January 16th 2012 (Retrospective)
I'll be brutally and totally honest; when I saw Dog Soldiers on the rack at HMV, I had no idea what it was.
This used to be part of my m.o., to be frank; buying films because they looked cool. But, as the previous entry advertised, this is another nostalgia trip for me, so if you're looking for interesting cricitisms or witticisms, well, you may or may not be in luck.
After I graduated from the first time on the degree merry-go-round, I had no real idea what to do except that I had a burning passion for film - I still do, it's just tempered - and a burning need to pay off my student overdraft before the Royal Bank of Scotland attempted to cripple me.
Fun fact; the Royal Bank of Scotland did attempt to cripple me, several times, by immediately converting a student bank account into a normal one without that pesky "graduate" bank account stage in between, which meant they tried to charge me full interest repeatedly and sent many, many threatening letters, to which I replied in kind, along with making many phone calls. Then I found a job, and I paid them off as soon as humanly possible, even taking a day off to visit the London branch in person to close my account as soon as it was paid off, because they were that difficult to deal with. For years afterwards if I was in London and passed that particular branch I'd - pettily, yes - flash them the Vs and wish them ill.
At the same time, Barclays were lovely to deal with. So if there's a lesson here, it could allegedly be said to not deal with the Royal Bank of Scotland. Legally, that's not what I'm saying, of course, but you might want to take it on as a thought.
Before I found a job, though, I had two abiding passions; computer games and movies. The first was a finely-honed art, the second an indolent dillettante of an interest that I had yet to develop. So one day, having moved home, I found myself with a little money, a lot of depression over the fact that I didn't have (a) a job and (b) more money, and ended up buying both Command and Conquer: Generals and Dog Soldiers.
Sidebar; Generals is a game with singularly the worst taste in humour I've played in a long while, especially if you play as the Global Liberation Army. I have no idea how they got away with some of the unit sounds they used, except that it was still early doors in the Iraq / Afghanistan conflicts and people still had a fairly broadminded sense of humour. Answers on a postcard, though, please.
Now, when I first watched Dog Soldiers I didn't do it justice; I watched it on a computer monitor, while I was doing something else, often in the tiny little Windows Media Player minimised window, for those who remember that. I still loved it, and must have rewatched it at another point.
Then I took it to a friend who still lived in London near my alma mater, with whom I share a love of films of negligible or debatable quality, and we watched it after a few beers one evening, and my love for it blossomed then, because even more so than Plunkett and Macleane, Dog Soldiers is arguably the perfect
And the fire, because, frankly, fire is almost a separate character in its entirety in the film; if it's not flares, it's sheds full of gas cylinders being blown up, molotov cocktails being thrown, or hairspray-can flamethrowers.
From a filmmakers point of view, it's also quite interesting, because once you get those tricky exterior shots out of the way at the beginning - including a night shoot, always dicey - the rest of the film fundamentally takes place at a single location, albeit occasionally stepping outside of the house for the occasional set-piece. So you have claustrophobia inside, and werewolves outside, and pretty pretty fire every now and then.
Then last year one of the courses at university actually added Dog Soldiers to their film list - the year after I took the course, of course, the bastards - and I ended up going to see it then on the basic principle that I couldn't not.
Low-budget but well-done horror is an interesting niche, because low-budget badly-done horror attracts its' own fans, and high-budget well-or-badly-done horrow attracts its' own fans, but if you have the temerity to do well on a low budget, then you succeed as much as you fail - the fans of the bad will point out the bad, the fans of the good will only see any bad you happened to leave in through trial, error or necessity - and people who don't like horror movies, well, they won't even care, so screw them.
But Dog Soldiers happily does amazing things with a low budget, and for that I have to salute them. I can only ask that you - having seen the film - do the same.
Here's another sidebar; the British trailers (not the Quotes trailer which I assume is for the American market, and I can only apologise if I'm wrong) are modelled more or less exactly on real adverts for Army / TA recruitment at the time the film was made, which I think is all kinds of amazing - although it's a shame the same isn't true in reverse, because more people might have signed up for the army if they thought they could fight werewolves. Certainly, sales of silver rings and accessories might have gone up - and then, wouldn't today's wintry economy be in better shape?
No comments:
Post a Comment