- Director: Jim Cummings
- Writer: Jim Cummings
- Stars: Jim Cummings, Riki Lindhome, Robert Forster
Synopsis
A young couple arrive at their rental cabin. They have dinner at a local restaurant. We see some of the town as the credits roll. The man yells at a couple of locals, trying to start a fight, but they don’t bite. They drive back to their cabin, they are annoying city folks who have more money than sense. Brianne, the girl, is killed by something off-screen.
The sheriff is old and deteriorating mentally, so his officers, including his son John, are really handling the case. He’s struggling to keep it hidden. They question the two local guys, but it doesn’t look like they were involved. Certain body parts were removed from the dead girl, so they are sure it’s not a wild animal.
That night, the local ski instructor is attacked in the parking lot of the resort. We still don’t see it, but it’s clearly a werewolf. This time, her head is missing.
John is a recovering alcoholic with family problems, and we see he’s under a lot of pressure, which is does not handle well. “There’s no such things as werewolves,” John insists. The medical examiner says there was wolf hair and bites on the body. John tells his daughter to start carrying pepper spray.
We next see, Liz, a mother and her small daughter at the diner talking to a man we don’t see, just offscreen. She quickly gets creeped out by the guy and calls the police. The old sheriff knows that John is struggling, and he wants to help, but John just can’t work with him anymore. The mother and daughter from the diner are killed that night. John opens up a beer that he had hidden away, and then he starts guzzling mouthwash till he passes out.
We see a man with a tattoo of a wolf burning a dead body the next morning. The next night, the police are out in force, heavily armed. John’s daughter heads over to her boyfriend’s house, and they have sex in his car. The werewolf attacks as a neighbor calls the police. John shows up and shoots it a couple of times. They find one of the cops stuffed in a garbage can later that night. Also, the sheriff dies in the hospital from his heart condition, and John misses the whole thing.
Since there’s no full moon, there’s no more murders. They find the guy with the wolf tattoo. He’s dead; overdosed on drugs, with enough evidence to believe he was the killer. John is still drinking heavily because he didn’t catch the guy, and guilt over not being there for his father’s passing. He does start going back to AA and doing his job again.
John is delivering some old evidence to Paul, the local taxidermist, who invites him inside to talk about the case. John notices just how tall Paul is, and that Paul seems to be hiding that fact. John finds a head and body parts inside as Paul stabs him. John tries to pursue Paul, but Paul puts on a werewolf costume – assembled out of real animal parts – and runs through the woods.
John and his deputy shoot Paul repeatedly which kills him because he’s not really a werewolf at all. Then John falls over from his wounds. Later, we see that John has resigned and Deputy Julia has become the new sheriff.
Commentary
We see early on that there is a werewolf involved, so it’s no surprise. Jim Cummings does a great job at showing us that he’s under a lot of pressure and not handling it well. Actually, the amount of pressure and his struggling was to the point of dark comedy after a while. It quickly becomes clear that John is in the wrong job at the wrong time.
This was Robert Forster’s last role before his death, and you have to wonder how much his health impacted the amount of screen time in this film. The sheriff was old and fading and clearly frustrated with that – was it all acting?
The twist at the end was a new one, and it was a real surprise, which is a good thing. Overall, I liked it a lot.