Three Films Make A Post: “The Best Werewolf Movie In Years”

A Werewolf in England (2020): As much as I adore many of director/writer/low budget genius Charlie Steeds’s works in general, I can’t say this one’s more me. As always, camera work, editing and lighting are pretty great (particularly when you keep the production budget in mind), always influenced by the tradition Steeds is working in, yet also creative in how that influence is used, and the cast is often much better than you’d expect. Locations and sets are fine, as well. It’s just that the whole tone of the movie is pretty much the opposite of what I like: instead of the more straightforward werewolf fare you’d expect, this is a deeply campy comedy, with joke after joke after joke I found nearly painfully unfunny. Which becomes a bit of a problem in a comedy, even in one where I ended up laughing two or three times.

If viewers who actually like camp will have the same problem with this as I have is anybody’s guess, obviously.

The Corpse Eaters (1974): Teenage (at the time) Lawrence Zazelenchuk’s little – the only existing versions run for apparently incomplete 57 minutes – bit of early (non-voodoo) zombie horror may be Canada’s first gore film. It is certainly a bit of a mess in the state you can see it now, a blown-up, sometimes pixelated greenish print. Much of it doesn’t work and makes little sense, but there are moments when the whole thing does take on the quality of a freakish nightmare, especially in the gore scenes where the (mostly library, I assume) soundtrack drops into synth chirps and drones while we witness improbable but – as far as you can see it in this version – excellently gloopy gore, filmed with wildly wavering camera and edited over-excitedly. As an extra bonus, the film warns us before the gore scenes with its own version of the Horror Horn: shots of a balding guy about to puke set to annoying synth noises. If that doesn’t convince you of a film’s quality, clearly nothing will.

Vampires (1979): Vampires were in the air in 1979, though this entry into the BBC’s venerable (and sometimes absolutely wonderful) “Play for Today” series, as written by Dixie Williams and directed by John Goldschmidt may not feature any actual vampires. Most of it follows a trio of kids in a particularly desolate part of Liverpool finding their imaginations fired by a viewing of Dracula – Prince of Darkness. So much so, they decide a pale man walking the local graveyard is a vampire, as well.

All of this works wonderfully as a compassionate, sometimes funny, exploration of a specific time and place and its people. It finds much joy (and a bit of subtextual anger) in the kids’ resilience in interactions with a grown-up world that mostly – apart from a joke shop owner – seems to go out of its way to nip in the bud anything that might make the dullness of the surroundings more interesting, more adventurous. That it ends on an ambiguous note that might turn this into an actual tale of vampirism is nearly beside the point, but still appreciated.