The Wolf of Snow Hollow
I must admit that I haven’t seen many werewolf movies. Although American Werewolf in London is rumored to be good, I haven’t jumped on that bandwagon yet because I haven’t seen it. American Werewolf in Paris – ain’t. I’m inclined to think the Howling is good; it’s directed by Joe Dante, who never lets me down. I’ll probably wind up watching the Ginger Snaps saga at some point because of Katherine Isabelle alone. She’s a cool and friendly person.
But – for the most part, I just haven’t been attracted to the genre in ways I’m attracted to vampire or serial killer movies. So it took a lot of hype and Facebook peer pressure to get me to watch the Wolf of Snow Hollow, a 2020 dark comedy horror movie about a werewolf vs. an incompetent police force in small-town Utah.
It’s really, really good.
It starts a little slow. A man and his soon-to-be fiancé come to the town for a vacation. He overhears a local drop an f-bomb and tries to start some shit over this, but the local man takes the highroad and just leaves. Later, the fiancé is killed by an unseen figure in a gruesome, removing-the-female-organs type method.
The police force is run by Robert Forster, appearing for the last time before his death in 2019. His presence in this movie is curious; it makes you wonder how much of the cast he had “disappeared” at the beckoning of Saul Goodman or if he had disappeared himself after dealing with Walter White. The second-in-command is played by Jim Cummings, who turns in the best performance in this movie as a twitchy alcoholic with anger issues. He gives a simultaneously hilarious and deeply sympathetic portrayal of an alcoholic, and can deliver a calculated awkwardness that comes just shy of being bad acting, which – if you think about it – must be very hard to do.
The comedy is deviously great. The movie’s one flaw is its tone, which is hard to get a taste for at first and might require a second viewing to really “get”. It doesn’t rely on exaggerated gore, like Dead Alive, or slapstick like Evil Dead, but is more about the overall situation and how the characters react to events well out of their experience level. In this respect it resembles a Cohen brothers movie more than a true horror comedy, so it plays off like a season of Fargo that’s getting creeped on by that episode of Hannibal with the machine-werewolf dude.
It’s ok if you don’t catch the reference, Hannibal sucks anyway.
A few other murders occur, and then there’s a pleasant sequence of tattle-tales coming to the police station to report on strange people. Most of the humor comes from Cumming’s inability to deal not so much with the murders, but his staff, whom he fires for little reason quite a lot and violently. He relapses, and in one of the funnier moments, bitches when he isn’t allowed to the annual AA Punch Bowl. You could say the main theme of this movie is how the accumulation of stress from both past and present events – a mid-life crises, if you will – can affect someone to the point of almost madness.
One of the more interesting subplots is that between Cummings and his daughter. There’s heavy themes of misogyny in this movie, which include werewolf lore generally and particular examples it would spoil the plot for me to reveal. The most profound moment in the movie, which I haven’t quite digested yet – hey, I’m writing these at breakneck speed – is when Cummings visits his daughter as she moves into her college dorm. As he walks away, he overhears some assholes walk by referring to the incoming freshwomen as “fresh meat”, and he stops as if to murder them. He pauses for a while, then walks on. This recalls the first scene in the movie, when the boyfriend virtually kicked the movie off with a fight over the f-bomb. I’m not exactly sure how the themes are related or resolved with these two scenes, but there’s something going on worth pondering.
All in all, the Wolf of Snow Hollow is a fantastic movie well-worth watching. It’s an easy 90 minutes, and although a little slow at first, will engage you quickly and leave you with a satisfying ending.
I give it four stars.
I must admit that I haven’t seen many werewolf movies. Although American Werewolf in London is rumored to be good, I haven’t jumped on that bandwagon yet because I haven’t seen it. American Werewolf in Paris – ain’t. I’m inclined to think the Howling is good; it’s directed by Joe Dante, who never lets me down. I’ll probably wind up watching the Ginger Snaps saga at some point because of Katherine Isabelle alone. She’s a cool and friendly person.
But – for the most part, I just haven’t been attracted to the genre in ways I’m attracted to vampire or serial killer movies. So it took a lot of hype and Facebook peer pressure to get me to watch the Wolf of Snow Hollow, a 2020 dark comedy horror movie about a werewolf vs. an incompetent police force in small-town Utah.
It’s really, really good.
It starts a little slow. A man and his soon-to-be fiancé come to the town for a vacation. He overhears a local drop an f-bomb and tries to start some shit over this, but the local man takes the highroad and just leaves. Later, the fiancé is killed by an unseen figure in a gruesome, removing-the-female-organs type method.
The police force is run by Robert Forster, appearing for the last time before his death in 2019. His presence in this movie is curious; it makes you wonder how much of the cast he had “disappeared” at the beckoning of Saul Goodman or if he had disappeared himself after dealing with Walter White. The second-in-command is played by Jim Cummings, who turns in the best performance in this movie as a twitchy alcoholic with anger issues. He gives a simultaneously hilarious and deeply sympathetic portrayal of an alcoholic, and can deliver a calculated awkwardness that comes just shy of being bad acting, which – if you think about it – must be very hard to do.
The comedy is deviously great. The movie’s one flaw is its tone, which is hard to get a taste for at first and might require a second viewing to really “get”. It doesn’t rely on exaggerated gore, like Dead Alive, or slapstick like Evil Dead, but is more about the overall situation and how the characters react to events well out of their experience level. In this respect it resembles a Cohen brothers movie more than a true horror comedy, so it plays off like a season of Fargo that’s getting creeped on by that episode of Hannibal with the machine-werewolf dude.
It’s ok if you don’t catch the reference, Hannibal sucks anyway.
A few other murders occur, and then there’s a pleasant sequence of tattle-tales coming to the police station to report on strange people. Most of the humor comes from Cumming’s inability to deal not so much with the murders, but his staff, whom he fires for little reason quite a lot and violently. He relapses, and in one of the funnier moments, bitches when he isn’t allowed to the annual AA Punch Bowl. You could say the main theme of this movie is how the accumulation of stress from both past and present events – a mid-life crises, if you will – can affect someone to the point of almost madness.
One of the more interesting subplots is that between Cummings and his daughter. There’s heavy themes of misogyny in this movie, which include werewolf lore generally and particular examples it would spoil the plot for me to reveal. The most profound moment in the movie, which I haven’t quite digested yet – hey, I’m writing these at breakneck speed – is when Cummings visits his daughter as she moves into her college dorm. As he walks away, he overhears some assholes walk by referring to the incoming freshwomen as “fresh meat”, and he stops as if to murder them. He pauses for a while, then walks on. This recalls the first scene in the movie, when the boyfriend virtually kicked the movie off with a fight over the f-bomb. I’m not exactly sure how the themes are related or resolved with these two scenes, but there’s something going on worth pondering.
All in all, the Wolf of Snow Hollow is a fantastic movie well-worth watching. It’s an easy 90 minutes, and although a little slow at first, will engage you quickly and leave you with a satisfying ending.
I give it four stars.