"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Late Phases

a.k.a. LATE PHASES: NIGHT OF THE LONE WOLF

I know this has been said before, but LATE PHASES is kinda like GRAN TORINO with werewolves. By that I don’t mean there’s an old guy who’s racist against werewolves but befriends a young werewolf neighbor, although that would also be cool. What I mean is he’s a grouchy old war vet who is not so happy where age is leading him, has trouble getting along with his kid and is cynical about everything and gets to know the local pastor even though he doesn’t like religion. With werewolves.

He’s a ‘Nam vet instead of Korea, and he came back blind. His name is Ambrose McKinley, and he’s played by my new favorite actor Nick Damici (MULBERRY STREET, STAKE LAND I & II, WE ARE WHAT WE ARE, COLD IN JULY), looking kind of like Fred Ward and talking kind of like DeNiro. His son (Ethan Embry, CHEAP THRILLS) and more patient daughter-in-law (Erin Cummings, BITCH SLAP) help move him into a duplex in the retirement community of Crescent Bay. That very night a fuckin werewolf busts in and mauls his next door neighbor (Karen Lynn Gorney, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER) and his guide dog Shadow. The police just tell him it’s from living near the woods, wild animals kill people all the time, be sure to keep your doors locked.

“Thanks for the peace of mind,” he deadpans.

But he found a claw in the wall and he knows it was a full moon and he heard that thing. Being stubborn, he sticks with his theory that it was a werewolf. Being independent, he doesn’t tell anyone. He just sets about taking care of it.

So most of the movie is about what he does in the month before the next full moon. There are training montages, practicing moves with a shovel. There is trap setting. There is detective work. He gets to know some of the people in town, but we know he’s not looking for friends, he’s looking for suspects. The ladies on the church bus feel threatened by him and make him get a separate ride. The pastor (Tom Noonan, LAST ACTION HERO) becomes his smoking buddy. Noonan takes advantage of that quality he has of seeming like a thoughtful, gentle guy while looking like a strange giant. It casts suspicion on him even though he appears to be an absolutely wonderful person. Their conversations can be interpreted as genuine, caring friendship, or a chess match of implied threats.

My favorite suspect: the husband in the iron lung. We don’t even see him. He could be up to something, in my opinion. Ambrose is snooping around for clues and, not knowing what his hands are on, he almost turns the machine off! Major faux pas.

You also got Larry Fessenden (not surprisingly one of the producers of the movie) playing a weirdo who sells grave markers but can also connect Ambrose to guns and ammo. I can imagine that was probly Fessenden’s real life first job.

Like in GRAN TORINO and other old man movies, part of the fun is Ambrose’s prickly persona and the way he unwittingly or uncaringly rubs everybody the wrong way. They try to be nice at first because he’s new in town and he’s blind and he’s a decorated veteran but for most of them the welcome wears out very quickly. And to be fair, it is completely legitimate to complain about him leaving his dead dog in the yard to smell up the place. But he’s likable and we admire his single-minded pursuit of silver bullet justice and they’re uptight and also we suspect they might be werewolves or werewolf-enablers so we’re allowed to be on the asshole’s side for this one and cheer on his bull-in-a-china-shop lifestyle.

Also, because of the genre we’re dealing with, there’s the unique joy of seeing the son’s frustration at the father asking him about the lunar cycle but not admitting it’s because he believes there’s a werewolf situation. He’s not gonna back down from his plan so he just pretends not to hear the criticism and sticks with what he’s doing. In real life this kind of stubbornness can be a pain in the ass because the person is often wrong, but in this he’s the only one who has the right idea.

His blindness of course makes him more vulnerable, but also enhances his level of badass. There’s a WAIT UNTIL DARK fear quality when a creepy cloaked figure shows up in his yard to intimidate him, but we’re also pretty confident he can handle himself.

I didn’t notice any digital business, but the practical FX (by Robert Kurtzman) are alternately good and bad. There’s a nice, disgusting transformation, and good monstery werewolf faces. In the interest of transparency though I gotta say that whenever they show a full body wolf costume it looks pretty ridiculous. There’s a particularly laughable money shot of the man-in-suit jumping slo-mo toward a car. I don’t know about you but for me it didn’t matter, I was already so in love with the character and story by this point that a better werewolf would’ve just been the cherry on top. The bad werewolf is far from a dealbreaker.

