Angry werewolves, a mad cowgirl, and a jaded screenplay writer

When it comes to this odd triple feature of films I watched recently, I guess the hairy beasts win it. Here’s my brief take on Skinwalkers, Mad Cowgirl, and Asylum.

SKINWALKERS (2006)

While the werewolves are pretty cool in this film, it’s basically a sci-fi/fantasy about battling werewolf packs – one is protecting a half-boy/half-wolf that can put an end to the werewolf curse forever, and the other pack wants to stop that from happening.

So the boy’s pack spends the whole movie running away from the bad pack, getting into continuous gun battles. Yes, gun battles.

Eventually, there’s a cool werewolf battle in a warehouse at the end (these are more “Wolfman” werewolves than “Howling” werewolves. Also, horror hottie Shawn Roberts is one of the stars.

MAD COWGIRL (2006)

Mad Cowgirl presents itself as a grindhouse film, but unfortunately, the majority of the film is more of an art film about sex, gluttony, and religion. Ugh. Plot points are twisted enough to be considered grindhouse (the main girl gets a form of mad cow disease, is obsessed with watching a Kung Fu chick flick, is fucking a televangelist then stalks him when he dumps her, fucks her television when the televangelist is on screen, has sex with her brother – played by none other than Kean-no Reeves himself, James DuVal), but mad cowgirl doesn’t lose her shit and start slaughtering people until the last twenty minutes of the film.

It’s the gore we wanted all along, but the kills are so brief and happen rapidly, one after the other, so essentially it looks like what should be the quick-cut trailer for much better grindhouse film.

But I have to say, the performance of lead actress Sarah Lassez totally rox and is the only reason I stuck with it.

ASYLUM (2014)

Here is the imdb description of this film:

An eleven-person riot squad races to an insane asylum to quell a recent inmate outbreak and hostage situation. They arrive, only to be caught off guard by a sudden barrage of insane patients. When they’ve finally fought off a wave, two of their squad members are missing, their communications return only static, and the doors are locked. They’re trapped. They break up into three teams to track down the lost members. Strange sounds and religious iconography suggest something beyond insanity has taken over the inmates. Sure enough, a simple rescue mission quickly morphs into relentless life or death battles with possessed. When McGahey, a trained, rational hostage negotiator, discovers the ringleader of this possessed insanity is none other than his brother, it falls on him to stop nothing less than the opening of a portal to Hell.

Here’s what is actually going on. From what I could gather on imdb message boards, that film was never actually completed the way the script writer wanted due to film studio bullshit. So…he took the film footage that was completed and wrote a sort Mystery Science Theater 3000 comedy commentary for it, delivered by two guys that are jarringly introduced after the film begins as if it is a serious film. There are several really big problems with this:

1. The audience has never seen the actual film (that was never even completed), so while these guys are talking over a majority of what’s taking place on screen, the jokes they’re making are kind of lost on us because we can’t hear what’s going on.
2. A majority of the jabs are aimed at the actors – the way they look, how they’re performing, and the state of some of their careers. If the writer has a grudge against the studio that hijacked his film, why does he spend most of his commentary attacking the actors?
3. Giving viewers no point of reference as to why the film is being presented this way, the entire “project” is completely self-serving. If this disgruntled screenplay writer needed this form of film therapy to cope with being dicked over by the studio, he should have made this mockery and showed it to his friends instead of marketing it to a general horror audience.

The trailer doesn’t even show any clips of the commentary guys we see interrupting the film every once in a while – the trailer is actually a trailer for the original horror movie. Why take your anger out by deceiving a general audience completely? Sorry, I just don’t get it. I mean, seriously, it doesn’t even say anywhere on the film’s imdb page what it is truly about (again, the description is specifically covering the original film). A backstory of this magnitude should have been at least described in the trivia section.

Oh—and fuck the Chiller network for actually bothering to air this.