It was a howling good time during Werewolf Night when Joe Bob and Darcy examined a couple of high-grade lycanthropic features in July’s episode.
But it all began with a red alert of the more urgent kind.
JB mentioned that the red wolf population is on the decline in the North Carolina — down to in the whereabouts of 20 left — and he got deep into the dating plight of the creature in the wild.
The dwindling red wolf population has brought an urgent need for the more-prone-to-monogamy male of the species to widen their field when it comes to aardvarking, according to JB. (Yes, wolves have to aardvark, too).
Will the red wolves get a chance to rebound? Well, maybe. But we might have to look into putting our Christmas charity skills into action to do our part — stay tuned on that.
Our No. 1 feature featured werewolves in one of their two natural states — foaming at the mouth and then tearing people up with their teeth. Our werewolf-on-the-rampage flick was the 2001 new classic “Dog Soldiers,” which pitted a bunch of British soldiers against some raging werewolves. It was director Neil Marshall’s feature debut and he set a pretty darn high bar for himself with this flick, full of gut ripping terror in the woods and an ensemble of grizzled Brits shouting slang while trying to counter a wolfy siege.
The flick took six years for Marshall to finish — but persistence got the “soldier flick with werewolves” rather than “a werewolf flick with soldiers” out in Luxembourg in the sequential shoot.
Speaking of slow, Joe Bob went through his own personal transformation — Lon Chaney Jr., style, starting from the bottom up during the movie. It would take the entire running time for him to unleash his inner wolf. We had a cursory list of favorite werewolf flicks — Darcy liking “The Wolf Man,” “American Werewolf in London” and “Hammer’s “Curse of the Werewolf,” while Joe Bob enjoyed two high-school-oriented flicks involving guys named Michael — “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” with the Michael Landon, “Teen Wolf” with Michael J. Fox and “Ginger Snaps.”
Darcy’s transformation was a touch more sudden.
Here are the totals for the flick that resurrected the British horror flick a couple of decades after Hammer Films’ demise.
The second feature showed us the second defining trait of the werewolf — that of the reluctant victim of the curse/disease and, to paraphrase Kevin Smith’s 1990s breakout flick — “They’re not even supposed to be a werewolf.” They just don’t wanna do it.
In other words, they’ve gotten to be wimps. In fact, Joe Bob’s favorite “newer” werewolf flicks were “Wolfcop” — featured on the Last Drive-In its own self — and “Strippers vs. Werewolves,” which did get a mild critique for having too many clothes on the strippers. JB says Millennial filmmakers need to step things up especially where it comes to werewolf movies — making them wimpy..
As an example, JB talked about the werewolf tendencies of Peter Stube, who murdered a bunch of folks in the 1500s. Instead, he said, flicks involving werewolves shouldn’t get deep into the relationship between the two contrasting personalities therein or see the werewolves as players seen through “eco-Gothic” lenses.
“Bad Moon” takes that sensitive approach, essentially a children’s movie about a lovable dog defending his family against a werewolf who is just trying to cope. He started out the flick with a celebratory romp in the jungle and ends up living in a trailer getting the stink eye from a German shepherd. Woe is he, especially with these totals:
Next up — things in the water that can kill ya night!
