Howl (2015) - Who says B-movies are dead?

As the title - semi - suggests, 2015's 'Howl' is about werewolves - not always the easiest of monsters to fit into a horror film, simply because they normally take more special effects/money to make believable and - perhaps more importantly - scary.  However, it's nice to see a low budget movie do the best with its limited budget and actually pull off something quite special - at least in terms of B-movies.

'Howl' may not have the action and 'gung-ho-ness' of 'Dog Soldiers' (my personal favourite werewolf movie!), but it still works.  Late one night, a train travelling out of London, gets stuck in the countryside and, as well as the buffet car being closed, it just so happens that a pack of werewolves are outside due to the full moon.

So, what you're left with is a tale with a - reasonably generic - plot, i.e. survivors making a stand in a one location (in this case, a stranded commuter train).  At this point it could just fall into that oh so forgettable category of so many similar films.  But here the writing is good enough to elevate it above so many others.  The first major plus point is that the characters aren't complete stereotypes.  Yes, they may be a little one-dimensional, but when compared to other 'monster-fodder' in such films, they're actually a lot more 'fleshed-out' than many such characters in monster movies.  Even the obligatory 'bad guy' among the group is memorable and you'll be waiting for him to finally get what's coming to him.

Then there are the creatures themselves.  Maybe for budget reasons, the film-makers have leant more into 'lycanthropy' being more a mutation to regular humans, rather than transforming them into fully-fledged monsters.  Therefore, the film doesn't rely on cheesy computer-generated effects which take you out of the story.

Like I say, 'Howl' may not be - quite - as much fun as 'Dog Soldiers' (which really did raise the bar in terms of werewolf movies), but it's definitely a fun film if you like the genre and well worth a watch.

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that