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WolfCop
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| Year: |
2014
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Director: |
Lowell Dean
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| Stars: |
Leo Fafard, Amy Matysio, Sarah Lind, Corrine Conley, Jesse Moss, Jonathan Cherry, Aidan Devine, James Whittingham, Ryland Alexander, Jason Shabatoski, Lyndon Bray, Victor Lam, Cheryl Mazil, Laura Abramsen, Josh Strait, Alison Dean, Peter Scoular
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| Genre: |
Horror, Comedy |
| Rating: |
  6 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Small town cop Lou Garou (Leo Fafard) wakes up in a strange bed for the umpteenth time, hungover and not even bothering to rouse the woman he spent the night with before he pulls on his clothes and makes good his escape, in his patrol car naturally. Pausing briefly to vomit in the street before driving away, he arrives at the police station to be greeted with a Chief (Aidan Devine) who is less than sympathetic, and Tina (Amy Matysio), a fellow cop immeasurably better at her job than he is. After enduring about as much of this as he can, he takes the easy way out and heads to the nearest bar where he is a regular, chatting with the barmaid Jessica (Sarah Lind) and drowning his sorrows - but those sorrows are about to take an unusual turn...
In fact, the ominously named Lou Garou is about to take a seriously dramatic turn into werewolf territory in this semi-spoof horror yarn which appeared to have added the humour to its premise since they recognised nobody could approach this as a sincere, scary chiller. Written and directed by Lowell Dean, it was a modest Canadian effort which belied its lower budget with an imaginative use of what special effects it had; you could still tell there wasn't a huge amount of funds at their disposal, but there was a lack of CGI and use of practical effects instead that operated as a neat throwback to the nineteen-eighties era of grungy gore makeup, and that was what gave WolfCop its kick, such as it was.
Although the title suggests this was going to be an urban nightmare in the vein of Robocop - "Part man, part wolf, all cop", perhaps? - this was set in a rural community, had an occult strain in the narrative and was altogether less likely to be taken to the hearts of all those fans of the satirical Paul Verhoeven cult classic. It was a more obscure destiny this was headed for, though that attention-grabbing premise would go some way to lodging in the memories of those who heard the title, and should that tempt them to give this a go they would find an eventful and amusing little effort which thankfully was played a lot straighter than all those deliberately "so bad they're good" works that were fleecing customers with the notion that it was supposed to be shit, so there was no point in complaining.
This came from another direction as there was obviously a pride in the work here that lacked the cynical saturation of certain other movies where the object was to have you laugh at the poor quality all carefully orchestrated by a bunch of filmmakers only interested in your money. In this case, there may be such gags as the WolfCop hanging his head out of the window while driving his souped up Wolfmobile, but on the other hand you could tell Dean and his crew were invested in doing their best with what resources they had, and the idea of a boozy rozzer so out of it that he doesn't realise he has been duped into becoming a werewolf was satisfying because it gives him a new lease of life, a sense of purpose that he did not otherwise have. Before long he is shaking up the criminals and following corruption all the way to the top.
As for that makeup, Lou didn't turn into an actual wolf as some movies in this variety have it, he was far more of the Lon Chaney Jr kind of wolfman which was a refreshing return to more traditional horror, mixed with the bloodletting that many fans liked to hark back to from decades before as a classic era of the genre. Still there were chances to be surprised: Lou's initial transformation starts with his urinating genitals, offering us an extreme closeup of his manhood bulging into a different, not to say larger form, a touch of the eccentric that not many higher budgeted movies would have bothered with (fair enough, you may wonder why they would want to). When a more conspiratorial element enters the plot, with a race of shapeshifters apparently running the show in this to all intents and purposes piffling little town, you do get the feeling Dean was pushing his plot that bit too far for novelty and ending up in the sort of business even The X-Files couldn't work out to any accomplishment, but for the most part WolfCop was an amusing, ramshackle shocker. Music by Peter La Rocque.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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