Everything a big bad wolf could want

"A Ken Loach movie with a werewolf in it" is how the makers of WILD COUNTRY (2005) describe this rare foray into genre for the Scottish film industry. It's a great idea for a new cinematic crossbreed, especially for a movie about crossbreeding, but first-time director Craig Strachan doesn't pull it off.

The film begins well, inside a Glasgow maternity ward as teenage Kelly Ann (Samantha Shields) is coached through the delivery of a baby that is immediately whisked away for adoption. The local parish priest (Peter Capaldi, from LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM) offers the cold comfort that the baby will have a happy family and leaves Kelly Ann to her misery. Cut to six weeks later, and Father Steve is shepherding Kelly Ann and some other Glasgow tearaways on an Outward Bound-style overnight in "Sawney Bean country." There's not much for Capaldi to do here but he has fun with this early scene, in which he recounts the cannibalistic crimes of the Bean clan and wonders aloud at the existence of descendants in the hills.

After a discomfiting encounter with a shepherd, the teens bed down for the night only to be led by noises to a mossy ruin. Therein they discover the mutilated corpse of the shepherd and a newborn baby, which they rescue. The group makes an attempt to reach civilization through the long night, only to be hunted and picked off one by one by some monstrous predator, who exhibits not only a ravening hunger for human flesh but also an almost human cunning. Okay, all of this is fine and good. You may remember that Sawny Bean was a partial inspiration for Wes Craven's THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977) and the kind of AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981) meets THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999) vibe could have - and should have - worked. WILD COUNTRY could have been a Scottish reinterpretation of those classic American horror movies as collective myth and urban legend but the project is ankled early on by a disastrous decision to shoot in very low light for more than half the film.

Craig Strachan is not director enough to establish a sense of place and space sufficient to allow us to fill in the blanks in the dark. (Watching the filmmakers fumble here, you appreciate the accomplishments of BLAIR WITCH even more.) In one suspense setpiece, one of the girls tumbles off... something. A hill, a cliff - you really don't know what, just that the others stand above her shouting down and she shouts back up at them as something in the distance approaches. This might have worked as a radio drama but as a movie, it's disaster. And add to the fact that you can't see anything or tell what the hell is going on through half of the film's barely feature length running time (67 minutes minus end credits) is the language factor. All the kids speak in a Glaswegian slur that is impossible to understand without resorting to the subtitle option.

Late in the film, as the sun rises at long last, over-the-top gore effects signal a shift to an unfortunate ironic tone, bringing the film to a close on a note of black comedy that seems a betrayal of all that has come before. Made for very little money, WILD COUNTRY might have been more effective without all of the effects, relying instead on mood, on character, and the frisson of watching good people scrambling from a bad end. Strachan's script is part of the problem, too, failing to commit one way or another to either kitchen sink realism or outre horror or to finding a happy medium in between. For lycanthrope compleatists only.

Got Wood?

Don't forget, the week-long Spirit of Ed Wood Blog-a-Thon begins on Monday, July 6th, over at Cinema Styles. Wood's magnum opus PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959) turns 50 this year and a bunch of us are going to make some damn noise about it and/or Eddie in general. Be there or ... bevare!

I feel sorry...

... for young people today. They will never know what it's like to work really fucking hard to have a good time.

Back before the Internet, you really had to use your imagination.

Curiosity wasn't satisfied with the flick of a switch. You had to turn a lot of dials and keep an eye on the needle.

You had to take actual risks but the air crackled with electricity.

In the end, you were a whole person. If you survived. And you hadn't gone insane. That was living.

If its any consolation...

... we still have this guy.

And that's called sad

I was never a fan particularly (I hated the show but if I had to pick an Angel it would have been Kate Jackson) and yet the death of Farrah Fawcett today has given me pause. When I was a young man, I used to love from afar and love hard but I fell out of the habit before I was out of my 20s. That was for the best, I think. But still... it just occurred to me that there will come a day and probably not too far off from now when all the women I ever loved from afar, from TV or the movies, will be dead. They were and are older than me, so they're all a lot farther up in the line to eternity. I wonder if I'll be sufficiently self-aware to call that collective time of death, to note that sad milestone. But even if the occasion slips by me, as so much does lately, it'll still be a hell of a day.

Apocalypse? Now?

I admit it freely, I'm a sucker for Armageddon porn. Science and logic be damned but tear up a major city or two and I'm Johnnie on the Spot. WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (1951), DEEP IMPACT (1999), THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW (2004), CLOVERFIELD (2008) - I love 'em all.

I love the high angle of Christ the Redeemer crumbling like wet bread over Rio de Janeiro and the vision of what I take to be the dome of St. Peter's Basilica flattening pilgrims at Vatican City. It makes me wish somebody would do a movie in which the only victims of disaster are the devout, in which every gesture of prayer or show of faith is met with unprecedented calamity and whole religions are wiped out one after another as they rise up to confront the situation and are squashed like bugs. That would really be interesting, dramatically, to see the various faiths go from steely reserve to blind bughouse panic. How many followers would simply resign themselves to their fate, see it as God's plan, and how many would go pagan and offer up sacrifices? But I digress. 2012 is likely none of those things but it looks like fun anyway. As Michael Bernadin at PopWatch said the other day, "My gods, it's full of everything... on fire!"

"Still cold from being in my mailbox"

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