Dog Soldiers (2002, UK/Lux)

Neil Marshall’s first film is a tight little horror flick with some mean comic timing. A squad of green soldiers, lead by the awesome Sean Pertwee and the even awesomer Kevin McKidd, are dropped in the Scottish woods on a training mission, where they shortly encounter some very bad trouble in the form of a pack of werewolves. In many ways, it’s your typical b-movie fight and flight from that point in, with the advantage that the acting and interactions between the squad members are generally top-notch. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the action sequences, as a combination of budget and directorial inexperience make these the weakest part of the film, with the exception of an inventive chase sequence at the very end. There’s also a very weird misogynistic rant that pretty much comes out of left field (coupled with a bizarre lapse in logic), made all the stranger that the fact that both of Marshall’s latter films – the nifty Descent and the markedly worse Doomsday - feature kick-ass female leads. But I can’t fully fault a movie that makes a Matrix and an Antonioni joke within minutes of one another. Marshall’s a smart man, and he knows a ton about film, but his biggest problem thus far seems to be a general lack of polish and restraint.