Werewolf: The Devil's Hound has, based on the cover art and the trailer, been marketed in a severely misguiding manner. Originally titled Lycan, this offering from the writing/directing team of Gregory C. Parker and Christian Pindar of Synthetic Cinema International looks, on the outside, to be a straight up horror picture. There werewolf howling on the front cover, the images of a pair of people with glowing yellow eyes roaming the mist on the back, and even the title itself - they all point to a spookshow. Imagine this reviewer's surprise, then, when the film turned out to be a comedy, and a pretty crappy one at that.

A young man named Kevin is a pyrotechnics guy at his father's special effects house. A crate of what are supposed to be fireworks shows up one day and instead of the intended cargo, it turns out that there's a female werewolf inside. Kevin gets bitten, and the next day he starts to notice that things are a little... different. Thankfully for Kevin, the werewolf who bit him is, during the day, a hot red headed goth chick. She shows up and makes it pretty clear to Kevin that she wants him to be her man, to help her start a new family of werewolves. Kevin goes to a crappy bar and freaks out, transforming into a werewolf and then later some European werewolf hunters show up to stop Kevin and the hot redhead from doing whatever it is they're trying to do.

While the plot may sound like reasonably decent if generic horror fare, the reality is that there are so many bad jokes and intentionally horrible performances in this picture that the few scattered gore scenes and piss-poor special effects work just flat out cannot save it or redeem it in any way, shape or form. The plot takes about an hour to really get going, and we're left to suffer through bad joke after bad joke until it finally gets moving. Even then, once we're off and running, it's simply too hard to care about Kevin or his plight. If that weren't enough, the film commits the ultimate sin... it's boring.

Nothing in the film works. Not the acting, not the effects (the female werewolf effects in particular are quite horrible), not the gore scenes, not the characters and especially not the dialogue. The filmmaker's were obviously going for intentional camp, throwing in everything including the kitchen sink, but rather than resulting in a funny, quirky, eclectic horror film they've instead wound up with a juvenile and completely uninteresting movie that simply wreaks of amateur filmmaking at its worst.

Video:

Werewolf: The Devil's Hound arrives on DVD in an anamorphic 1.85.1 widescreen presentation that does a reasonably good job with less than perfect source material. The movie was shot on digital video and there are some very obvious compression artifacts present in many of the darker scenes in addition to some softness throughout. That said, color reproduction isn't bad and while there is some edge enhancement and some shimmering, it isn't a huge problem and it's only distracting in a couple of scenes. While this is hardly reference quality, there are certainly worse looking low budget indy horror movies out there in DVD land.