DARK WOLF

Los Angeles. The police are hunting a brutal serial killer who is rampaging through the city's streets, disemboweling and devouring anyone. In reality, the killer is one of the last descendants of an ancient lineage of werewolves, known as Dark Wolves, who is searching for the last purebred female werewolf to whom he himself belongs, with the aim of mating and giving new life to his people, now near extinction. A policeman, whose colleague was killed by Dark Wolf, manages to identify, with the help of a medium, the werewolf woman (completely unaware of her true nature) and will do everything to prevent the werewolf from getting his paws on her... Mismatched mix between a lupine horror film, a series Z action movie, and a police series in the style of "Miami Vice," "Dark Wolf" appears from the first minutes as a work of inferior level, showing us a parade of half-naked girls engaged in lap dance, some action scenes shot very badly, and the worst CG effects ever seen in a film. The story seems unoriginal from the start (we've seen tons of similar films: just replace the figure of the werewolf with that of Satan!) and poorly structured, supported by a series of characters on the verge of historical characterization and stereotyped to the extreme: from the muscular policeman who has just lost his colleague and falls in love with his protégée, to the virginal girl unaware of her true nature and object of the monster's attentions, passing through a series of characters so banal that they make you drop your arms (the uninhibited friend of the protagonist, the policeman's colleague with playmate curves, the gay photographer friend, the stupid boy who just makes a small appearance to end up then torn apart by the wolf, and so on...). The actors chosen reflect the complexity of the work; they are mostly young, little-known actors from various successful TV series: the protagonist is played by Samaire Armstrong, from the cast of "O.C." and who has appeared in the cinema in the absurd film "It's Not Another Stupid American Comedy"; the policeman-hero is played by the monolithic Ryan Alasio, who has appeared in the TV series "Will & Grace" and in the cinema in "Repli-Kate"; while the role of the policeman's colleague is entrusted to Jamie Bergman, a playmate already seen in "Any Given Sunday" by Oliver Stone and in "Gone in 60 Seconds" alongside Nicolas Cage; finally, in the role of Dark Wolf, we find Kane Hodder, known to the horror public for having played Jason in some episodes of the "Friday the 13th" saga, here styled as the bad copy of the wrestler Undertaker! The director Richard Friedman also comes from television, having directed episodes of the series "Friday the 13th" and "Baywatch". The screenplay, on the other hand, is by the debutant Geoffrey Holliday, a guy we will surely never hear from again! The special effects, as already mentioned, are uniquely ugly: CG effects in the style of PlayStation One games, but the most absurd thing is that, aware of not having the means, the responsible parties have concerned themselves with filling the film with real-time transformations and close-ups of the werewolves. The only positive note is given by the gore/splatter rate distributed sparingly (dismemberments, severed limbs, pools of blood... there's everything); moreover, the film contains numerous erotic scenes, naturally absolutely non-functional for the story, put there just to make the film exceed 80 minutes (among all, a very long lesbian scene during a photo shoot). In short, "Dark Wolf" is a bad film in every way, not even insertable into the trash universe, given the boredom it manages to convey to the viewer in less than an hour and a half. We advise you not to waste time looking for this title, which is also hard to find given that in Italy it had a very limited distribution for the home video market only.