Sawyer-4815162342 This movie has no right being as good as it is. It's not great, but by all means it should be terrible. And it's not. Things I liked: -The effects are practical, not CGI. And they only show glimpses of the werewolves until the end of the movie so one doesn't get tired of the costumes. I think they did a better job with the werewolves than many high budget Hollywood movies would. -Sir Davos Seaworth, the Onion Knight, does a great job in his role. The rest of the cast did pretty good with their acting too. -The plot moves along quickly and sustains a fun tone throughout. Negatives: -I did find a couple of minor plot holes/things that don't totally make sense. Overall this movie is much better than one would expect. Sure it's kind of cheesy and it's clearly a low budget effort, but they make the most of what they have to work with and it ends up being surprisingly good. Recommended to fans of werewolf movies and anyone that enjoys a well made B-movie

kensai-5 Objectively, Dog Soldiers is a fairly bad movie, with hardly any of the scenes making sense, very shallow humor, low-brow writing and a pitiful excuse for action. The film crew and actors manage to provide some credence, but I assume that the "so bad, it's good" factor would work a lot better if they hadn't.Let me give you a spoiler-free rundown of what the first 30-40 minutes of the movie *looked like* to me: A group of adult men are playing a group of twelve-year-old boys who are running through the woods, shooting with their toy guns at imaginary enemies, while shouting nonsensical stuff that preteens assume adult soldiers might say. Since none of the material the camera captured had any resemblance of tension, generic but frantic action music is playing, while the actors are pointing their rifles into the depth of the wood, shooting wildly at absolutely nothing. When not shooting at air, the group of men-playing-children is sitting around a fire or walking aimlessly through the woods and having some of the most boring and dim-witted conversations you could hope to find in a movie...in my opinion. After that, the scenery switches but nothing else improves much.The acting is fair enough and occasionally loosened by exaggeration. Author/director Neil Marshall isn't generally awful either, but rather brought to the limits of his wits when it came to creating tension or action with a bare minimum of a budget. Almost everything that happens is laughably ridiculous and hardly given much thought. A lot of cheap tricks serve in visibly veiling the lacking quality of the action. The music is basically carrying every scene. Without it most viewers might question whether anything is actually happening at all. Choppy editing is used to help the music along, creating an audio-visual mess. One scene features a single soldier attempting to block a door from a werewolf, while also reloading his rifle. Nothing exciting is actually happening. The soldier is crouching in front of the door, fumbling with his gun, while we see little bits of an ugly, static wolf mask lightly moving around in the door's window. If the camera held still, the scene would be laughable to look at, without a trace of tension. To circumvent the obvious absence of action, the scene switches between 2 different camera perspectives, every second. In one angle the camera keeps swinging around, like the cameraman was heavily drunk and just about to run off to the toilet, jerking around on the spot, unable to concentrate on his job, only barely capable of keeping the camera held on the scene. In the other angle, the camera appears to be lying on the ground, after the cameraman finally ran to the bathroom. In his despair he didn't even mind placing the camera straight or orderly. The soldier is seen in the top right corner, while 3 quarters of the screen only show the ground and the wall next to the door-frame. Additionally, the camera is slightly tilted, giving the impression that the house is about to tip over to the side. Now imagine the scene altering between those two camera angles once per second. In effect it's a lot like watching a video of two elderly men, quietly playing chess, while frantic action music is playing and the camera view is doing what I described above - wildly moving around. And that's exactly what the majority of the movie is doing, adding music, shaky cam and bad editing to otherwise boring and nonsensical events.I won't pretend that my assessment of the movie would or should feel the same to everyone. Regardless of that, I think you might have the best chances of enjoying this movie if you belong to the group of men who are easily excitable by soldier uniforms, firearms and thoroughly meaningless, childish expressions like "Owned you!".

