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Werewolf Movie Review: Battledogs by Silvermane

Battledogs (made for TV 2013) specifically Syfy.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2457138/

Knowing the above let's keep everything in mind.

The Good:

-Werewolves invade New York

-There's a lot of werewolves

-some transformation scenes

-occasional physical effects (make up, animatronics, etc.)

-Has Ernie Hudson (Ghostbusters) and Ariana Richards (girls from Jurassic Park)

-We get to see Ariana Richards and how her acting career has gone.

The Bad:

-We get to see where Ariana Richards career has gone. *laughs*

-CGI as only the Asylum can do

-cliche military sub plot

-cliche acting

-numerous timing problems

Firstly expectations for this were pretty low given that IT IS a Syfy original AND an Asylum production. The biggest problem with this film is that sadly it is a SYFY original. If a big movie budget had been given and a longer run time it probably would have been at the very least tolerable and awesome in scale. However the restrictions of television production become imediately known as you treated to a scene from "JFK airport". It so isn't. For anyone who has been there you know immediately that the airport in question is not JFK. That suspension of disbelief aside the plot is pretty straight forward. A wild life photographer is a carrier of a virus (Lupine virus -10 points for originality) and the outbreak occurs in the airport with people getting killed and infected all over. The government sets up a quarantine the infected in a what I assume is a facility but it's look of an abandon train station keeps me thinking this is a rushed job and this leads to a problem. Outside the facility people are protesting saying the infected (werewolves) should be released because they are human. However throughout the film we get the sense that this just happened. In fact when one of the main characters goes back to the original scene of the crime there's still bodies and blood marks everywhere. Yet the government had time to set up a quarantine place, ID the werewolves with apparent 100% accuracy, and enough time for the general public to find out about all this to protest the injustice.

Soon Major Hoffman (Craig Shaffer) meets (although he does not know it) patient zero, cause after zombie outbreaks there's always one of those. They bond for all of five seconds and soon Hoffman crosses paths with the General (Dennis Haysbert ) whose planning the use said werewolves as military soldiers while making a brief but never fully realized argument about the follies of modern technology versus men in boots. The rest of the film has Hoffman along with a CDC nurse trying to find patient zero and extracting the antibody from her to get a cure all while racing against the clock as the once imprisoned werewolves eventually escape into the city. A nuke is called in just to add to the tension but fear not it is all wrapped up in under five minutes, seriously.

What should be a fairly straight forward race against the clock or werewolves running amok gets so many of the cliche plot points SYFy just seems to not be able to let go. President ordering nukes on a city as a last minute deterrent, finding the deux ex machina solution, and an evil military subplot all detract from what could have been an awesome idea. As mentioned above timing of everything seems off in this film. From the time it takes to nuke New York (a decision made WAAAAAAAAY too lightly by a very ineffectively acted President), to the werewolves fast and yet slow trek across New York City, the way too sudden two romantic relationships in the film, and finally the extremely rushed end. The CGI is almost laughable. The werewolves appear disjointed and in some scenes you wonder where the neck is on some of them but the bad CGI doesn't stop there it is randomly inserted into areas of the film that were quite needless, CGI fog, a CGI plane, and several of the actors CGI in, it's like the computer animator just went crazy. What physical effects there are get little screen time and are mostly seen in the beginning rapidly replaced by computer animation later on.

The biggest problem, patient zero. I don't mean Ariana Richards acting either. How did she become patient zero? She was a wildlife photographer, specialty wolves. One would assume she got too close to a werewolf and bitten. After all it makes sense right? WRONG! She got bit by a common wolf, whose fang gets some how lodged into her arm. I didn't think wolves teeth came off like a sharks but apparently they do. Worry not for the cure is actually antibodies in the fang which also caused the virus in the first place. So for anyone wanting to become a werewolf just go out photograph a wolf and try to get it's teeth stuck in your body....yeah ok. The end doesn't make sense either. Werewolves running around and the cure is now in some abandoned part of New York because that's where the nuke (a seemingly just giant black smoke cloud) went off and where Major Hoffman and CDC woman find themselves with the fang. No needles, no medical facilities, werewolves still running around in urbania. Don't worry the military has blown up the bridges out of New York, in the slowest possible way ever, but seemingly fails to bomb or do anything with subway tunnels, rail tracks, etc. just roads. Yep it's a good day for werewolves.

Lastly I can't help but compare this to "City Under the Moon" by Hugh Sterbakov. In fact the initial similarities are striking but as the film goes on you quickly see the missed opportunities that the book offers. I would recommend reading City Under the Moon as it deals with the idea of a werewolf out break far more effectively than Battledogs could ever hope. I would recommend this film as a group effort with friends, I imagine giving this film MST3K treatment would be the best way to see it. Overall it is a quick enjoyable film if you turn your brain off and try to ignore the bad CGI.

I give it a 3 out of 5 mostly for effort as you can tell someone WANTED to do this, but just lacked the resources needed for the scale of it also Ernie Hudson. :)

Werewolf Movie Review: Battledogs

Silvermane

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