Just days after throwing my pitch for a new kind of bad movie, WOLFCOP, I come across this. Full Eclipse. It's not exactly the same as Wolfcop but there are wolves...and there are cops. And a few of them ARE Wolfcops. Although they forgo actually calling themselves Wolfcops. Which is a damn shame, it would have made this movie so much fucking cooler.
So the movie basically starts out like Lethal Weapon 2. Two buddy cops patrolling the streets. One's a slick young cop and the other is old and ready for retirement. At one point he actually says that he's "too old for this shit." Well there's some hostage situation...the old partner is shot and Solo...I mean Mario Van Peebles kills everyone.
From here we go on a 30 minute set up to the Wolfcops. They inject themselves with some liquid that makes them all wolfy. They recruite the new guy (Peebles) into their pack. Now what the pack does is they run around at night, shooting drugs to turn themselves into wolves, and they slaughter the shit out of bad guys. It would actually be pretty awesome...if they showed any of it.
From there the rest of the movie is about the history of said drug and then turning from evil fighting werewolves to cop killing werewolves. Some bad things happen, good people get killed, good guys turn corrupt, and we end with Mario Van Peebles going hand to hand with the master werewolf.
...or possibly a bear.
Full Eclipse tries really hard to be a good movie. It opens strong with lots of action, people getting shot, and then a lot of mystery. From there the film slows down a lot and tries to create some mysterious atmosphere. It does actually succeed but it just doesn't follow suite with this kind of story. (Wolfcops should be full of ACTION!) And then it jumps into gear again and ends with a final bang...which is kind of cool but is actually pretty bad.
This movie would be a great movie...if it wasn't so fucking slow. They could have condensed the setup and the recruitment of the new guy by 15 minutes and added more wolf fighting. And they could have actually SHOWN more fighting. Right when it was about to get to a cool slaughter...the camera just kind of got sick of watching and looked away. Come on! Let's see the good stuff. This is an HBO movie right? A 1993 HBO movie? I didn't think they gave a shit about blood and guts. Or nudity.
The cast is pretty good. Mario Van Peebles is the star. You may or may not be aware of any of his movies. He was the guy from Solo. Amongst other action movies. He does a pretty good job here...and actually looks pretty bad ass as a werewolf. Also there's Bruce Payne as the master wolf. You may remember him from Warlock III: The End of Innocence, Howling VI: The Freaks, or the two D&D movies. No you don't? Oh yeah, nobody really does. Except for me. And maybe that guy over there. But anyway, finally I was pleasantly surprised to see Patsy Kensit. She's a gorgeous piece of eye candy. I'd let her rip out my trachea any day. You'd have seen her in Lethal Weapon 2.
That chick that Mel Gibson boned? Oh yeah, that's her.
Well Full Eclipse is a movie that for everything that it does right it seems to do something wrong. It starts out like a great bad movie but then tries really really hard to be a good movie. And then it ends up like something straight out of Silver Bullet. I'd recommend this movie to all of you, it's worth a watch. I hear its kind of hard to find a copy of it anywhere but Netflix has it so you're good to go there. It's not the greatest werewolf movie out there but it isn't a bad one.
That chick is patsy kensit and I'd bone her as well .
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