It really takes a while for this film to get going but once it does, it's a lot of fun. Most of the first half gets weighed down by dialog that doesn't really matter and most of these dialog scenes go on for way too long with flat staging. Matt Monaco distinguishes himself as the best performer of the film and the closest thing it has to an antagonist, but his character spins way too many Dickensian yarns through the film in tedious fashion. When he just out and says "I'm a werewolf in cast I need to spell it out for you", I was refreshingly amused. I only wished he'd done so 20 minutes earlier, especially as it had been so telegraphed to us in the audience.
Once people start getting murdered, we get treated to all kinds of creepy night photography and over-the-top gore. One poor homeless man gets graphically rendered and his body parts flung every which way in a grisly fashion that would have sickened Lucio Fulci or Olaf Ittenbach. There's a couple impressive false scares and jumps, especially at the expense of a nervous girlfriend out on a date.
I find the concept of a gay man and his lover both intentionally becoming werewolves so they can prowl together as very promising. There could have been a lot of scenes between the two sampling the various sexual underground subcultures of San Francisco to accrue new victims. We also could have had the police investigate the mutilations but write it off as "some kind of bondage thing gone bad" etc. And ignored things before it got too late. This film could have taken all kinds of depraved and lurid turns there, but by then it's unfortunately far too late in the movie to do anything with.
I also thought that the idea of a brother and sister teaming up to track down werewolves held a lot of promise and could have had its own movie. Unfortunately the film doesn't really introduce them until it's on its final third, leaving them under developed. As they converge over the household of their dead parents, I would have loved to have seen them emotionally react to the parents' deaths or even to blame the creepy goings-on as resultant of some kind of haunting. The sister is also way too quick to believe that the dead man on their floor is actually a werewolf and that her brother didn't just shoot an innocent naked man.
As with many Wild Dogs movies, it's an impressive feat considering the low budget, but frustrating knowing that it doesn't seem to quite know what to do with its groundbreaking potential.
