Movie Review: LATE PHASES

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Quick, count the number of werewolf movies you can think of off the top of your head!  Okay, how many of them are actually good?  I’ve got six.  That’s not including batshit crazy things like The Howling 3: The Marsupials, which is full of so much lovable WTFery.  Too many werewolf stories are beyond similar, with so little variation on the “curse” and the lunar cycle archetype to feel fresh or exciting.  I’ve seen three so far this year — Wer, Wolves, and Wolfcop — which have all left some to be desired.  Thankfully, Late Phases is here.

The movie could have been a great vehicle for Clint Eastwood or the late Charles Bronson.  Nick Damici reminds me of a combination of the two in his role of Ambrose, a legally blind and hearing impaired, war veteran in the “late phases” of his life whose son Will (Ethan Embry) moves him into a retirement facility.  Once there Ambrose discovers the residents are being attacked by an animal.  Ambrose realizes after he’s a surviving victim that the beast is much more than just mere animal.  Naturally, he isn’t believed to be anything but delusional and he sets out to take matters into his own hands.

I’ve not been a fan of director Adrian Garcia Bogliano’s previous films, but this one works.  He treats it like a Hitchcock film, using angles and camera placement to build tension.  He does the best with what he has, and most of it is nice looking, but there are obvious budget or editing issues where some of the action just doesn’t mesh well.  Perhaps it’s a coverage issue where there isn’t enough footage to actually make a cohesive edit.  Maybe they only got one shot at a few of the fx heavy moments.  These are issues that knock the film down a peg because it just pulled me out of it, but for a low budget feature it’s really solid.

The two main highlights of the movie are Nick Damici’s performance and the practical wizardry of Robert Kurtzman’s away team Creature Corps.  Damici, as said above, pulls off a great combo of Bronson and late era Eastwood — gruff and grizzled, tough and damaged.  He has a lot of alone moments where he talks or mumbles to himself, and a lot of actors would make something like that ham-fisted, but Dimici doesn’t.  The main transformation scene doesn’t give Rick Baker or Rob Bottin a run, but it’s pretty cool.  The wolves themselves are frightening, as they should be but often aren’t.  I also really loved the score, which is almost too big to fit this small movie but is too damn good to overlook.

Late Phases doesn’t reinvent the werewolf genre, but it’s DIFFERENT.  The approach is fresh, the script is small and intimate.  We’ve seen adults deal with being cursed, and kids (and even dogs) try to handle lycanthropes, but never the elderly.   We think of kids being unable to convince people of the impossible but the elderly are in the same boat and I’d never considered it.  Well worth seeing, do check it out.