Alpha Wolf

"Alpha Wolf" has all of the low-budget eccentricities that those of us who are B-movie fans like. There are lovably bargain-basement werewolf costumes and there is amusingly awkward acting and there are nice California countryside settings. What more could a bad movie fan ask for?

Over-aggressive Casper Van Dien and his wife and their dog are going up the country to re-connect with nature and with each other. Before long there is a werewolf attack, Van Dien gets bit and all low-budget lycanthrope hell is breaking loose.

Van Dien's real-life wife Jennifer Wegner carries much of the movie, even as she struggles with a script that contradicts itself on how long she's known Van Dien's character! Van Dien himself turns out to be playing such a jerkoff that even fellow werewolves can't stand him, and only Wegner's dog Larry is loyal and trustworthy.

While bad CGI (is there any good CGI?) is used for fires and such, good old practical effects are used for the werewolves and in the violence scenes and there is some blood-splash here and there, a heart gets ripped out, a guy gets brained with a hammer and so on, with the gore shown briefly and the violence on the moderate level. There is also a jaw-dropping surprise involving were-transformations that I'll let you see for yourself. Even though it has a "You've got to be kidding me" quality to it and should have been done better, I don't believe any other moviemakers have ever used this idea, so "Alpha Wolf" deserves credit for that.

Other than that, characters regularly contradict themselves here and the script seems to have been written by utter amateurs who never even bothered to double-check it. Luckily this becomes part of the fun and one soon begins to sense the ghost of Ed Wood hovering around.

Even the fact that the real-life couple Van Dien and Wegner's love scenes are actually awkward, or that Van Dien appears to have had plastic surgery, does not detract from, but adds to the overall enjoyable air of B-movie angst. You know who you are if this sounds like something for you, so head on over to You Tube or Hulu to catch it!

This film begins with two hunters out in the woods late at night when they hear a growling noise nearby. Not being very intelligent they decide to disregard it and continue along their way. Neither of them live to see the morning sunrise. The scene then shifts to a young man named "Jack Lupo" (Casper Van Diem) his wife "Virginia Lupo" (Jennifer Wenger) driving along a winding road looking to spend some time together in a remote cabin in the woods. Along the way they stop at a small country store where Jack proceeds to ogle one of the female customers and almost start a fight with another man. Although Virginia doesn't care for his alpha male tendencies they eventually make up that night at the cabin only to be attacked by a large animal not long afterward. The very next day Jack begins to act rather strange and it's then that Virginia begins to realize the type of person she has recently married. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that I really enjoyed this movie up until the last 30 minutes or so when the plot took a definite turn for the worst and everything came crashing down immediately afterward. To that effect, I'm not sure what the director (Kevin VanHook) was thinking but perhaps he should find another line of work because his decision-making skills in the motion picture industry are definitely in need of some serious improvement. That being said, I have rated this movie accordingly. Below average.

I stumbled upon "Alpha Wolf" by utter random luck. I saw that it was a werewolf movie, and I saw that Casper Van Dien and Patrick Muldoon were together again in the same movie, so of course I wanted to watch "Alpha Wolf".

Well, a werewolf movie might be stretching it a bit far, because the were-creatures looked nothing like wolves, actually more like weregerbils. Yeah, they looked like hybrids between humans and gerbils. It was just such an eyesore to witness.

The storyline was fairly simplistic and easy to follow, but I can't claim to say that the storyline was interesting. It made for a less than mediocre movie experience, and "Alpha Wolf" offers nothing to the genre that hasn't already been done or seen before. Well, I stand corrected, because apparently if a canine is bitten by a were-creature, it can changed into human form from dog form come full moon. Are you bloody serious? That was the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen in a werewolf movie.

The movie had a very small cast ensemble, which means that the actors and actresses had even more riding on their shoulders in terms of carrying the movie. So did they manage to do so, No, not really. The characters were flaccid and not particularly interesting. And to be honest, then the actors and actresses had very little material to work with here.

For a weregerbil movie, then "Alpha Wolf" could have benefitted from a more elaborate and costly CGI budget. They had some CGI effects in the movie, they served their function, sure, but they weren't convincing. It was actually the practical effects that won the contest here.

"Alpha Wolf" is not the type of movie that you will watch more than once, provided you manage to get through it the first time around.

This movie is bad... Very bad... Bad cgi, bad make-up, bad story, bad acting... There's a reason why Casper Van D. never made it to the A-list, and this is one of the best examples... Man, this is really bad... Run away......

I don't know what Universe this wheely bin of a film is set in but I've never been so confused in my life. I love crap horror films but I think this tragedy was taking itself seriously! Everything and I mean everything about this skid-mark of a movie is thoroughly frightful, the characters are hateful vomiting out absolute nonsense, when you can actually hear them because the sound seems to have been recorded in 1974 and the story was obviously crayoned on a nursery wall, then simplified and stolen by the writers. The only hope I was loosely holding onto was a heroic hound called Larry who was being set up throughout to save the day,,, but they even ruined that, I wont attempt to describe it because I'm not sure it actually happened, and there's no way I'm watching that again to find out.