WolfCop
(2014) 79 Min.
Rated: NR (Sex and Extreme Gore)
Country: Canada
Director: Lowell Dean
Stars: Leo Fafard, Amy Matysio, Sarah Lind
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
A police officer turns into a werewolf and must stop the town’s local cult.
Synopsis:
In the sleepy cold Canadian town of Woodhaven, a drunken cop named Lou Garou (Fafard) finds it a struggle just to show up to work. While the police Chief berates him, co-worker Tina (Matysio) gets most of the real work done.
One day they receive a call from town gun shop nut Willie Higgins. He reports the findings of occultist symbols. When Lou goes to investigate the videos he dismisses the symbols as just the marks left by heavy metal fans. Later Willie calls the police station again and reports a disturbance.
Once on the scene Lou finds Terry hung upside down from a tree. Terry Wallace is Mayor Bradley’s rival for the upcoming elections. Terry whispers “Behind you” just before Lou is attacked from behind.
Lou wakes up the next day to find that he cannot shave the hair off his face and he has a large bloody wound carved on his chest. This sends a couple of flashbacks in his mind to cultists cutting into his flesh, but clearly nothing too alarming for Lou since he carries on with his day as usual.
Terry’s body is found in the woods with puncture wounds from needles in his arms and a gash on his neck. The police speculate that it was an overdose and that the gash wounds are postmortem animal bites.
Lou spends his evening at the local bar, Tooth and Nail Tavern, where Jessica (Lind) serves up drinks for him. Lou drinks up and Jessica closes up the bar early for a “private party”. Meanwhile, Lou goes down to the bathroom because he feels extremely ill.
While in the bathroom, Lou transform into a werewolf. His body basically sheds its human skin like a chrysalis with blood pouring out. He manages to murder one man and scares off another man who visit the bar after it’s closed as Jessica looks on.
Lou wakes up chained to a bed. Somehow Willie was able to shoot down werewolf Lou with tranquilizers and chained him to a bed. Willie is convinced that Lou changed into a werewolf and lets him go to work.
At work, Lou has to investigate the scene of a bloody murder at the tavern. It’s the site where he went on his werewolf rampage the night earlier. Tina and the coroner area already on the scene investigating. Lou tells Tina to take off and that he’ll take over the investigation, to which she agrees to for some unknown reason.
Meanwhile, Willie and Lou do a library research of werewolves and cults and discover that in certain occult ceremonies a werewolf sacrifice strengthens the magic of alien reptilian shapeshifters. Lou takes all this information in pretty matter-of-factly.
Willie cooks a scheme to keep Lou in a police holding cell while Lou changes into a werewolf. Willie decides to videotape his transformation for scientific purposes. After a long gooey transformation sequence, Lou is a werewolf and the phone rings. A robbery is taking place. A band of three robbers in pig masks and hitting a liquor store.
Wolfcop goes down and easily kills and dispatches of the three pig criminals. Afterwards he decides to soup up his patrol car and turn it into some kind of black Wolfcop mobile with a large “W” on the hood.
Wolfcop pees on a few kids scribbling graffiti and then heads down the the local meth lab. There he disrupts a party, kills a few people and manages to blow up the lab. All while sustaining no injuries when shot at close range and of course Wolfcop has super strength.
Wolfcop and Willie return to the police station to be greeted by Jessica dressed as red riding-hood. Wolfcop and Jessica then have a long and disturbing wolfcop on girl sex scene. After sex, Jessica serves Wolfcop a drink spiked with drugs and she locks him in the holding cell as he staggers to the ground in a daze. She mocks him and transforms into Mayor Bradley as he passes out.
Willie and Mayor Bradley, who are both shape-shifters take Lou’s body from the police station. Tina, meanwhile, sees the surveillance footage of everything that has happened and decides to go after the shape-shifters.
Down in the woods we see that the drug boss is also the police chief. He’s the third shape-shifter that seems to control the town. The trio have chained up Lou, but it seems that there is going to be a solar eclipse during the day and with that Lou manages to get enough power to break his chains. Tina, from the shadows is able to kill one of the shape-shifters with a sniper rifle.
Tina also squares off with the female shape-shifter and shoots her. Lou, as Wolfcop, drinks a flask and is able to finally defeat the last shape-shifter. Afterwards, Tina and Lou stagger off in search of a hospital.
Review:
Comedy-horror is hard to do well. You can have a good blend of dramatics in it and ramp up the comedy, or even balance the two. But in general it’s not an easy task. I’d have to say that in this regard, Wolfcop fails.
A movie where a werewolf has to deal with their daily life? It’s been done before. Teen Wolf springs to mind. Wolfcop however is played for pure laughs, unfortunately there are little to be had here. There’s a few sight gags with gore and some with situations, but for the most part it’s just buildups without pay offs.
Do you think alcoholics are funny by nature? This might be for you. Do you find the concept of a wolfman having sex with a woman hilarious? This is your movie! Things like the car modding scene that results in a black police cruiser… they make no sense. Lou’s constant vomiting. We get it, he’s drunk. Silly things like the pig store robbers and Jessica dressed as red riding-hood. They’re jokes that are more on the cheesy gag side of humor rather than anything sophisticated.
I can respect the Peter Jackson-esque amount of gore-fun this film had, it doesn’t even touch anywhere near the fun levels that a film like Braindead (Dead Alive) had.
It’s as if this film felt like the mere concept of a Wolfcop was enough to carry the film sprinkled with a few gags about little pigs and any wolf-related puns. For me, that’s not enough. For some, I’m sure this film will satisfy.