Wolf House – Six People. One House. Lots of Monsters.

Listed as being “based on true events”, Wolf House is an upcoming found footage film directed by Matt D. Lord, co-written by Ken Cosentino and Elizabeth Houlihan. It stars Jessica Bell, Ken Cosentino, Marcus Ganci-Rotella, Elizabeth Houlihan, Marc Sturdivant and Rick Williams as six friends who in October 2010, went on a camping trip. This found footage at the grisly scene reveals the last terrifying day of their life.

Preface

I’m going to preface this review by saying two things. These statements are NOT specific to Wolf House but found footage in general.

1. I’m not typically a fan of found footage films. I think they tend to take too many shortcuts of what they show and don’t show. I’m also not a fan of the “jerkiness” that you get when someone’s walking around with a non-stationary camera.
2. The “based on true events” is a pet peeve of mine. We’re seeing it a lot… like… a TON these days especially in the horror genre. This is super nitpicky and 100% in my head, but I’d rather not be told that it was a true story and just be shown a good film.

Finally, writer Ken Cosentino has asked us to keep this relatively spoiler free so I’ll respect that.

Plot & Thoughts

From a plot perspective the poster pretty much tells you what you need to know – Six people. One house. Lots of monsters. Six friends go camping in the woods. There’s a couple of couples and some single guys. We get a thread of a story here where one of the guys (Alan) is sort of an outcast of the group and keeps being made fun of. I couldn’t help to think of the Shelly character from Friday The 13th Part III.

One of the guys shoots something in the woods. I say “one of the guys” because I honestly don’t remember any of the characters’ names. That’s not to say that I wans’t invested in any of them because I was, I just don’t recall any of of the names other than Joey (the main camera man) and Donna (his girlfriend who’s ass he’s filming quite a lot of the movie). Regardless…

They don’t know quite what he’s shot. Is it a bear? Is it a bigfoot? They decide to strap it to the top of the car and bring it home. Never a good idea. They put it in the basement and with clever bit of two camera trickery we’re shown that the creature is very much alive and excapes through a basement window.

Wolf House has a run time of just over an hour. At this point we’re about 30 minutes in and the film takes a sharp left turn into a true horror flick. As I said before it does a great job here of not being a single camera found footage film the whole way through which I really appreciate. In a film full of jerkiness, it’s nice to get at least a few moments of stationary camera if only to give my eyes a rest. It’s also a great way to move the story forward without having a character tell you what’s happening.

Speaking of extrapoliation… there are a couple of scenes when Joey (Ken Cosentino) turns with the camera and looks into a mirror. He delivers some dialoge that moves the story forward and gives us a human moment or two. This is a nice break in the action as well and gets him out from “behind the camera” for a few moments.

If you thought this was just a werewolf movie you’d be wrong. There are several (I think) other types of monsters here in the film’s conslusion that left me scratching my head. Werewolves? Zombies? Monsters?  There are some other things going on here that I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at but I’m happy to say that the film held my attention for the duration and gave me a couple of twists and shocks along the way.

One other thing that I’ve got to mention is the way the film is cut together. Througout the “assault” on the house, we get some other footage intersperced. It’s still found footage (allegedly from the same found camera) but it’s from previous days. This gives us some more background knowledge of the characters, their camping trip and their relationships. I’m not sure if we’re to think that this is someone watching the footage “out of order” or what, but it was a nice technique that broke up the horror elements of the film.

Recommendation

As I said in my preface, I’m not a fan of the found footage genre or the “based on true events” trend we’re seeing in horror these days. That said, Wolf House manages to get past both of my biases and deliver an experience that I generally enjoyed watching. It does some great things here with multiple cameras and time hopping that you don’t normally get with found footage and it breaks up not only the jerkiness typically associated with the sub genre but also the horror of the film.  It’s not overly gory or bloody, but this is definitely a horror flick. It’s just over an hour so I’m not sure if they’re going to try and cut it down to be a short or perhaps add some additional footage to make it a fuller length feature. Either way if you’re a fan of the genre Wolf House is worth checking out.

You can find more about Wolf House at the following links:

• IMDB: www.imdb.com/title/tt4713312
  Very weird… you need to be logged OUT to view this link. If you’re logged into your IMDB account it shows up as a 404 page (page not found).
• White Lion Studios on Facebook: www.facebook.com/WhiteLionLLC
• Writer / producer Ken Cosentino on Twitter: @KenCosentino
• Did WEREWOLVES kill these people?

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