In fact, even after seeing these goofy things I was genuinely moved by the story. The stakes are not only survival, or even whether or not he kills the werewolf. The more important thing is resolving the complicated relationship he has with his son. To give you an idea what a mix of badass and emotional we have here, this is a character who (like Tommy Lee Jones for the revenge mission in ROLLING THUNDER) decides to put on his dress uniform before making a last stand against a fucking monster.

You know I got a weakness for certain father-son stories, but I didn’t expect to find myself trying to keep my eyes dry at the end of a werewolf movie. Maybe they should’ve put a human more clearly on the cover so you’d know that’s what it’s about.

I’ll have to keep an eye out for screenwriter Eric Stolze, even though he’s not the actor from MASK and is the writer of a Steve Guttenberg dog movie called I HEART SHAKEY. I guess I should check out his other horror movie, UNDER THE BED, from the director of SILENT NIGHT and ARSENAL.

LATE PHASES is directed by Adrian Garcia Bogliano of Spain. I’ve been told to check out some of his other movies, which include COLD SWEAT and HERE COMES THE DEVIL. I wouldn’t say this is as well directed as the Jim Mickle movies I know Damici from, and some of the acting of the women who don’t like Ambrose could be subtler, in my opinion. But it’s just such a great hero and situation, and such a new but natural mix of genres I enjoy, that this is my favorite new-to-me horror in quite some time.

I know some people have been recommending this to me for a while, so thank all of you, and extra credit to Mr. Majestyk for being the one who finally broke it down in a way that got it through my thick skull this was a must-see. (I think he said blind Vietnam-vet training to fight werewolf.)

This entry was posted on Friday, January 13th, 2017 at 10:24 am and is filed under Horror, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

19 Responses to “Late Phases”

  1. I guess I have to revise my list of movies for my werewolf movie book and actually write that damn thing.

  2. I thoroughly enjoyed this film. I had seen Damici in other movies, but this is the first one in which I was really struck by his high level of talent. Noonan is always a welcome addition. I liked the set-up and, like you said, the storytelling has real heart. There are some broad elements that rasped at me — for example, anything to do with the local ladies quickly gets cartoony — though it isn’t enough to drag down the film as a whole for me. Definite recommend.

  3. Those old ladies were pretty cartoony, but I don’t think they were any worse than other aspects of the movie. Plus, I’m sure they were played just the way they were supposed to be, considering the actresses resumes. For awhile I thought Caitlin O’Heaney (the one who wasn’t married to the guy in the iron lung, or the one married to the guy with the eye patch) was Ann Reinking, who only did a few movies (ANNIE, ALL THAT JAZZ, MICKI AND MAUDE), but is an amazing Broadway dancer/choreographer who was protégé and partner to Bob Fosse. But, to reign in my musical theater nerdness, it wasn’t her. Instead it was an actress that you know you’ve seen in something, so you look her up in IMDB, only to see you know her from every single thing in the 70s and 80s. Same with the actress who played the wife to the guy in the iron lung. And the actress who played to one married to the guy with the eye patch was fuckin’ Ginger.

    Overall, it was a fun movie. I don’t know if I miss that they didn’t do a whole WAIT UNTIL DARK setup where his blindness gave him an advantage or if it’s nice they didn’t haul out that old chestnut. The one part that I had to say, “Come on!” outloud and had trouble getting past was when he was going around turning on the lamps. What the fuck for? It didn’t seem to be part of his training, or that it would come up in his battling. I know we need the lights on to see what’s going on, but why point out the weirdness of a blind man’s apartment being well lit by showing him turning them on?

