Alas, the poor werewolf. Forever enshrined in the annals of horror thanks to Lon Chaney’s legendary Universal Monster, yet among those iconic terrors, it’s arguably been the most underserved in recent years. With the post-American Werewolf boom long past and Joe Johnston’s under-appreciated Wolfman remake having failed to ignite interest, a new halfway-decent werewolf movie is particularly a cause for celebration. Yet even when a surprise comes around, a twenty-year old cinematic shadow still looms over the subgenre. Two decades later, Dog Soldiers remains both a gory action-packed highlight among werewolf films and an impressive debut for a promising director.
Dog Soldiers, The Descent, Doomsday, Centurion: while his most recent films have underwhelmed, Neil Marshall’s first four films seemed to herald a new genre cinema maestro arriving on the scene, fully embracing taut low-budget thrills and b-movie pulp. His nightmarish spelunking masterpiece surely places Marshall among the aught’s horror greats, but his action-horror debut has lost none of its intensity. In fact, its economical scale, practical gore and creature effects, and guns-blazing grittiness seems more singular today than it might’ve at the start of the ‘00s horror era that would produce films like Feast and 30 Days of Night.
The set-up is exceedingly simple and lean. A squad of British soldiers engaging in war games in the Scottish Highlands find their SAS training partners ripped to shreds; soon lupine figures are lunging from the wilderness, forcing them to survive the night in a werewolf-besieged cabin. Dog Soldiers establishes the team, builds tension, and erupts into soldier-vs-werewolf action with a propulsive momentum, effectively fusing the genre-straddling dynamic of Predator with the survive-till-morning claustrophobia of Night of the Living Dead. Once all hell breaks loose and lycanthrope silhouettes are watching from the treeline, Marshall smartly treats the siege not as the attack of rampaging monsters but as a tactical cat-&-mouse between elite units: one armed with dwindling weaponry, the other with jaws, claws, and predator cunning; both trying to outmaneuver and outthink their enemy.
Thanks to Gotham and Game of Thrones respectively, Sean Pertwee as Sergeant Wells and Liam Cunningham as the insidious SAS Captain Ryan would be the most recognizable faces today, but the main unit quickly establishes itself as charismatic and capable, more concerned about missing the World Cup and with ribbing each other than with the exercise. That humanity ensures a sense of vulnerable tension as the battle condenses from woods, to cabin and barn, to tight hallways and cramped closests. The team never feels safe, never has the advantage against their beastly menace, as Marshall constantly hammers home how utterly outmatched these humans are. Between the hulking animatronic wolf heads and the buckets of viscera their maulings leave behind, Dog Soldiers really comes across as one of the last gasps of the fully-practical werewolf, tangibly menacing onscreen and a fearsome FX showcase to boot.
Moments like superglue-aided surgery and “There is no Spoon” hint at the winking goofy Marshall who could direct a movie like Doomsday, but Dog Soldiers is a blood-drenched mix of action and horror first and foremost. Twenty years later, its fearsome werewolves and desperate soldiers-vs-monsters carnage remain modern highlights among a subgenre whose entries have become rare.
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