WolfCop takes place in a small town in Saskatchewan beset by a massive crime wave. At the same time, drunken cop Lou Garou wakes up after investigating a disturbance in the woods with a pentagram carved into his stomach and an enhanced sense of smell. Looks like we got ourselves a WolfCop on our hands.
This is a pretty great deal. First and foremost, it has an 80-minute runtime. Anyone who's been rockin' with the DTVC over the years knows that I love me a good 90 minutes or less. Also, this had a good mix of humor, horror, and action, which is something I need in my 80 minutes of movie. When I wasn't watching a werewolf cop shoot or slash people, I was laughing. Granted, it's easier to not have any wasted space with only 80 minutes of time to fill, but we've seen worse before here, so it's worth giving this film credit in that respect. This is just good, independent horror/action done refreshingly right.
That then begs the question: does it beat out Howling II: ...Your Sister's a Werewolf for my top werewolf movie of all time? Unfortunately no, but finishing second isn't too bad. Where does it fall short? One, no Reb Brown. Two, no Christopher Lee. And then how can you ever top the incomparable Sybil Danning as Stirba, the immortal werewolf queen? Before I turn this into a review of Howling II, I should get back to why I liked this as a werewolf movie. First, the canon surrounding it was unique. I don't want to get too much into it and give away too much of the movie, but the basic idea was that a person was turned into a werewolf in order to carry out a centuries-old ritual, and usually the person chosen was the village idiot because they would be easier to control. That's pretty far from the standard "a werewolf bite will make you a werewolf" we're used to. From there they had some really interesting takes on what a werewolf's powers would be. You had the standard enhanced senses and superhuman strength, but thrown in were the idea that donuts and booze make a werewolf stronger, and the notion that a werewolf is a crack mechanic who can make custom alterations to a vehicle at blazing speed. It'll be interesting to see if they explore that last thing more in the next movie.
Another area where this and Howling II dovetailed was in the line of human-werewolf sex--though to be fair, in Howling II that was more like an orgy, and this was just one woman having sex with our hero in his lycanthrope form. The great part about this one was they tried to play it straight, despite the fact that this massive werewolf was having sex with a human woman, which made it all the better. I feel like if we looked it up, there are some states in the US that still have laws on the book making fornication with werewolves a crime.
Going back to the werewolf love-making scene, a song plays in the background, "Moonlight Desires" by Lawrence Gowan. Jamie mentioned in the pod that she thought it sounded very retro, and found out that's because it was an actual retro song that Gowan had released in the 80s. She also said that Gowan was the lead vocalist and keyboardist for Styx. At the time, I was like "ah, that's why Gowan sounded familiar when I saw it in the credits," but something about it didn't sound right, because I thought Dennis DeYoung was the lead vocalist and keyboardist for Styx. I did some digging--er looked Styx up on Wikipedia--and found out what I probably should have known a long time ago: DeYoung isn't in Styx anymore, he was replaced by Gowan. The other thing I discovered when I looked the song up on YouTube is that it's a huge piece of nostalgia among Canadians because it was used in the late 80s in Degrassi. It made me wonder how many other inside Canadian references were made that I didn't get...
I'm going to use my last paragraph before the wrap up to vent a little about Hulu and their online movie player. Unlike Netflix, which removes the slider and the play/pause buttons if you wait a few seconds after pausing, giving you a clean picture to take a screenshot, Hulu's never goes away, so to get screens for the blog, I had to take them while the movie was running and hope I got the shot I wanted. For this reason, I won't be doing anymore movies through Hulu, which isn't the worst thing anyway, because they don't have a great selection, but still, pretty annoying for us movie bloggers and instagrammers trying to get screenshots for our content.
Vent finished, time to wrap this up. This is definitely worth checking out--and I'm realizing now as I say that that the only place I could find to stream this is Hulu, so after I'm killing them for how their player won't let you hide the slider on pause, I'm then telling people to go there to watch this. Either way, however you can find it, WolfCop is deserving of our support: solid, earnest, independent film making that I think reminds us how good this can all be.
For more more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2781516
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