The Snarling

Okay so look at that cover, look at that title! I went in with zero expectations, I believed I was likely in for another low budget werewolf mess and when I realized it was British my hopes flatlined.

It's been a longtime since I've been this wrong, this is one of the biggest surprises I've come across in years.

A British independent horror comedy with a werewolf theme that tells that story of a small village as a movie production crew begins filming a zombie movie locally. When the bodies start to pile up it falls on the incompetent police force and local bar buddies to save the day.

It looks as cheap as you'd expect and sadly when anything even remotely werewolf happens the lack of budget shows and hurts the film.

But that's literally all I have to say in criticism of The Snarling. Well cast with a host of vaguely familiar faces from various UK soaps and sitcoms and with some of the best writing I've come across in years! I chuckled, I laughed and I split my sides......this is a genuinely hilarious movie.

Absolutely beats the pants off of most werewolf films and for that matter films in general lately. Really oddly enjoyable.

The Good:

Some good laughs

Great transitions

Oddly good writing

The Bad:

Lack of budget hurt the film

Well, what to say after watching The Snarling? First of all there are the usual fake reviews, but that we learned to live with on IMDb. This is no way close to a gem or masterpiece like some reviewers try to make you believe. It's a low budget (very low) werewolf movie from the UK. It's not supposed to be just horror, but more of a comedy, and there is nothing wrong with that except that in this case the humor is most of the time nowhere to be seen. There are a couple funny moments (a very little bit funny) but most of the time you wonder who wrote that kind of lame script. The cast is divided in two, on one hand you have a couple of actors who did it once before without too much success and than you have the other actors (if you can call them that) that they got out of the local pub, with zero experience and it shows. The werewolf creature, you have to wait a long time to see it, and there is a reason why, they just got a mask from the local Halloween store, put it on somebody and asked him to strut around a little bit. It's really really bad. They could at least spend a little bit of money on that, I don't know maybe by trying to raise some money at a car booth or so. Don't waste your time on this one, there are dozens of better werewolf movies.

It's a (very) low budget British comedy that happens to include a werewolf. The title, apparently a ham-fisted allusion to The Howling, is typical of this movie's level of sophistication. It's not scary and it's not trying to be - which is fine: there are a lot of excellent comedies that utilize horror conventions. The problem is that this one simply isn't funny. You get the sense they were going for talky, dry British humor and deadpan snark, but it all comes across as stale and forced.

It has the same basic premise as 2022's Wolf Manor (or Scream of the Wolf depending on where you're watching) which, by no means excellent, is a vast improvement over this 2018 effort.

An English village endures the filming of a Zombie film on its doorstep. As if that were not enough, locals are found dead, their bodies torn apart.

This is a low budget horror comedy, and glories in it. Silly, funny, with some good performances and some reasonable jokes - some work better than others, which is fair enough - and it actually makes sense.

Director and writer Pablo Raybould isn't interested in anything too sophisticated, preferring rather to dish out a few giggles during the 83 minute run-time. My score is 6 out of 10.

Its daft humour, which did have me laughing along. Quite a few nods to AWIL, had me looking in the background for those nuggets. The torn jackets hanging on the pub door etc.

I'll happily have a pint of Howling Wolf. Cheers to werewolf films, may there be many more.