olice officers chase a hulking biker into a strip club, dragging him out just as the full moon appears in the sky. Locked in the back of a van, he transforms into an inhuman beast, rips apart his armed escort, breaks free and disappears into the nearby streets.
Josie is a perky young diner waitress who likes to talk about her fondness for staring at the moon and often slips meals to the homeless woman who lives in the alley. A friend has persuaded Josie to pose nude for a nearby photographer, which displeases her boyfriend very much; but when the moon brings out some odd symptoms of transformation, the matter seems about to become moot.
The police detective tracking the biker happens to belong to a top-secret squad dedicated to fighting werewolves. But, as he informs an incredulous young partner, the biker is actually a monster of an entirely different order. "There's werewolves," he says, "and there's hybrid werewolves. Werewolves are normal, normal werewolves. Hybrid werewolves are something else." The hybrid werewolf must be found before he finds the queen werewolf and creates a new bloodline.
There's no time to lose: The beast's sense of smell is so acute that in tracking down his intended he will kill everybody who's been in contact with her. Alas, the homeless woman Mary, actually an immortal figure intent on protecting the matriarch, fails to survive the beast's first attack ... and Josie's flight leaves the hybrid werewolf free to run amok among the strippers and photographers who comprise Josie's social set.
A film that fails to transform itself into fun
In recent times, there have been a number of low-budget, direct-to-video werewolf movies that accomplished chills well out of proportion to their respective budgets: Ginger Snaps, for one, and Dog Soldiers, for another. Both had the benefit of visual and conceptual wit. Alas, the same cannot be said of Darkwolf, a movie whose sole positive attribute seems to be a sexy mid-film photo shoot performed by two curvy strippers in faux supernatural drag.
The ladies are attractive, all right, and their erotic routine does achieve a level of excitement the rest of the film lacks ... but it's not the kind of excitement that supports the story at all. It's hard not to feel annoyed as we keep cutting away to the werewolf's attempt to stalk a guy whose fate interests not at all, and who's such a pill that we can't help but squirm at just how long it takes for him to meet his eventual fate as lycanthrope chow.
The film as a whole works at about that same level of achievement. As a story, it's schematic and uninvolving. As a thriller, it bores. As a special-effects extravaganza, it fails utterly: At the many points where it teases us with only fleeting glimpses of the monster, those flashes are not impressive enough to persuade us that there's anything more to see. (There's a peculiar fascination with the clicking sound the beastie's eyelid makes whenever he blinks, which frankly gives the impression that he's hiding a camera in there.) At the moments when CGI takes over and we see the monster's rampages in full glory, the effects are fakey and cartoonish, with one character's bumpy transformation from human being to lycanthrope looking a lot like an outtake from a video game.
The actors cannot be faulted. Nobody gives a great performance, or even a particularly good one, but nobody's painful, and most are likable (even when they're playing jerks or murderous wolf-men). The biggest star, Tippi Hedren, may be a long way from the days when she headlined for Alfred Hitchcock, but she shows more than sufficient conviction here. It's just the story around them that's weak.
