Wolf Town

The timid and insecure Kyle (Levi Fiehler) has a crush on Jess (Alicia Ziegler) and he invites her to go to the Paradise ghost town as a pretext to be close to her. He brings his best friend Ben (Max Adler) with him, but Jess comes with her boyfriend Rob (Josh Kelly).

Kyle drives his convertible to the town and sooner Ben is deadly wounded by a ferocious pack of wolves. The trio of survivors is surrounded and trapped by the smart wolves and they have to be brave enough to face the animals.

"Wolf Town" is a lame and amateurish low budget movie with a terrible screenplay. The wolves are capable to trash the wires of a car to trap the driver and passengers in town; Rob succeeds to go to the barn during the night to get only one dynamite when there is a box of dynamites; Rob, Kyle and Jess escape from the wolves and do not bring a piece of wood or any weapon for self defense. However, the acting is decent, but the cast could not do any better with such poor script. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "Terra dos Lobos" ("Wolves Land")

During the gold rush, the prospecting town of Paradise is attacked by a pack of wolves, the animals wiping out all of the inhabitants, who are unable to save themselves despite being armed to the teeth with rifles and dynamite. Cut to the present day, and a group of college friends travel to the ghost town as part of a history project; lo and behold, the wolves still run the place, and are mightily upset by the intrusion.

Yes, Wolf Town really is as dreadful as it sounds: its hairy killers are not only able to dodge bullets and avoid detection for a century and a half, but they also have enough intelligence to sabotage a car by ripping out its wiring and steal their victim's provisions. Clever wolfies! Meanwhile, the youngsters who stray onto the wolfs' territory display next to no common sense (they're certainly less switched on than the wolves), failing to adequately arm themselves against the snarling beasts and repeatedly risking life and limb to go it alone (one character makes a daring bid to retrieve the dynamite and comes back with just one stick!).

In addition to an iffy script, the film also suffers from uninspired direction from John Rebel (the man behind the equally dire 2010 killer-animal movie Bear), who achieves zero tension or sense of horror, and poor editing that makes it looks as if there are only two wolves for most of the running time (only towards the end do we see as many as five on the screen at the same time). Amazingly, the acting is more than passable for such nonsense, but with such awful material, the cast can do nothing to prevent this film from being one hell of a mess.

I wanted to see a vicious pack of wolves destroy some humans. Sadly, that didn't happen.

1) The "wolves" were just a bunch of dogs... I guess the director didn't want to waste his time getting real wolves. I don't see how wolves are that much harder to train or more expensive than bears (since that director made a different movie about a killer bear) .. If you can get a bear for another movie, you should be able to get real wolves! I didn't rent this movie to see dogs. I rented it to see WOLVES!

2) ALL the attack scenes were horrible. I don't have very high standards for animal attacks, but this movie really crossed the line.

If you want to see real wolves (or at least CGI wolves, like in "The Grey"), Wolf Town is NOT the movie for you. The cover is extremely misleading. The "wolves" in the movie don't look like the wolves on the cover AT ALL.

The "attack" scenes don't even deserve to be called that. This movie is a movie about teens running away from wolfy-looking dogs. The action is lame. This movie is NOT worth your money and especially not worth your time.

Kyle and Ben are off to Paridise, a ghost town, under the pretense of looking for good, but really Kyle just wants to get in Jess's pants who ends up bringing her boyfriend. Uh-oh. To make matters worse they're hounded by killer wolves, one of which bites Ben. Now they must find a way to survive. Will they? a better question would be will anyone care??

Almost every Tuesday Instant Netflix has at least one film streaming on same day as released on DVD, this week it's three films (this one, The Myth of the American Teenager, and Beneath the Darkness) This film is definitely the worst of the bunch. amateurish, boring, awfully (over)acted (by the people, the wolves under act), and quite a task to sit through.

My Grade: F

Okay, recession hit everyone hard. So I'm not gonna blame the makers of "Wolf Town" for charging me 8 € for a movie that was produced for half that money. I can get past the fact that the entire "Wolf Town" was populated by a meager three wolves who kill by gnawing at life-sized dolls. Neither shall I complain that the special effects look like they were shoplifted from the local funstore (check out the red blubber that was plopped on Rob to pass for intestines). I'm not even gonna rant about the fact that they couldn't even be bothered to remove the wreckage of modern tractors from the scenery of a "ghost town from the 1800's". All those things require money, and it's blatantly clear that this cheap flick was made on a shoe-string budget.

But there can be no excuse whatsoever for the extremely bland and dumb story. Creativity and imagination are free. A decent filmmaker can make a great movie on a nickel and dime. "Blair Witch Project", anyone? But no-one involved in the production "Wolf Town" shows a glimpse of such talent. Therefore this is doomed to be a poor man's movie with a poor man's script. There are plot holes the size of Europe. So we're supposed to believe the wolves managed to sabotage a car, steal their cellphones and catch up with the idea of dynamite? The director stops quite short of crediting them with setting up the town's website to lure edible tourists. Even more irritating is the utter standstill that the story creeps in after fifteen minutes. The main characters run from one deserted house to the other, where they start to bicker at each other. After a while the wolves are fed up with their nagging and jump through a window. That's the sign for our jolly bunch to run casually to another house. That process is actually repeated six to seven times, I kid you not. To top it off the end leaves us with a wacky eco-message when the wimpy kid starts to understand the "motive" of the wolves, who just want the strangers to leave their cozy town. Wolf-children of the Corn, ay?

A final warning: those like me who love a good killer animal-flick and let themselves be fooled by the cover will find themselves howling at the moon in utter frustration.