Wolf Town (2010) - 2/4

A group of youngsters take a road trip to a local ghost town where they are attacked by an unfriendly wolf pack. They have to use their ingenuity to defeat the wolves, hiding in the abandoned buildings of an old mining town. Not a terribly inspired plot. Wolf Town would be a fairly indistinct, low-budget animal-attack movie were it not for a few admirable quirks that made me want to write about it.

The most impressive of Wolf Town’s features is, oddly enough, its psychological realism. The film’s psychology is, in fact, infuriatingly realistic. In countless films, a total wimp like Shaun in Shaun of the Dead becomes an ass-kicking badass the moment a real threat shows up. Perhaps we all believe really intensely in the fight-or-flight response or, as I think, we believe the world works like video games. If we’re really good at Resident Evil and have shot enough zombies, we’ll be ready for a real zombie threat. I suspect the people who spend all day playing Resident Evil would do little more than defecate and die when the real zombies showed up. Lazy, videogaming nerds like to believe they have inner badasses just waiting to come out, but they don’t: a pussy is a pussy is a pussy is a pussy, as Gertrude Stein never said. It’s curious how this implicit belief is one also shared by the conservatives who think video game violence can translate into real violence. Both are wrong, of course. Video games and real life threats are totally unrelated.

The protagonist of Wolf Town, Kyle (Levi Fiehler) is a pussy, as his friend tells him. He’s so afraid to ask a girl out, he contrives the road trip just to do it. He’s humiliated when he sees her with Rob (Josh Kelly), an alpha male sort of guy who did ask her out. When Rob says ‘Let’s just go to Vegas’, Kyle is ready to back down. When the wolves arrive, Kyle remains a pussy who whines and cries, while Rob remains an alpha male, barking out orders and making decisions. This is psychological reality. Meek guys like Kyle do not become alphas whenever a tense situation arrives. And as much as the film’s sympathetic focus on Kyle may make us dislike Rob, and as tedious as overconfident people are, someone has to make the decisions and Kyle is clearly not up to it. This is the psychological realism I admire in Wolf Town. It’s very refreshing, even while it’s infuriating. We want Kyle to man up, but he, like many of us, can’t just do that: it’s not who he is.

That said, there is a feeling of cheapness to Wolf Town. What budget Rebel did have was probably spent on the ghost town setting, a charming concatenation of shacks with an inexplicably intact saloon. The sense of cheapness is probably due to the wolves clearly being huskies and alsatians with a bit of fur-paint, and we rarely see more than two on screen at any given moment. On the one hand, director John Rebel deserves praise for using real animals instead of CGI. On the other hand, the use of real dogs does limit what he can do. We’ll never see a wolf injured in any way on screen, for instance, nor will be see them performing impossible jumps.

Rebel settles for editing the dogs wherever they need to be, giving the wolves a strangely mystic quality. This mysticism would be egregious were it not pervading the whole film. The dogs don’t just try to scare their victims off; they disable their car and steal their cell phones. The film’s subtext is one of nature vs humanity. The wolves just want a space to be without human interference, a place that belongs to nature. It’s a line of argument I don’t think carries much weight, whether in Wolf Town or in Avatar, because humans and their activities are a part of the natural order; but it is what it is.

Wolf Town is a mildly entertaining way to pass eighty minutes, especially for wolf-lovers. But the film does drag. However praiseworthy the real dogs and psychological realism may be, Wolf Town could have done with a ton of CGI wolves getting chopped to pieces by a bunch of badass nerds. In a film like this, fun is more important than realism.