Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Never Cry Werewolf (Werewolf Transformations)

Edit: the transformation scenes from the film can now be watched at Dutch Bull's terrific TF archive. Go here, here, and here.

Last Sunday the SciFi channel aired a new made-for-TV movie, Never Cry Werewolf. It wasn't all that bad, and though the budget was too low to allow for top-notch transformations (they even resorted to the old trick of cutting to the reaction of a horrified onlooker during the TF scene), we got the beginnings of two werewolf transformations.

There wasn't a single mention of Never Cry Werewolf on metamorphose.org, which has become almost useless to anyone who's interested in more than TG transformations (why don't they just rename the place transgendertf.org?). I actually raised this complaint on the site's board, only to be told that there wasn't many animal TFs around to take notice of. I think the truth is that there's plenty and it's being ignored.

Back to the movie:
Some folks have complained that Cry is just a rip-off of Fright Night, and there's no denying how derivative it is of the latter's plot. But I prefer to view Cry as a variation or inspired remake of FN, because it gets an awful lot of thematic mileage out of its variations. Here the evil neighbor is an attractive male werwolf who lusts after the heroine, who's surrounded by males who are either threatening or ineffectual. The threat is not merely physical but sexual too. That's emphasized by having both of the men attracted to her turning into werewolves. And as the villainous werewolf neighbor, Peter Stebbings turns in a good, seethingly sexual performance--you can understand why the heroine would be attracted to his animal charisma against her will.

Oh, as for the other werewolf, he's played by Sean O'Neil, who is younger and cuter than Stebbings. Unfortunately, after a promising-looking beginning to his transformation, he turns into a freakish bug-eyed mutant thing who has very little resemblance to any lycanthrope I've seen. Still, the fragments of TF scenes that we have are enough to tide me over, and for once we got a werewolf film with two cute guys transforming in it!

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