Rish Outfield's reviews
Well, somewhere in South America, Michael Pare is bitten by a werewolf. He comes back to his little trailer in the mountains, and eventually is taken in by his sister (Mariel Hemingway) and her Aryan son. But when he transforms every night and goes on a killing spree, only the family dog, Thor, can protect them.
Perhaps the novel was good (it was apparently told from the dog's perspective), but this wasn't. Michael Pare's character was illogical and inconsistent, and he was hard to like. Mariel Hemingway was passable as the tough and independent single mother/lawyer. The too-beautiful blonde kid (Dennis the Menace?) Mason Gable was good, but as the movie was made in ‘96, I'm sure he's screwed up and insane by now. The ubiquitous German Shepherd named Thor (we see through his eyes a few times*) was a good dog actor, but its role was unrealistic and infantile. The big, bombastic score didn't seem to fit with this otherwise cheap-feeling film. Pretty cinematography and pretty Vancouver countrysides are pretty much all there is to look at in this borefest. Strangely, I noticed that in the world this movie took place in, the full moon lasted night after night, after night after night after night. . . They showed the werewolf from the very beginning--a surprise because it's usually not done (but also, an example of why...once they showed the monster, they showed it more and more, until its flaws were more than evident. The high-tech 90's transformation from man to wolf (complete with overused "morphing") just plain SUCKED. Initially, it was a cool-looking werewolf, but as I said, they showed it way too much, and it was so obviously mechanical, that it stopped being cool real quick. The dog proved to be tougher than all the other characters (pretty much omnipotent), including the werewolf, which got on my nerves. When everything came together (finally), it did so in five minutes. The ending is bizarrely, surreally cheery, as the worst horror-film endings are. While only one hour nineteen minutes long, it was dull and seemed overlong. Very slow-moving, talky, and predictable, the best I can say about this thing is that it was that it was not awful, but simply mediocre.
Best Scare: There was some nice lighting in a couple of night shots, and that helped set the mood before the creature jumped out to claim another victim. Other than that, though, not much.
I'd Recommend It To: Pet lovers, I guess.
* Okay, I counted. We see the dog's POV a total of seven times in the film.