Thursday, May 5, 2011

BAD MOVIE REVIEW: Never Cry Werewolf (2008)


The Trailer:

A couple days ago I posted a trailer for a Kevin Sorbo Predator/Robowar Ripoff called Flesh Wounds. I was so damned excited for a Kevin Sorbo ripoff that I had to check out another ripoff he did a couple years back. This time Fright Night gets the Sorbo treatment...

There are only 3 kinds of people that would LOVE Never Cry Werewolf.

1. People who ABSOLUTELY adore the movie Fright Night. They know the movie in and out…or at least have a pretty good understanding of the story. These people also happen to love horrible movies.
2. Blissfully ignorant teenagers.
3. Morons.

I happen to fall in the first category. (obviously)

Never Cry Werewolf IS Fright Night. There really is no way around it. The story is the same, the scene sequence is the same, the characters, for the most part, are the same. BUT WAIT! There’s a werewolf instead of a vampire…so its totally different.

(I’m about to spoil the shit out of Fright Night and Never Cry Werewolf so if you have seen neither of these movies and have any intention of watching them, you might want to skip the next part)

1-Fright Night starts out with a boy sitting in his room. He looks out the window and notices there’s a new neighbor. And there’s something odd about it all. But he shrugs it off for the time being.
2-Fright Night arouses suspicion by having the Vampire next door luring women home late at night and eating them in front of the window…which the boy sees from his window. (and the news points out that said woman has gone missing the next day)
3-Fright Night has the evil Neighbor coming over to the boys home and getting friendly with the family and making silent threats to the boy.
4-Fright Night has the vampire being interested in the girl because she bears a striking resemblance to his lady he had eons ago.
5-Fright Night has the boy running to the police begging them to look into his neighbor. When they do, the boy proclaims that his neighbor is vampire and everyone laughs at him.
6-Fright Night then has the boy trying to figure everything out. He does a little research, with the help of his good pal EVIL ED (Amazing character by the way), and figures out the best way to kill a vampire.
7-Fright Night then enlists the help of a washed up late night TV personality. He is on the verge of cancellation and his career is basically over. This man is Peter Vincent. The greatest vampire hunter in recorded history.
8-Fright Night then has Peter Vincent checking out the neighbor, with obvious disbelief. It’s all an act. But then something happens that causes him to instantly believe that the neighbor is in fact a vampire.
9-Fright Night then has Peter Vincent trying to run away from it. The boy begs him to help him. But when Peter Vincent tells him no, the boy tells him that he’s going to do it anyway. So Peter is conflicted and feels bad so he goes to help the boy anyway.
10-They invade the neighbors home, have a crazy little battle, and become victorious against the terrible vampire.

Now if you re-read 1-10 and replace Fright Night with Never Cry Werewolf, boy with girl, vampire with werewolf, Evil Ed with Emo Pizza delivery guy, Peter Vincent with Kevin Sorbo, and “greatest vampire hunter in recorded history” with “pussiest werewolf hunter in recorded history”, you have Never Cry Werewolf.

This would be one of the "werewolves".

And you know what? I kinda liked it. For some reason I really liked it. It’s just that I’ve seen Fright Night enough times to know how the story goes, so when I watched Never Cry Werewolf, I was just BLOWN AWAY about how similar it was. It’s like all those papers in high school that you cheated on. Those ones where you just made a photocopy and used whiteout to put your name on it. This is the same thing. I actually had a lot of fun anticipating the next scene...waiting to see if it take the same road as Fright Night or try to be something original. Nope. Same fucking road.

If you’ve never seen Fright Night, then this movie might still appeal to you. It’s got a cute girl in it. There’s no nudity, but she’s still pretty cute. The werewolf effects are really good. With the exception of one scene…all practical puppet effects. I really really appreciated that. And this movie is quite a bit gorier than Fright Night…so it scores some points there.

And if you haven’t seen this movie. The first kill will make you laugh really hard. HOLY SHIT that guys acting is amazingly horrible.

If I had to recommend this…I would say that I would. Probably the best thing you could do is make a drinking game out of it and every time you see something that this movie ripped right out of the Fright Night screenplay…take a drink. Trust me, you’ll be feeling pretty good by the end of it.

Other than that…it was alright. The acting was bad but the effects were actually really good. The story, even though it was ripped off, progressed kinda haphazardly. It’s like a crinkled up Fright Night.

I don’t know. I love it and I hate it. Would I watch it again? Absolutely. So I guess that’s all that really matters doesn’t it?

No. No it doesn’t.


4 comments:

  1. I didn't dislike this because its bad, I disliked it because I'm really tired of werewolves fetching the short end of the stick. "Werewolves are not worth taking the time to write a good story about, lets just rip off a vampire movie instead." This was just another crappy werewolf movie dragging its ass across the carpet. Lazy and derivative shit like this is why werewolves get disrespected, why the biggest werewolf movie of the last several years was a remake gone bad, why Red Riding Hood ended up as Twilight without the vampires, and why the werewolves are nothing but a sausage party of grubby losers in Underworld. WEREWOLVES ARE NOBODY'S BITCHES.

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  2. Wow. You bring up an interesting point. If you'd have asked me to watch a werewolf movie 5 years ago, I would've told you to go fuck yourself. I thought they were just stupid. I probably would have used this movie as an example.

    All of that changed the day I watched Dog Soldiers. Now I actively seek out werewolf movies. The pick of the litter isn't very many but the ones that do it right do it very well.

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  3. The good werewolf movies are so few and far between. Dog Soldiers is the last good example. A few years before that, Ginger Snaps. Then you have to start digging all the way back to the 80's to find the next really good ones, especially 81 when we got the trifecta of The Howling, Wolfen, and An American Werewolf in London. What a great year that was for werewolves.

    There are some in between that are actually so bad they're good. Silver Bullet is fun now because of the Gary Busey/Corey Haim combo. And there is one good/bad little gem called Big Bad Wolf, have you seen that? I think thats right up your alley, man its crazy, I love it!

    But for every good or good/bad werewolf movie there are about 10 that totally suck and have no redeeming qualities. It makes life hard for werewolf fans like me. Thankfully werewolves do much better in literature, where most werewolf books are really good. However, werewolves still don't have a defining novel like Dracula for vampires or Frankenstein for zombies. I guess werewolves are the underdogs of the horror world, pardon the pun. I don't care, they're still my favorite. Obvisously I need to blog about this, I practically wrote a whole post here!

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  4. I think you should, you make a great argument. And have not seen Wolfen or Big Bad Wolf. Been meaning to though...I believe they're on instant. Might have to have a werewolf weekend sometime soon...

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