When Animals Dream (a.k.a. Når dyrene drømmer) (2014) 1h 24m

Denmark: A country that I looked up a bunch of facts on and, while most of them are pretty cool, I don't feel like sharing them on here.  A land where people live simple lives and work at a factory that processes fish.  A land where one guy is a total asshole to his female co-worker and he and a friend do a fake sexual assault using a fish, as if that makes the shit joke okay...

When Animals Dream is less of a horror movie and more of a light thriller with a horror element.  Marie lives with her father and ailing mother.  She lands a job at the local fish processing plant and all seems to be going well.  That is until she starts to unravel a secret about her mother being part of some Russian tests and that whatever the mother has might have been passed on to Marie.  I'm being vague but long story short, it's some kind of lycanthropy, and everyone in the town knows what's up.  Some people end up missing and they come for Marie and her mother.

This film was incredibly slow if you're looking at it solely from a horror stand point.  The actual wolfwomen segments are minimal and it's not a shock because I guessed what this was going to be about just based on the title.  I don't know why werewolves are the thing to associate with this "coming of age."  Just last week I covered the same general plot with Uncaged.  There's also Ginger Snaps which everyone knows by this point.

I get it!  Puberty sucked for us all.  Hair where the was no hair before, adult teeth bumpin' in, primal urges to jizz into all the tissues that exist in the house, yeah, we get it.  The same with the passage from teen-to-adult.  We fucking get it!  After watching this I spent a bunch of time trying to think of a different monster we could use for this metaphor but nothing really works well... except for maybe the Creature From the Black Lagoon.  You could hit puberty and get weird dick gills or something.  Oh god, that'd be the worst.

I give When Animals Dream 1 t-shirt of wolves howling at the moon out of 5:

Uncaged (2016) 1h 35m

I've been disappointed by films before.  Had my heart broken.  Been starving hysterical naked, dragging myself through the streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.  Okay, that's actually the greatest minds of Ginsberg's generation but you get the point.  There are films that I hope will bring good things once I hit play.  I assumed that a werewolf film called Uncaged could take me places.  Instead it just left me on my couch with a want for something real.

Uncaged puts us shortly after our main guy's 18th birthday.  Apparently becoming a man also includes becoming a wolfman for him.  His uncle invites our guy to his cabin for winter break.  It will apparently be empty and this is also the time that his wolfy-ness should be kicking in.  Wolfman invites his misogynist-hyper-sexual-focused-but-virgin cousin and their friend.  Our wolfdude begins to realize there's something wrong with him and eventually gets tied up with a local crime person.  Wolf shit happens, this movie is bad, and they try to pull off a low budget version of the American Werewolf in London change but end up giving us a wolf snout, teeth, and an Amish beard they picked up from the Spirit store.  It's butt!  BUUUUUTTTTTTT!

I think the moment I gave up on this film was about two minutes in when the cousin is having a conversation and says "she is thirsting for my penis."  That's pretty much how that guy talked the whole time, unless he was making a gay joke.  His dying wish was for a prostitute so he wouldn't die a virgin.  Well virginity is a social construct and not a real thing.  Do you know what is real?  This movie, but it needs to be forgotten.  Left as a bad dream best forgotten for it's terrible writing, boring looking wolf, and all around aura of an egg fart.

I give Uncaged 0 copies of Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage" single out of 5:

Friday's Choice Cuts: Harley Poe

Let's skip straight past The Misfits as far as horror-punk goes.  We all know of them and how they're kind of a shadow of their former self.  Of course, so is "no-photos" Danzig right now.  Let's jump straight to a modern band with Harley Poe.

Sounding like a slightly more folk-punk version of The Violent Femmes, I was was introduced to them by chance back when I was spending a lot of time checking in books at the library I worked at.  At that time I was listening to a lot of Pandora or Spotify and this happened to just pop up on a random playlist.  Since then I've tracked down most of their albums except for one of their last releases which was put out by Fangoria and is a group of seven 7" all tied to one of the deadly sins.

The albums are a good mix of horror and humor.  With topics ranging from vampires, to werewolves, to hating their small town of Kokomo (not the place the Beach Boys song is about), it's fun sing-a-long type stuff.  Although I wouldn't recommend it in the car with your three-year-old.

Here's one of my favorite songs.  It's called Time of the Month and ties in a woman's cycle to be about her full-moon werewolf transformations as opposed to menstruation... although blood will flow.  MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!  Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Day 7: Late Phases (2014) 1h 35m

That poster is a fucking lie!  Look at it!  Seriously, take a moment to look at that poster.  So with that name and that image you assume you're looking at a werewolf movie, and you'd be right.  However, that wolf looks a billion times better than what we get.  I'm getting ahead of myself though...

Late Phases holds a double meaning here.  It's not just a reference to the moon, but also to our main character.  He's a Vietnam vet that is being moved into a retirement community.  The kicker here is that he is blind.  This doesn't hold him back though as he is incredibly independent and his military training allowed him to adapt his other senses so he's kind of a badass.

On his first night his neighbor is killed by a werewolf who then tries to kill him and his guide dog.  The guide dog doesn't make it so fuck this werewolf in his wolf ass for mortally wounding the dog.  From there our protagonist pieces things together to realize it's a werewolf and who the werewolf is.  Training and hijinx ensue.

I very rarely look at other reviews of films after I watch them/before I blog about them.  This time though I came across someone comparing this to Bubba Ho-Tep and I had the same feeling early on.  The main differences would be that Bubba Ho-Tep has Bruce Campbell and it is a much better film.

I liked the plot here, but not the execution.  I'm not going to fault the actors or the director (as this was his first English speaking film), but just the film itself.  When they moved the chains it just came up short of the first down.

Getting back to my earlier complaint about the werewolf... holy fuck, where do I begin?  First, I have never laughed so hard at a monster reveal as I did while watching Late Phases.  It was just a man in a shitty fur suit and mask.  And when I say a "man" I mean that they spent no time in giving this werewolf any wolf features aside from claws, a poorly designed wolf face, and weird thin and long fur.  The transformation scene was also really cheesy aside from having the guy tear his skin off to have the wolf under it growing.  Maybe I'm being a snob, but when you have the transformation from American Werewolf in London looking as good as it did in 1981, and you come at me with this fucking 2014 shitshow you can suck a wet fart.

I give Late Phases 1 copy of Dog Man out of 5: