There’s always been something a little more down to earth about horror movies from England – granted, films like The Wicker Man and Hellraiser are as wild as they come, but ever since Shaun Of The Dead so expertly mixed the downtrodden quality of a British sitcom with the horrors of a zombie infestation, there’s been a clutch of movies that’s eagerly dropped a clutch of young, put upon sad sacks into the middle of some pretty vicious shit.
A good example of this is Howl, a rather under the radar flick that sees a bunch of train commuters suddenly find their journey delayed by a late night werewolf attack who have to band together to survive despite the fact that no one even wants to make eye contact with someone else on a British train, let alone trust them to save them from a slavering family of wolf people.
But does Howl stand as a hidden horror gem, or does this take on Dog Soldiers without the soldiers find that it’s on the wrong track…?
Joe Griffin is a young man who works as a Alpha Trax train guard who finds himself browbeaten into working long into the night shift when he’s forced to cover the red eye service due to a bout of sickness. While Joe has obviously reached the end of his tether in his chosen form of employment and he gets nothing but disdainful hostility from the passengers on his service, he at least is thankful that be gets to share a shift with Ellen, the tea trolly girl who sells refreshments on the journey.
However, as we get a rundown of the people on board the train on this stormy, full moon night that consist of an elderly couple, a brattish teen, a smug businessman, a slobbish footie fan, a nerd, a hoodie and an uptight businesswoman, they’re about to find out that there’s far worse things that can delay a train than leaves on the line and when the service grinds to a halt after hitting a deer as its route takes it through a forest. In pretty short order, the driver discovers that whatever was chasing the deer now has chosen him for its newest meal when he’s attacked by a ravenous beast and quickly reduced to kibbles and bits and after being bullied to break protocol and let everyone off the train Joe and his passengers soon discover that they ate being stalked by a family of werewolves.
Taking refuge back in the train, the group has to try work together in order to try and keep the snarling predators out, but as per usual in a British survival horror film, everyone soon starts to turn on one another due to the fact that there’s a sizable amount of pricks and idiots thrown into the mix to ensure these guys won’t be able to get along for five minutes, let alone to the end of the night. But with endless dissension in the ranks and a wounded member to keep an eye on (werewolf bites ain’t no joke, you know), they’re going to have to find a way to coexist or the red eye is going to get a hell of a lot redder.
Earlier on, I named dropped Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers, which obviously was no accident considering it managed to merge werewolves and a very British sense of humour together almost perfectly. But what links it even further beyond including English accents and howling man-beasts is that thd director, Paul Hyett, was one of the effects guys who not only toiled on Marshall’s debut, but he also lent his effects magic to the director’s filmography too. On top of that, we have a cameo from Sean Pertwee who also appeared in Dog Soldiers, but there’s a sizable role for Shauna Macdonald who was the lead in Marshall’s sophomore classic, The Descent – which kind of gives it a sense of legitimacy by association.
However, while Howl can’t hope to reach the dizzy heights of some of the movies mention throughout this review so far, it does manage to be a diverting little horror flick that harmlessly eats up 90 minutes of your time the way a glaring lycanthrope would wolf down your liver given half a chance. While the comedy isn’t quite as measured as some of its ilk, I personally found a few of its quirks especially amusing as I have actually worked on the railway and recognised some of the tropes. For example, anyone who watches the first twenty minutes of this film and sneers at how unrealistically shitty and dismissive all the passengers are on this train would do well to realise that even if the film leans into exaggeration as a joke just to pick on Ed Speelers’ depressed lead, it actually felt pretty fucking accurate to me. However, while I was chuckling at how cluelessly entitled passengers can be, I have to admit that the interiors of the train is nightmarishly small and looks more like something you’d getbon the underground – but I digress.
The characters are fairly standard tropes for a movie like this – the hoodie has hidden depths, the spiky businesswoman has a softer side, the seemingly suave businessman is a gargantuan tosser – and its lead pretty much follows the Simon Pegg/Shaun playbook to the letter as he slowly rises from lowly guard to a leader as monstrous forces and a passion for survival panel beat the apathy out of him, but to say any of the characters are particularly memorable would sadly be a lie – although I was surprised to spot Ted Lasso’s Brett Goldstein in a minor, before-he-was-famous role that completely comes out of nowhere
However, when it comes to building a sturdy, survival/horror frame to hang it’s bells and whistles on, Howl manages to do just fine. Sure, the train interiors are all wrong (I’m gonna die on this hill, sorry), but the production values are good enough that this nasty predictiment certainly has enough atmosphere to spare. But the best thing about Howl is the fact that Paul Hyett chooses to approach his werewolves in a slightly different way than the norm and avoids both the more bear-like form of An American Werewolf In London and the biped versions seen in The Howling and Dog Soldiers. Here, the movie opt to take a more wolf man like approach, dropping the more overt animal features in favour of a mixture, we have hulking beast people with gaping, sabretoothed mouths and triple jointed lupine legs that look pretty sweet if you ask me. Also, the hints and suggestions that suggest that the werewolves are actually a family out on the hunt give you enough clues to toy with (one is wearing a wedding ring) without breaking the mystique of where these fucking things have come from.
However, at the end of the day – which, of course, is when werewolves usually appear – Howl just isn’t as funny, scary or gory as it thinks it is, which means that for all its good intentions, it’s only good for a single, largely enjoyable ride before it pulls into the deserted train yard of your mind and is promptly forgotten. Actually, while this may be a cringe inducing pun, you may find that for best results, stream Howl for free if you can find the appropriate… platform.
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