Wer (DVD)
Steve Barton
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Starring A.J. Cook, Simon Quarterman, Vik Sahay, Brian J. O’Connor
Directed by William Brent Bell
Distributed by Universal
Matthew Peterman and William Brent Bell. They will forever be reviled in the film community for their film The Devil Inside. So reviled in fact that I’m pretty shocked that a major studio gave them another shot to make a movie. Of course they played it safe and sent it straight to DVD. Welcome to the world of Wer.
Long story short, A.J. Cook plays Kate Moore. She and her legal team are representing the monstrously huge Talan Gwynek (O’Connor), a man who’s been arrested for the heinous murder of a father and son who were torn apart and eaten at the scene of the crime. Moore is convinced that Gwynek couldn’t have pulled off said murders because he suffers from a rare disease that makes him overly hairy and causes him pain when he moves.
Is Talan responsible, or is there some giant animal out there who has a bad habit of feasting on helpless prey? We already know this is a werewolf movie going in so the only mystery to be had here is whether or not Talan is indeed responsible for the killings.
Wer is home to some really memorable gore effects provided by Rob Hall and his company, Almost Human, and it’s filmed in a really interesting way that’s thankfully not found footage. You see the action from several different cameras, including one that is of the more traditional cinematic variety. Bell does a good enough job ramping up the tension and hooking the audience in to the events transpiring before us.
Then it happens… the third act, in which we watch everything magically fall apart. In comparison to the first two thirds of the movie, the finale comes off in the most sloppy and amateurish of ways. The storyline takes a turn for the worse complete with really bad ADR’d dialogue (the crappiest since Lin Shaye provided the voice for her younger self in Insidious: Chapter 2) and yes, a convoluted ending. At least the gore keeps flowing.
This is a damned shame, too, because up until the third act Wer was giving us a compelling new twist on the werewolf subgenre. It almost feels as if they ran out of money and had to rush through to completion. Yep, chalk another one up to the mediocrity fiesta that is 2014.
Wisely, there’s not a single extra to be found here either. Not even a trailer.
Wer isn’t horrible, and it has its merits. It’s just infuriating to see them all flushed down the toilet by the time the end credits run. Watch at your own risk.
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