Even review wise for me, 2008 just laid down and crapped its pants and died there at the end. And it pouted a lot and played LARPs, as well. We’ll have none of that horseshit in 2009, I tell you! Well, I lie, and I’m sure we’ll have plenty of garbage that makes me question my loyalty to the life of cinemasochism. But not tonight, boils and ghouls! The new year comes haulin’ some serious ass out the gate with a little no-name Scottish werewolf movie that rips the shit out of just about every lycanthrope flick ever made.

The plot is stripped bare and terrifying for its simplicity. There’s no hip irony, no pop culture references (excepting one nod to Mr. Bean of all things), no lame CGI (there are one or two shots that I assume use CGI because they would be virtually impossible to achieve using practical effects, but they’re so brief and so well-realized that it becomes seamless and makes the animatronic and suit work that much more convincing), and no attempts by the movie to prove itself by re-writing all the lore of the monster involved. There’s nothing to get in the way of the primal terror dredged up by the idea that there really is something in the dark, strange places, and this is what would happen if it decided you looked like food. It’s just a sparse 72 minutes of running, screaming, roaring, and dying, with pacing tighter than a 12-year-old Thai hooker.

Kelly Ann, and her friends David, Louise, and Mark, are dropped off in the Scottish highlands by Father Steve for some kind of survival hike. Lee, the father of Kelly Ann’s recently put-up-for-adoption-by-Father-Steve-because-it-were-a-wee-bastard baby shows up, and we’re off to the races. After the group make camp, Kelly Ann goes off to use the bushes, and is hit on by the creepy shepherd they met shortly after beginning the hike. Lee comes running when she screams and wards him off with a knife, but a lecherous farmer is the least of their worries. He doesn’t make it ten paces from their camp when he’s attacked and savagely killed by a huge, growling shape. The kids run off, followed by snarls in the night.

Kelly Ann and Lee investigate a ruined castle (a real castle in Mugdock County Park outside Glasgow, where most of the movie was shot), and find a huge charnel pit full of guts and bones and corpses. And crawling around in the gore, a tiny squalling baby. Assuming she’s saving the baby from the fate of its parents, Kelly Ann takes it and they haul ass outta there. Back with the group, the baby nips her while breastfeeding (she just squeezed out a puppy herself just a few weeks ago, remember). And then the real ugliness begins.

The creature, under cover of darkness and low scrub growth, begins picking them off one by one until Kelly Ann, Lee, and Mark wind up trapped in the castle ruins with the creature outside. Sunlight streams through the window, waking the exhausted trio…and the fucking beast is still stalking patiently around in the clearing outside, waiting. That is probably the scariest thing about the whole movie – when the sun comes up, the monster doesn’t go away. As far as I can tell, once the lycanthropy takes effect in this movie, it’s not a reversible condition. You’re stuck as a bison-sized prehistoric wolf monster for good and all.

Well, the kids manage to drop a loose stone on their pursuer and kill it, but just as the boys finish it off, its mate jumps through the window and we say goodbye to Mark. Kelly Ann and Lee book the fuck out of there, only to be treed a short distance away. They separate, Lee running off to make a distraction, leading to one of the strangest things I’ve seen in a movie all year (“But Ragnarok”, you’re saying, “the year isn’t even a month old”, and I say to you, think for a second about the kind of movies I watch). Lee gets chomped, and Kelly Ann is nearly rescued by a cattle farmer, who winds up being bitten almost completely in half when a wolf EXPLODES OUT OF ONE OF HIS FUCKING COWS! The movie never sets up that a wolf fetus can gestate inside another mammal, but I can’t figure out how the hell a creature which is approximately the same size as the cow could have tunneled into the cow leaving no visible damage to the exterior of the animal until it comes exploding out to savagely slaughter the poor fuck who gets in the way of its massive and mighty jaws. I dunno, but it looked damn cool so who cares?

Kelly Ann finally makes it to the farm which was their original destination, only to have the remaining wolf arrive and kill the landlady. With a monster at the door, and Kelly Ann locked in a room upstairs with the baby, Father Steve is in way out of his depth. Especially when you consider that the baby, found unharmed in a werewolf’s larder, bit Kelly Ann on the tit a few hours earlier…BUM BUM BUUUUUUUUUUUUUM! Yeah, yeah, spoilers fuck you. If you’ve read the Fangoria article on this they give away the only plot point in the whole movie in a still shot, so shut the hell up. Besides, if you’re even halfway paying attention you saw it coming anyway. In fact, Mal said she’d be disappointed if the baby hadn’t turned out to be a wolf.

I’ve already expounded on this movie being absolutely incredible because it’s so simple and so short. Just imagine the first ten minutes of American Werewolf in London as an entire feature and that’s your movie.

Let’s move on to the real attraction – the werewolves. This may be blasphemy in the world of monster fanboy-dom, but Bob Keen is my fucking hero. I know Rick Baker was revolutionary, and I know Rob Bottin was revolutionary, and I know everyone has a hard-on for KNB and Tom Savini, but in the last decade, Bob Keen has made three of my favorite contemporary monsters from three of my favorite contemporary monster flicks. The wolves in Dog Soldiers, the mutant cow fetus skeleton worm from Isolation, and now this. He’s totally reinvented the werewolf design once again (well, taking maybe just a bit of inspiration from Ginger Snaps, but making it a hundred times more badass). From the humanoid bipeds with realistic-looking wolf heads in Dog Soldiers, he’s taken several steps backwards on the evolutionary scale (), making the creatures look more like a thylacine on steroids, or an Andrewsarchus with no fur on its face. They’re damn huge, nearly the size of a smallish bison, and they’re pretty goddamn unsettling. The hair looks a bit like shaggy Fun Fur ™, but when you’re a monster living in the Scottish Highlands, grooming is probably the least of your concerns.

I can’t tell you enough how much you need to go out and see this movie right now. Do it. Now. Seriously. What the hell are you doing still sitting here? Unless you’re putting it at #1 in your Netflix queue, you better be running your ass out the door to find the copy nearest you and cram it in your DVD player immediately. Movies like this are the cure for the overly hip garbage cramming the theaters and video store shelves today, pretending to be horror movies when really they’re just postmodern intentionally ironic pastiches. This is a true horror movie. What Stephen King would call a “psycho with a hook” story. No frills, nothing fancy. Barely even the scarcest hint of a story. Just outright horror. There are monsters. They will eat your fucking head. ‘nuff said.