To go along with my earlier viewing of Bad Moon, I stayed up late last night and watched Late Phases (2014), a more modern werewolf B-movie. (It's got some dreadful alternate title like The Night of the Wolf in some places.) I'm not exactly sure who recommended it to me. It's good, though it's kind of a mixed bag.
The setup is great: a blind Vietnam veteran who is ready to die moves into a nice townhome retirement community, and he quickly realizes something is wrong when an "animal attack" happens close to home. He decides to figure out what happened and deal with the problem himself.
Probably the biggest problem with the film is the casting of the villain. In a movie with an otherwise very solid cast (Nick Damici might be a better screenwriter than an actor, but he's mostly very good here as the lead), Lance Guest kinda sucks as the character eventually revealed to be the bad guy. You want a role like that to be played by someone who can seem normal but alternatively menacing, and Guest just comes across as hammy instead of threatening, especially when playing opposite someone as absurdly talented as Tom Noonan (as the priest).
(Also, a shout out to Dana Ashbrook for completely whiffing his one-day-shoot role as the gun shop owner. Ashbrook is a good actor who literally didn't seem to know what the fuck he was doing in this movie. I'm sure they had him for an afternoon, he learned his lines on set, and he just winged it otherwise.)
The limited budget is, strangely, handled well at the beginning of the movie but not later on. The opening half hour is very strong, with effective gore and a creature that's wisely shown only partially. But later you see more of the creature... and it ain't great. (The requisite transformation sequence late in the film is decidedly weak as well. Just don't do it if you don't have the budget for it.) It's not terrible, but if only the creature effects were as good as Bad Moon's...
The pacing feels strange, too. There's a lot to praise about the execution of the very solid script, but late in the plot they seem to want to get it all over with, and scenes that should be given more time to breathe feel rushed. (Though that doesn't apply to the action scenes. They're brief and exactly as long as they should be.) It's all strong conceptually, so you can overlook it, but I liked this movie a lot and wanted to see it stick the landing. Ditto for the score, which is solid from a composition standpoint but suffers from cheapass synth at key moments.
Anyway, I have other complaints (like you never get a sense of the retirement community as a physical place), but overall, I would recommend it if you like B movies and the premise. You can see why it's got a little bit of a cult following. Early on I wanted to say it's better than Bad Moon, but they're basically on the same level in my opinion.
I'm probably going to watch Ginger Snaps (2000) next. I guess this is my werewolf Halloween.
