After a series of savage animal attacks, the sheriff of a small town finds that the town is being invaded by a pack of vicious werewolves that were previously held in control by a powerful werewolf hunter and that a thought-missing townsperson has become the new protector to stop the creatures.
For the most part, this was quite an enjoyable and somewhat entertaining effort. A lot of the positives in this one comes from the strong storyline at play here, which brings a modern twist to the werewolf-hunter setup that gets employed here. This one tackles the idea of a supernatural protector coming back from the dead and combating the werewolves attacking people under the guise of her sacrificial offering. Promoting the idea of a cursed bloodline protecting the town and using all sorts of mythical weaponry to do the job which is what has kept them from appearing beforehand gives this a rather intriguing storyline to deal with. That also plays into the films' action scenes of the wolves attacking which has some enjoyable aspects here, from the first wolf attack on the party being held out in the woods where it strikes the lone couple, a later ambush on a couple in their home and the full-on fun of the vigilante crew encountering the creatures out in the woods and realizing their outmatched when she appears to save them at the last possible moment. The few brief encounters around town offers some more fun, while the finale contains several big encounters in the underground caves which has a lot of fun in their battles with the wolf creatures and leading into the wholly exciting take-over of the town as the full-scale creature and it's minions arrive turning this into a fun little massacre sequence. However much fun the rest of the film is, it's still hard to get over its main problem in that the werewolves are merely played by actual wolves and dogs. There's never a sense of this being more than real animals for their scenes which greatly reduces the concept of them being threatening when they look like regular dogs which is the usual problem associated with following that format of the creatures. Not only does it completely undermine the point of using werewolves as the monster when they look nothing like these beings but to then place this as the main source of the film's monster really undermines this one. Coupled with the wholly ridiculous look of the monster make-up and the CGI for the main creature, the werewolves here are wholly underwhelming as a whole. The last flaw is the somewhat flimsy story structure where it tends to go in circles and never really seems to focus itself in any particular way, going back and forth on its story to get to a point that it could've gotten to much easier without wasting time on its secondary storylines. These are what hold this one back the most.
Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, Nudity and a sex scene.
