You know, nothing gets my heart pumping more than a good, full blooded, horror debut and in 2002 we got an utter banger in the fuzzy form of Dog Soldiers, the first outing for director Neil Marshall who fused the rustic gore of The Evil Dead with the military stylings of Aliens to stunning effect.
In many ways, Dog Soldiers is something of a miracle; not only is it one of the rare werewolf movies released after the 80’s that made an actual impact (along with Ginger Snaps, of course), but it’s an ever rarer example of a British made action/horror that manages to keep its distinct identity while squaring up to their American cousins. And on top of that, it’s really fucking funny too.
So lock and load, keep an eye on that full moon and prepare to howl with joy because, to quote the ubiquitous Sean Pertwee’s Sarge: “I expect nothing less than gratuitous violence from the lot of ya.”
Dropped into a remote area of the Scottish Highlands under the pretence of a training exercise, a squad of British soldiers flog their way through the misty woodlands under the command of the take-no-shit Sergeant Wells. However, after a shock run-in with a mutilated cow, the hardened squad find their unshakable resolve… well, shaken, when they discover that the SAS team they’re supposed to be pitted against have been rendered into slurry by an unknown, bestial enemy.
There’s only one survivor, the slightly mauled but decidedly shifty Captain Ryan – a man who has a complicated past with the squad’s Private Cooper – who blurs out something about the whole exercise being nothing more than a ruse for a bigger mission.
The mission, it seems, was for the SAS team to capture a real, live werewolf that’s been helping itself to campers who come to the area, but instead of finding one lycanthope, the squad discovered an entire pack.
After the initial attack leaves one of their number dead and the Sarge laid up with a sizable section of his insides on the outside, the soldiers are saved by Megan, a passing zoologist, who takes them to shelter at a nearby, but ominously deserted, farmhouse.
As the troops lick its wounds, their shelter is soon surrounded by the slathering werewolves who not only are impervious to bullets, but are going to forcefully gain entrance at some point.
As Cooper and Ryan continue their rivalry of glaring at each other across the room and Wells finds that his Lycanthope inflicted wounds are healing at a worrying rate, the remainder of the squad deal with this assault-by-werewolf in their own ways. Private Terry is terrified, the overexcited Spoon is perversely loving it and Joe? Joe’s just pissed he’s missing England vs. Germany on the telly.
Low of budget and adorably rough around the edges, Dog Soldiers is essentially a horror movie for the lad culture that sees its boorish collection of gun toting geezers get a true demonstration of teamwork as their close knit, bantering band of brothers are slowly rended to pieces by a family of hulking, biped wolf people. What what makes Marshall’s supremely fun debut stand out is that for all its swagger and coarse nature, its remarkably smarter that the average were(wolf).
Liberally pinching from horror classics all over the place, Marshall knows that a good script and a quick wit is vital when trying to craft a low budget monster mash that can utilize its campy roots as a benefit. Thus the early works of Raimi and Cameron are plundered to a rousing degree – an vicious force unleashed upon an isolated group in the woods that doesnt take itself too seriously? Check. A bunch of soldier types swapping military speak and alpha-male banter facing an unstoppable inhuman foe? You can tick that off the list too along with Pertwee delivering a Jaws-esque, Indianapolis speech and possibly the greatest Matrix reference in cinema history (“There is no Spoon.”), but the most impressive bit of the result of Marshall’s scribbling is that, for all its borrowing, it still defiantly stands on it’s own two paws.
Movies like this have a tendency to feel somewhat episodic as horror themed siege plots, if not handled right, just descend into a chaotic frenzy of gore and shouting, but the writer/director keeps a steady hand on the repeated waves of werewolf attacks to stop them becoming repetitive due to the single location.
Better yet, his cast – obviously realising they’re sitting on a script that’s way smarter than you’d normally find – rises to the occasion, wringing out every performance to the extreme and making a succulent meal of the numerous, genius lines. Trainspotting’s Kevin McKidd may have narrowly missed out on appearing on that iconic poster, but here he’s a stonkingly good hero and hes given superb support by an impossibly game Pertwee who truly deserved the Sean Pertwee award for the most Sean Pertwee performance in a Sean Pertwee movie ever. Elsewhere we find a pre-Game Of Thrones Liam Cunningham honing his talent for accents and sterling character work as the comically sinister Captain Ryan while Darren Morfitt stands out as the hyperactive Spoon who is gifted with one of the greatest displays of defiance in the face of death oth the immortal line: “I hope I give you the shits you fucking wimp!”.
It’s just one example of a movie who surfs its inevitable journey to cult immortality on a wave of superlative one liners. “What, full moons, silver bullets and eyebrows that join in the middle?” questions the perpetually gloomy Joe when the subject of werewolves is first broached, while a sneering Cooper squares up to a wolfed-up Ryan with a line (“You tried licking your balls yet?”) far more damaging than any amount of weaponized silver. And yet it’s unsurprisingly Pertwee who score the best moments, attacking his character with the same deranged nature that his character attacks lycanthope marauders. “They’re not going to fucking fit!” he wails in despair while desperately trying to stuff his wandering guts back into a sucking gut wound; elsewhere he fights with the family dog as it tugs on his blood soaked bandages and proves amusingly resistant to being punched unconscious while Cooper and Megan tries to tend to his ragged wounds.
Such is the way with any cult masterpiece fashioned out of gile and gaffer tape, there are flaws (Emma Cleasby is the odd-one-out of the cast, cursed to deliver exposition while the boys get to play with one liners) and some may find its boy’s club stylings a bit dated, but as British debuts go, Dog Soldiers is up there with the likes of Hellraiser when it competes with the big boys on it’s own terms.
Wickedly funny, genuinely exciting and featuring some legitimately awesome werewolves courtesy of Clive Barker regular Bob Keen, Dog Soldiers saunters up to the Wolfman genre and cheekily cocks its leg over the whole shebang.
Good boy.
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