Wolves at the Door

One can only hope this was made by a first year film student, and not someone who's been in the business for a while. From the opening factual error , stating the events took place in "1969, the summer of love" (was this written by a millennial kid who had no idea of 1967?) I knew I was in for a stinker. I get the feeling the writer/director saw The Strangers with Liv Tyler and said "yeah, we're gonna make something like that, only BETTER!!"..with any luck, they've since left the film industry.

As much as it doesn't reference it early on, it's quite obvious this is a retelling of the Sharon Tate murders from the 1960s by the Manson family. The fuller details can be left to somewhere else, and this story has been infamous but influential.

This film takes the story but sadly it's a torture porn lite retelling pandering to those who shouldn't be pandered to. It really only focuses on the murder and nothing else, which leaves it all to be vacuous. Bankrupt in a moral sense, and it's in poor tastes as it's based using real people.

I'm no prude but there is pure fiction and reality, and this abuses that line. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is just fiction and well made at that, with some nods to the Manson murders. Wolves at the Door is a gratuitous take on the whole thing but exploits for gain by focussing really on the deaths alone of real people without anything to add to it all.

In fairness, the acting is good, the settings are fine and I enjoyed the soundtrack. Maybe if they avoided the Sharon Tate element and pushed it to another period with other characters and fattened out the story a bit more, we'd have had a more acceptable film. Yet they didn't do that, so we have to take it as it is.

It's one I'd say avoid, despite admitting that it is well made. Just not for me, but more for those we should not be encouraging.

You could have 2 different directions if you were going to make a film about the Manson murders of 1969, documentary style or a straight drama. In either of those cases though, you should at the very least have the integrity to acknowledge and address the actual subject matter that you are filming. This was NOT a movie inspired by, it was a melodrama about the ACTUAL people who died in that horrible event. The makers of this film though refused to even acknowledge this fact while only inserting hints or references about it. But then they named all the characters the same as those killed that night. Even right down to a pregnant "Sharon"

I'm not sure all the reasons behind such a ridiculous decision, my guess it was fear of repercussions, whether legal or financially from actual family members and decedents of those who lost their lives. I gave it a 2 because I will not reward gutless film making with anything higher..

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This movie is based on a horrific real life tragedy; the Tate murders. I think, one of the hardest things to do, is to make an adaptation of real life events. I don't know if this killing spree even needs a dramatization, but I'm sure it doesn't need one, that uses all the bad clichés and style elements of the tired genre of the slasher film. This movie tries to depict the horror of that night, but in a very irritating manner. I felt frustrated throughout by the very bad direction and the lack of respect for the subject. The bad rating is justified.

Wolves at the Door (2016)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Based on the Manson murders, this film centers on four friends who gather at a house to celebrate but soon are faced with the ultimate terror.

WOLVES AT THE DOOR opens up with one of those "based on a true story" things that you've got to read. This was a decent movie but at the same time it somewhat made me violently angry with it. You have to wonder what the filmmakers were trying to do with various aspects of the film but on the whole the movie kept me entertained and I thought it was well-made for the most part but at the same time there were a lot of things here that left me scratching my head.

For starters, the total running time without the end credits was just 66-minutes, which is a very rare thing today. I'm not going to complain about short movies but what's interesting about this picture is that there's zero character development. Normally this would be a problem but I just figured the filmmakers already expected you to know the events and characters so there was no need for an introduction. With that said, if the filmmakers expect you to know the characters then why did they change the story up so much?

The murders, how they happened and so forth have been changed and re-arranged to the point where you're basically watching a remake of THE STRANGERS instead of an actual Manson movie. If one is coming here for a Manson movie then they're going to be disappointed. At the same time, for "younger" viewers, I wonder how many of them know the true story so perhaps they won't mind the "violence" being re-done yet they're going to be hampered by not knowing the characters and this is where the character development might have helped.

As I said, the story's development left me scratching my head but at the same time there were some very good things here. The opening sequences was extremely well-directed and I thought it had some nice tension. The performances were another good thing with Katie Cassidy doing a nice job in the role of Sharon Tate. Elizabeth Henstridge was also quite good. The people playing the "family" are pretty much left with no lines or anything else and in fact you never really get to see them clearly.

WOLVES AT THE DOOR pretty much ends just where you think it would get started. Again, I can respect and enjoy the short running time and there's a lot of good things here but at the same time there's some bizarre choices made.