At the heart of all the great
werewolf stories is the tragedy of the lycanthrope’s condition. Usually, these characters didn’t ask for
what’s happening to them (in fact, Oliver
Reed’s character in The Curse of the
Werewolf is just that; cursed by happenstance of birth). Oftentimes, they are wracked with angst prior
to their “infection”/transformation, and their lycanthropy amplifies this,
creates a visual metaphor for dealing with it, and generates pathos which makes
their typically tragic endings more impactful.
We feel bad when Lon Chaney, Jr is
killed with almost Shakespearean poignancy in 1941’s The Wolf Man, because he’s basically a nice guy. We feel bad when Dee Wallace sacrifices herself at the end of The Howling, because after all she’s gone through, we want her to
live, but we know that she has to die.
Even villainous werewolves who are not the protagonists of their stories
normally embody a certain sense of anxiety centered on their duality. Just look at Everett McGill’s character in Silver
Bullet who has nightmares about his loss of morality/control. All of this is rooted in the injustice of
these people’s situations. They don’t
generally deserve their lot in life (hey, who does?), so we sympathize with
what they’re going through. However, in Alessandro De Gaetano’s Project: Metalbeast, Butler (John Marzilli) was an unsympathetic
piece of shit even before his self-inflicted transformation. Consequently, his werewolf is nothing more
than a lumbering beast we don’t care about as anything other than a killing
machine, and I think it robs the film of the resonance it could have had. Of course, none of the other characters are
all that compelling either, so I suppose there’s some sense of balance in that.
After injecting himself with
werewolf blood obtained in Budapest for a top secret super soldier project,
Butler, a soldier working under the shifty Colonel Miller (Barry Bostwick), wolfs out, is put down with three silver bullets,
and is placed into a cryogenic deep freeze.
Twenty years on, his cadaver is thawed out to test Dr. Anna De Carlo’s (Kim Delaney) unstable artificial skin,
called Bio-Ferron (just to reinforce this for you, they have an artificial
epidermis that has the UNINTENDED side effect of turning into metal, and they
called it Bio-Ferron), under the orders of the still-shifty Miller. I wonder if Butler will awaken and go on some
kind of rampage?
One of the more interesting
things at play in this film is its combination of science with myth. In the same way that some science fiction
fantasy stories (a la Karl Edward Wagner’s
Kane stories or Thundarr the Barbarian) merge grungy, bloody barbarianism with high
tech, almost aseptic futurism, the dichotomy of juxtaposing science with the
supernatural holds a certain appeal for me.
It’s the incongruities of the two, the core polarities that I find
fascinating. There is some de-mythologizing
of lycanthropy in the film as the condition of werewolfism is treated as a rare
blood condition rather than as a curse or disease passed from one victim to the
next (even the military wouldn’t be foolish enough to purposely infect soldiers
whose combat efficiency they wish to enhance with a known malady [or would
they?], although this does call to mind the shameful Tuskegee Study [which took
place over a span of forty years!]).
Werewolves are simply something that exist (and that they do so in
secret bolsters the conflict between comprehension and the incomprehensible). Yet, the filmmakers don’t deal with any of
this in anything other than a superficial manner. The elements are all there, but De Gaetano seems to be more intent on
making a straight up creature feature (not that there’s anything wrong with
that) than on exploring the depths of the sandbox in which he was playing.
There is also some toying with
notions of morality, but even here, it’s essentially cursory. Naturally, Miller has no moral or ethical
code whatsoever (“morality has nothing to do with it”), because he’s both a
government employee for an unnamed, clandestine branch as well as a soldier,
and we know that these two things spell mercenary in cinematic terms. The doctors (who are also government
employees) are innately moral, because their stated purpose is to help cancer
and burn victims and they work out in the open (more or less). They want to heal people, whereas Miller wants
to hurt people. Even the soldier Philip
(Dean Scofield) who works with the
doctors is himself a doctor, so he shares their clear moral code, and General
Hammond (William G Clark) is upfront
about his distaste for the likes of Miller (“people in Washington have no
regard for humanity”). The doctors also
hang out, drink beers, and play poker in their off hours, so the audience
recognizes that these are regular folks just like them. Despite all this, the doctors don’t display
the courage of their convictions. They
raise token ethical/moral arguments, but they go along with Miller’s plan with
little prodding, and then everything is business as usual for them. Even after Butler comes back to life, they
have very little compassion for the guy (granted, he doesn’t deserve it, but
they don’t know that) outside of the frustration of snapping off needles while
trying to give him injections.
Nevertheless, when Project: Metalbeast is all boiled down,
it’s by the numbers right down the line.
The characters are indistinguishable from one another and undeveloped
outside of their designation as “the good guys.” The same goes for Miller, who is a cardboard
evildoer, always turning up to overhear some suspicious dialogue and deliver
some vaguely menacing lines of his own.
The Metalbeast (played in costume by Kane Hodder) is a chunky, blank slate of a monster that looks more
like a mutant hedgehog than an iron werewolf.
There are no unforeseen twists to the story. There are no especially clever moments for
any of the characters in their combatting of the monster.
And speaking of the lack of
cleverness, the film is rife with just dumb moments and decisions. To wit: why does Miller suddenly think that
Butler will obey him now simply because twenty years have gone by? Why does he have no method to control what is
basically a feral animal (it’s declared that the amalgamated soldier would have
the brain of a man, but this is not in evidence anywhere) which he wants to use
it in combat. Why is Miller not armed to
the teeth with silver bullets or have any underlings with him similarly kitted
out? Why does Miller show Butler photos
of the initial werewolf eating Butler’s fellow soldier in Budapest, when Butler
clearly didn’t give a fuck about that guy in the first place (and why is this
so effective on Butler, then?)? Why do
they seem to keep Butler’s frozen corpse in the kitchen refrigerator? Why does Chef Ramon (Mario Burgos) get third billing in the end credits (they’re only
partially in alphabetical order) after a single, histrionic scene (which, by
the way, wins the Robert Marius Award
for the film)? Even discounting any of
this (or reveling in it, for that matter), the film watching experience with
this one was basic in every aspect for me, not in an old school, throwback sort
of way but in an ultra-generic one. It
was just nothing to howl about (and by the way, the Metalbeast never howls in
the film).
MVT: I like the Metalbeast,
not because it’s in any way memorable, but because it’s a practical monster
suit, and I’m a sucker for practical monster suit effects. A backhanded compliment if ever there was
one, I suppose.
Make or Break: The Budapest
werewolf attack has another practical suit monster, which I quite liked, and it
was gory (I should state, there’s quite a bit of gore in the film that provides
a tiny amount of satisfaction). And
that’s that.
Score: 5.5/10