Home Entertainment It's creepy eyes and cowboys in these first images and synopsis for David Hayter's directorial debut WOLVES

It's creepy eyes and cowboys in these first images and synopsis for David Hayter's directorial debut WOLVES

3 min read
1

Thanks to a certain sparkly tweeny franchise, werewolves have lost a lot of their street cred over the years. Director Joe Johnston tried to get the lycanthropes back on the badass path with The Wolfman, but that fell a bit short of the mark.

Now it’s the turn of X-Men and X2 screenwriter David Hayter, who’s making his debut in the director’s chair with Wolves. And there’s not a single pair of ripped denim shorts, or bare male torso in sight.

Hayter is of course no stranger to badassness. Besides for penning the X-Men films, he’s also the voice behind Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid videogame franchise as well as playing the lead in the 1990’s cult classic live action anime adaptation, Guyver: Dark Hero.

Now he’ll be teaming up with X-Men: First Class make-up magician, Dave Elsey, who earlier in the year described their vision as not so much a better version of The Wolfman but rather as a “very violent and bloody” version of the X-Men. Just with more fangs and fur. That isn’t blue.

Along with the images, an official synopsis has also been revealed

Cayden Richards (Lucas Till), 18, has it all: Captain of the high school football team; straight-A student; gorgeous girlfriend. But when he wakes one dark night to find his parents brutally murdered, he is horrified to realize that he is turning into an animal: a wild, savage wolf.

Panicked, Cayden runs, determined to find out what is happening to him. His quest leads him to the strange, isolated town of Lupine Ridge, where two clans of wolves are on the brink of war.

The opposing clans are lead by Connor (Jason Momoa), the powerful, pure-blood alpha of a savage pack and John Tollerman, an old farmer, committed to protecting the human citizens of Lupine Ridge. But when Cayden falls for Angelina (Merrit Patterson), the beautiful, young mate promised to Connor, a battle to the death is inevitable.

And as the past begins to reveal itself, Cayden’s place in the world becomes clearer – as does his power to put an end to the savage violence building up around and within him…

I only know Till from X-Men: First Class where he did a pretty respectable job as the young Alex Summers, but with a string of roles lined up over the next two years (most notably in Park Chan-Wook’s Stoker and sharing the screen with Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman in Paranoia), you can expect to see a whole lot more of him before Wolves comes out.

I’ve been a longtime fan of Momoa’s since his Stargate Atlantis days though, and if you’ve watched Game of Thrones then you’d know that he can play an vicious alpha male like few others. Unfortunately, he then had his Catwoman moment with Marcus Nispel’s Conan reboot, but with him also about to be getting into axe-fights with Sylvester Stallone, I think he’s quickly putting that slip up behind him.

The images also reveals one of my personal favourite TV actors, John Pyper-Ferguson, all cowboy-ed up for his role as Wild Joe, but no word on whether he’ll be howling at the moon or not.

I won’t say that the film has me completely excited yet, especially with that Twilight reference throne onto the teaser poster, but I do like the people involved and it shows some promise. Time will tell if this will reinvigorate werewolf mythology to it’s former brutal status, or whether this will just another Team Jacob fanfic.

Last Updated: November 12, 2012

One Comment

  1. James Francis

    November 13, 2012 at 11:09

    I don’t think werewolves have ever managed to get any real mainstream attention. There was Wolf, The Howling and American Werewolf In London, but they were more cult events than an emergence of the genre. The problem is probably that the werewolf has always been tied to vampire sin cinema. It started with The Wolfman, who was at first a sidekick of Dracula and eventually became a nemesis in later films.

    Werewolves in their savage form have never enticed mainstream audiences. One exception was Underworld, but I suspect as long as it was vampires vs something, the audience wouldn’t have cared.

    What we should be careful of is to romanticize the werewolf mythology. Most of it, like vampires, are drawn directly from movies and there has never been that much consistency around it.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Check Also

James Wan reveals the title for Aquaman 2

The sequel to the highest grossing movie in the current DCEU franchise finally has a name.…