Dog Soldiers

One month after failing a recruitment test for special forces for refusing to shoot a dog, Private Cooper, along with his platoon, find themselves caught up in a routine training exercise gone terribly wrong.

Everything starts out normally enough with the platoon deployed to the Scottish highlands for what they have been told was to be a simple training exercise, nothing more than an elaborate game of capture the flag. Things soon take an odd twist however when the platoon find themselves surrounded by the carcases of dead animals. Unsure of what’s happening around them it’s not long before the platoon realizes that they’ve gotten more than they bargained for when they track down the opposing team’s camp and find it completely ransacked. Things go from bad to worse when they discover the team’s only surviving member, a  Special Forces captain named Richard Ryan who appears to have been mortally wounded and suffering from shock. Ryan keeps shouting the same thing over and over again, “There was only supposed to be one of them!”

As the sun sets and the full moon rises the troops are attacked by an unseen but powerful foe. One of their ranks is quickly slaughtered and their platoon leader, Sgt. Harry G. Wells, eviscerated. It’s up to Cooper to get his team out alive but it’s hard to defend yourself when you have no clue who’s attacking you. Grabbing Wells, Copper and the rest of the surviving troops with Captain Ryan in tow head for the roads and hopefully escape. Whoever is after them is hot on their heels and it looks like it’s game over until a vehicle comes out of nowhere and the woman behind the wheel orders them to get inside. Not having much of a choice the surviving troops huddle inside the car and speed away into the night with what looks to be a pack of giant wolves not far behind.The woman calls herself Megan and claims to be a zoologist who had come to the highlands two years earlier to study what she believed to be legends of lycanthropes or as they’re more commonly known… Werewolves. Megan takes the troops to the only house within miles where they try to figure out how they’re going to get their wounded to safety. Things aren’t looking good when Cooper discovers that Ryan is healing far more quickly than he should be which means if Ryan becomes a werewolf there’s a good chance that Wells wont be too far behind. As if things weren’t bad enough the house the troops are holed up in just so happens to belong to the werewolves and the werewolves want it back.

All the platoon has to do is make it through the night but it’s not going to be easy. There’s still six hours to go til morning and they’re running out of options. Just six more hours until the sun rises and their nightmare is over. Now if only Cooper could shake the uneasy feeling that Megan and Captain Ryan are keeping something from him…

Dog Soldiers, a British film starring Kevin McKidd, Sean Pertwee, Emma Cleasby, Liam Cunningham, Thomas Lockyer, Darren Morfitt, Chris Robson and Leslie Simpson is quite simply one of the best werewolf movies I’ve seen in a long time.

Rich in atmosphere and riddled with suspense, Dog Soldiers keeps the viewer on the edge of their seats both dreading and eagerly anticipating what happens next. The werewolves are gruesome creatures you would never want to encounter on a cold night in the highlands and you never forget for a second that what you are watching is indeed a bloody great horror movie.

There had been buzz for quite some time that a sequel, Dog Soldiers 2: Fresh Meat was in the works but as of August 12^th 2008 all information about the movie had been removed from the internet, including IMDb. For whatever reason it looks like Dog Soldiers 2: Fresh Meat has fallen into the realm of movie production limbo and may never see the light of day.

-Chris