
One might assume that werewolf bikers are a staple of movies, but A Werewolf in England aside, I can only think of one other film. It’s Werewolves on Wheels from 1971, about a satanic commune of motorcycle-riding werewolves, High Moon which features a group of Old West lycanthropes who ride modern motorcycles, and Bikers vs Werewolves which is due out later this year, but that’s about it.
In fact, the opinion of Hellhounds has more than one starting point. Three groups of characters are introduced out of nowhere and one does not know what the link is. First, a woman who was apparently pursued and captured somewhere in the desert. Then we have a bounty hunter, looking for a member of a Hellhounds gang, followed by some members of The Silver Bullets. And finally, a lady whose spouse has some sort of inexplicable injury that looks suspiciously like a truncated fang.
In the end, we end up at a bike rally where we meet Alias, a member of the Hellhounds biker who has intimate moments with a bounty hunter named Mia, and then there are fights and bare breasts. More importantly, there’s someone named Dave (Daniel Link, Watch Over Us, Ghost Town) who made The Hellhounds useless after The Silver Bullets massacred them.
Regretfully, just as we comprehend this, writer-director Robert Conway (Exit to Hell, Battlefield 2025) returns to scattering the focus throughout. Here, Kevin (Cameron Kotecki, Senioritis, Selling Silence), the bitten guy, is pursued by some lady, Lucella (Eva Hamilton, Ruin Me, Blood Harvest), she says she’s his mom, but is clearly not.
And the man who we witnessed abducting the girl in the desert? He must be Dave and he recently abducted another woman.
Everything is yelling annoyance now because it is all talk and no action in Hellhounds, nobody speaks. The term “werewolf” is not even mentioned or hinted at until around forty minutes later in the film. It is treated as some sort of intriguing mystery, even though one is clearly displayed in the poster.
And, while speaking of the film’s advertising, ignore the part where it talks about biker werewolves and biker werewolf hunters, there is a war waging between them and it, as the Harper at the beginning of the film says, is over. It is somber, and it is the only bit of The Silver Bullets we see. Hellhounds is more about the hunt for Dave and Lucella. And a lot of that does play out like a straight-up thriller.
When we finally manage to see a werewolf, it feels like a letdown. The CGI werewolf change is far too clean and effortless, with no bone breaks or flesh rips, which we normally expect. I was in fact rather pleased when the subsequent transformation was conducted off of the screen. But unfortunately, the next two are not. The gore does look practical but there is not a whole lot of it, more people are shot rather than torn apart.
After seeing the film was directed by Robert Conway, I knew that the budget was not going to match the expectations of the film’s plot. But the plot we got had in my opinion a lot of potential. Werewolves, among the violent criminals in a modern-day Hole-In-The-Wall, soullessly stalking each other.
What instead we receive is a talky film that is assembled in such a way that there are some quite noticeable and glaring plot holes, with far too much clumsy dialogue and a totally unsatisfactory anti-climatic ending. On his part, Conway does add some plot to Hellhounds in the form of scantily clad women, which is a first for him. But that and about two weak replays of some scenes from The Howling are needed to cover the mange on this mutt; however, that does not do the trick.
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