Dog Soldiers (2002)
Directed by Neil Marshall
A band of soldiers is dispatched to war games deep in the woods. When they stumble across a rival team slaughtered in camp, they realize they're not alone.
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What critics compared Dog Soldiers to
I’d also like to commend Dog Soldiers for featuring some of the best werewolf designs this side of An American Werewolf in London and The Howling—a feat most modern lycanthrope films just haven’t quite achieved (although Late Phases gets pretty damned close).
While last year's " Ginger Snaps " resurrected the werewolf movie for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer teen audience, "Dog Soldiers" returns to the kind of lycanthrope comedy-horror that hasn't been seen since John Landis' "An American Werewolf in London".
"Dog Soldiers" pays homage to "Wolfen," "Evil Dead,"and "An American Werewolf in London," though I wouldn't put it in the same caliber because it was too clichéd and lacked the same intensity as the others.
The werewolf genre has been known to churn out serious-minded films, but the majority of those fail miserably (last year's much-talked-about Ginger Snaps wasn't nearly as much fun as it should have been) - with comedic films of this genre left to pick up the slack (the most influential werewolf movies of the last 25 years are undoubtedly An American Werewolf in London and The Howling).
The film just can't seem to decide whether it wants to embrace the schlockiness inherent its concept and turn into a period version of Neil Marshall's Dog Soldiers , or play it super straight, adding the horror of the monsters on top of the already horrific realities of war.
Like From Dusk Til Dawn or Dog Soldiers , Overlord continues to play it coy about its horror movie foundation in its first half.
Marshall is nothing if not forthright about his influences, having his movie-savvy characters drop references to Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan and The Matrix along with the occasional apt fairy tale—“The Three Little Pigs” doesn’t come up, but “Goldilocks” definitely does—while he name-checks Jaws and Zulu on his commentary.
That general synopsis will probably sound like a very generic horror movie premise, and though director Neil ("Dog Soldiers") Marshall's influences are somewhat obvious, but veering more towards thrillers like "Deliverance" and "Alien" than out-and-out horror movies.
Traumatizing terror serves as the ultimate right to passage for surviving the horrors of the real world in British writer/director Neil Marshall’s ("Dog Soldiers") cathartic horror film about a group of six women adventurers on a doomed spelunking journey.
In this 2005 film (released stateside in 2006) — Marshall’s breakthrough after “Dog Soldiers” — a sextet of female friends goes spelunking after a tragedy ripples through their social circle.
It may sound bizarre to say that a film about women under threat of vicious, violent death is a triumph of feminism, but there we are -- there’s a refreshing novelty here, an unwillingness to give in to what is expected Or perhaps that’s not so astonishing: writer/director Neil Marshall’s last scary flick was the all-guy Dog Soldiers , which was intensely ooky while never descending into the conventions of its subgenre, the werewolf movie.
British writer/director Neil Marshall ("Dog Soldiers") was lucky that his film was released in Britain last summer over a month before the similarly themed Hollywood release "The Cave."
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Neil Marshall's otherwise sterling Dog Soldiers suffers badly for having detailed but inflexible body suits, and even that film at least has the benefit of textured, physically convincing wolves.
The film blends the geezer-humour of Dog Soldiers with the backwoods superstitions of The Wicker Man and chucks in a monstrous quadruped tree demon with a taste for human entrails.