Wild Country (2006)

directed by Craig Strachan
Scotland
67 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I had an unusually tough time finding new things to watch this week, so I ended up watching a couple of movies that were pretty much just random picks, including this one. It's a relatively low-budget Scottish werewolf flick that somehow got Lionsgate distribution (or so I've heard). The cast is largely no-names who do a surprisingly good job, but Peter Capaldi is there for a bit too.

I probably liked this more than a lot of other people because I was surprised in general at how well-made it was. There are parts that were more slipshod than others, including some apparently botched fake daylight scenes that I didn't notice but other reviewers did, but as a whole it feels like something where a lot of effort was put into it from everybody involved. The storyline isn't very original and really at times there seemed almost to not be any storyline; it just progresses along the track of "some goofy teens find a werewolf baby" and doesn't have any extra twists save one at the end that was a bit predictable anyway. Like the director just wound up the key on this movie's back and set it going, then didn't interfere.

I think about 98% of the reason why this was able to win me over so much was the practical effects. It uses those on both gore and wolfy stuff, and admittedly those creatures don't even remotely resemble wolves, nor do they look like living, breathing organisms so much as what a large Muppet might look like if infected with a zombie virus, but I just loved them so much anyway. I loved that they didn't look like wolves. They looked like their own beings, and every time I looked at them I got a sense of "somebody made that!" that felt more unique and genuine than the typical picture of a bipedal, muscular, long-clawed lycanthrope. I dug those silly-looking werewolves. We need more silly-looking werewolves.

Basically, Wild Country had a lot of positive attributes that were enough to outweigh the negative for me, but I can't tell if anybody else will like it. Film opinions are totally subjective. This might not go down in the annals of werewolf movie fame, but who decides what does?