ace_ryan Horror movies are usually not something I watch, this was always due to the fact I have a bit of an over active imagination but I was hooked on this movie when it was on TV one night. It finished incredibly late so I watched the rest of the movie on DVD and boy was it a good British horror movie. There are some parallels with the real life Battle of Rorke's Drift (depicted in "Zulu") and scenes from "Aliens" which blend together well with our usual dark humour (I am British myself). So the basic plot is a group of soldiers on a training mission deep in the British countryside are hunted by a pack of bloodthirsty werewolves with a mysterious and wounded Captain Ryan with a secret agenda of his own. One by one the men are taken and torn apart by the beasts leaving a single soldier to prove a point put to him at the beginning of the movie; can he kill a dog? Watching the movie, all that was going through my mind was I was seeing Captain "Soap" MacTavish from the "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare" series fighting werewolves which was a cool concept to me, the creatures themselves looked incredible, so real and terrifying I was genuinely on the edge of my seat numerous times watching wondering who was the next to become a dog's dinner and growing attached to them, the deaths and blood effects were gruesome but very well done and I liked how it was all set around a small farm playing on the idea that what they think is safety really isn't. One of my favourite points in the movie is the intelligence of the werewolves when they managed to trick the soldiers in a couple of moments. Overall this is a very well put together British horror movie and I do highly recommend it to anyone

TheRedDeath30 I am a HUGE werewolf fan. Going back to childhood, werewolves were always my favorite little "sect" of monsters, more than vampires, zombies, witches, etc. It is a sad fact, though, while Hollywood and indie horror have churned out a plethora of bloodsucking vampires, flocks of mindless zombies and a gazillion ghost stories, they just can't seem to produce a great werewolf movie. In fact, I could probably (truthfully) name about ten movies in the entire history of filmdom that really, truly do werewolves justice. So, when I hear of great werewolf movies I go in ready to devour them. This one is not a let down. This is a great werewolf movie packed full of tight thrills.This came to my attention about a decade ago because of the popularity of THE DESCENT. As I talked with fellow horror fans, everyone kept saying "you have to check out his werewolf movie". Wait a minute....a werewolf movie, that people are really digging, directed by the guy that did THE DESCENT? I'm in. I actually bought it on DVD before I ever saw it (something I don't do often) and was more than happy that I did.A group a soldiers out on a routine training mission, deep in the forest, playing war games against a special forces unit. Our gang of soldiers is, suddenly, thrust into brutal action though as something has wiped out the special forces guys, something bestial, something that is now hunting our soldiers. We got only glimpses of fur and claws, at first, amping up our expectations. The unit is "rescued" by a young zoologist who is familiar with the area and brings them to a farm house, where no one is home. The soldiers hole up inside the house and fortify themselves against the monsters as the beasts continue to lead an all night assault against the house.One of the things that works so well here is using a group of soldiers rather than (thank god) teenagers or something similar. It keeps the movie unique, but it also presents a very different angle to the movie. There is a bond among these men, a sense of brotherhood that is there from the beginning. Yes, we get some bonding moments as the unit tightens together, but they have each other's backs and that sense of loyalty to each other brings something deeper to this movie than having a random group of civilians being killed would have done. It, also, allows for a fresh take on exactly why these men are really out there in the forest and what their true mission was, even if they were unaware.I really dig the creature design, also. That's ultimately what makes so many werewolf movies fail. Being such a fan of the genre, I have seen MANY werewolf movies and so few can get it right. The classics like THE WOLFMAN just went for the "shaggy guy" look and never tried for anything really lupine. There is the really cheap way out, a la THE BEAST MUST DIE where it's just a dog and they eschew makeup effects at all. Recently, movies like GINGER SNAPS and LATE PHASES have his odd look to the werewolves that doesn't have enough hair or enough canine quality to really be convincing. This take an approach that owes a lot to the design of THE HOWLING, they are erect creatures with humanish bodies and canine heads and, in my humble opinion, the best route to take the werewolf design. I will admit, though, that they don't hold up quite so well in close up, but they look fantastic from a few feet back and I PRAISE the film makers for going practical and not CGI.If I have any complaint about the movie and the only thing keeping it from a slightly higher score is that the formula of the plot is a little too well tread. Yes, as I said, I think they add some nice new ingredients with the soldiers and a cast of good adult actors, but we start off with a scene I've seen in far too many movies as an opener. A couple camping in the woods, something is outside the tent, something gets in the tent, shed some blood, roll title. Once we get to the farmhouse, also, the movie is nothing but a clone of the formula that started with THE LAST MAN ON EARTH and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Carpenter stole it, famously, in ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 and a thousand horror movies have used it since. Our heroes are holed up in a house with the monsters outside. Board up the doors, board up the windows and prepare to keep the monsters at bay. I understand that there are really only so many tropes you can follow and all movies boil down to the same dozen or so plot lines, but more could have been done here and I would rather that they kept the action in the forest. I would have like a hunter and hunted movie a little better, but with all of that said, this is still an excellent movie that I highly recommend.