  4. Two things other then I liked this one a lot.

    1. I feel bad that Lance Guest went from a heart throb to fat middle age guy.

    2. Vern, my wife says Under the Bed stinks.

  5. Sternshein, try leaving your sneakers outside then :)

  6. Been putting this one off for the longest even though everyone and their mauled-by-a-werewolf dog has been raving about it, but I’m going to chalk that up to the fact that I’ve seen HERE COMES THE DEVIL and that movie might hold some kind of record for decline severity between atmospheric, intriguing, potential filled opening and laughably misguided trainwreck that is almost all of the rest of it. The only real recent competition it has is PROXY whose first half was easily one of the best things I saw the year of its release, and whose bed-shitting second half was one of the absolute worst.

    Will check this out ASAP. Even though it’s relatively slim pickings, I do love the grizzled-old-badass-wages-war-on-a-monster subgenre. Hopefully BUBA NOSFERATU will take its place at that table sooner rather than later.

  7. I knew mentioning the training was the way to your heart, Vern. Any asshole can make a movie where a werewolf fights a blind guy, but it takes an artist to know that the month leading up to the fight is the cool part.

    This is one of my favorite horror movies of the last few years and one of the rare horror movies that also functions as a legitimate piece of badass cinema. I had not paid much attention to Damici, having not been that impressed by STAKE LAND the first time I saw it, but his performance here really turned me around. He’s got a Bronsonian vibe that obviously appeals to me. Kind of a catch 22 that he’s such a good writer that he seems to be focusing on that instead of acting, because he brings a grown-ass-man-ness to the genre that it often lacks.

    That said, I’m gonna watch the shit out Damici’s upcoming scripted work:

    Bushwick (2017)

    Directed by Jonathan Milott, Cary Murnion. With Dave Bautista, Brittany Snow, Arturo Castro, Christian Navarro. When a Texas military force invades their Brooklyn neighborhood, 20-year-old Lucy and war veteran Stupe must depend on each other to survive.

    Even if the real estate agents are trying to get people to call Bushwick “East Williamsburg.” Somehow, East Williamsburg Bill doesn’t have the same ring to it.

  8. Oh, and I used to not like Larry Fessenden much but I’ve come around on him now that he’s become the Clint Howard of modern indie horror. I swear, he’s in two out of every five horror movies I watch nowadays. He seems to be graduating from “scummy guy who gets murdered halfway through” to “scummy-looking but decent father figure who gets murdered halfway through.” I approve. Horror needs more sympathetic ugly dudes.

  9. Him and Jim Mickle was also involved in the HAP AND LEONARD show.

  10. Whoah – a Dave Bautista vehicle too. That sounds great.

  11. I wonder how ridiculous the reason for Texas to invade New York.

  12. I imagine it went something like this.

    1993 Pace Picante Sauce Commercial

    (c)1993 Campbell's Soup Company (purchased Pace Foods in 1995) Some of my favorite commercials when I was a young kid were these Pace Picante spots; in which...

  13. Bogliano first came on my radar with a movie called 36 Pasos that’s one of the best ultra low budget (reportedly made for only $5,000) horror flicks I’ve ever seen. It’s like a Russ Meyers movie combined with an Argento movie. Totally batshit and fun.

  14. This movie ticks a lot of my own personal boxes: a no-nonsense Chuck-Bronson style hero, dog revenge (the best kind of revenge) and werewolves. I like werewolf movies, but so few of them are done well. This one is done well.

    I agree that the relationship between Ambrose and his son was one of the best things about the movie. They could have easily overplayed it and made Embry’s character a selfish brat or his wife a sexist caricature. Instead it’s more complicated and thoughtful. Embry wanting to do right by him while also being frustrated by his behaviour rang really true to me, even as other characters (e.g. the old ladies and the cops) were too cartoony to take seriously.

  15. Funny Vern, I think Ambrose sounds way more like Bill the Butcher than Travis Bickle.
    And I always dig your Best Thing I’ve Seen Lately award winners

  16. Holy shit, that movie was all kinds of awesome!

    Except for the werewolf design. That was one of the worst looking werewolves I’ve ever seen. But the rest of the movie? Fucking great!

  17. Late to the party but finally watched this one this morning and holy shit was it great!

  18. I am even later to this party, and I have nothing to add to the comments above. This one really is awesome, and just what I needed right now. Dog revenge really is the best revenge!

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