plot. And that doesn’t make for a good film. So while I don’t expect Twilight 2 to be a great, high quality film, I do think it’s probably as worthwhile a take on the genre as any other of these lackluster scripts.

[X] - Scooby Doo (Complete Crap)
Atilla (Poor, Few Redeeming Qualities)
Wedding Crashers (Mediocre)
Hot Rod (Good)
Definitely Maybe (Pretty Darn Good

Isla Prospects: Nope. None. At all. There aren’t even any women in this story. Instead, the story is populated by men without personalities.

What I Learned: There’s such a thing as taking a plot too far out into a high concept. Halfway through the plot, when the vampires are introduced alongside the werewolves, the script goes so far out into a place where the film can only be camp or ridiculousness. If you take too many chances on a reader/viewer’s sense of what’s real you enter out into a place where it becomes very hard to sustain believability. Reminds me of a script I wrote one time about Bigfoot and the cure for cancer.

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