Despite a great setup, Werewolf Game just never gets it right, leaving you frustrated from beginning to end. Leaving us with a film that could have been so much better if more time had been spent on fine tuning the smaller details, particularly the casting – disappointing.
The Judge (Tony Todd) has kidnapped a group of twelve strangers who must play a game where they vote on who among them to murder. At night, the werewolves hidden among them come out to brutally kill them. The twist? If they pick the werewolves, they immediately get released. With the game firmly afoot, the group must try not to fall apart to find those against them.
With Werewolf Game, a wonderful idea for a film is here, a murderous version of the TV show Traitors. This should be an easy, twist-laden psychological horror to fall in love with. Still, the film has so many issues that you simply cannot forgive its indiscretions. You want to like it, and some of the writing and cast make it very easy to do so, but wowzers, it feels like this film is trying and failing to run uphill.
The first 15 minutes of Werewolf Game are purposefully filled with as many close-ups of our cast faces as humanly possible. Co-directors Cara Claymore and Jackie Payne have chosen this intensely claustrophobic tone to show how trapped our group is and how little hope they truly have. This is jarringly broken when the group can leave, and we find them in a house “on an island.”
It’s a small thing, but it’s incredibly interesting how these two sections of the film are so inherently different from one another, almost as if they were filmed by someone else and then slotted in to fit from the choice shots of tight close-ups to these loose and free handheld shots. There are clear choices, and little has anything to do with the other. The colour grading is all over the place sometimes, and you wonder what is happening in post-production.
Some of the performances are lacking, but that is from the slightly stilted script they are given. However, it’s clear that when the more experienced characters are given screen time, they can weave that script into gold. Todd is as ominous as ever as The Judge, and he helps bring some threat; that voice will do more to scare you than most actual sequences. On the “villagers” side, Robert Picardo is the highlight as he plays a police detective who gets this and tries to detect who might be the werewolves. The rest of the cast kind of flail around in an overly annoying manner that just scratches your head.
Speaking of scratching your head, this group are probably the dumbest bunch you will ever meet outside of Washington, D.C., on January 6th. They continually make the worst choices when it comes to the voting sections that you must wonder if they are perhaps a touch suicidal and actually want to die. It’s all so frustrating that there could easily be a good film from Jackie Payne’s script, yet Werewolf Game just can’t make it to being a solid flick. It’s a real shame.
★★ 1/2
Werewolf Game is released by The Horror Collective on January 21st, available on-demand and across digital platforms
Support Us
I am but a small website in this big wide world. As much as I would love to make this website a big and wonderful entity, that would bring in more costs. So, for now, all I hope is to make Upcoming On Screen self-sufficient—well enough that any website fees are less of a worry for me in the future. You can support the website below…
Patreon
You can support us in a variety of ways (other than that wonderful word of mouth and those lovely follows). If you are so inclined to help out, you can support us via Patreon; find our link here! We don’t want to ask much from you, so for now, we have limited our tiers to £1.50 and £3.50. These will, of course, grow the more we plan to do here at Upcoming On Screen.
Buy Us A Coffee
Our other method is through the wonderful Buy Us a Coffee feature, but seeing as we are not the biggest fans of coffee, a pizza will do! We keep it fairly small change on that as well, and it allows you to give just a one-off payment, so there’s no need to worry about that monthly malarky! We even have a little icon on the website for you to find it and help us out with the website’s running.
