Werewolf Castle (2022)

Werewolf Castle is a medieval fantasy that strives to evoke an air of authenticity. This is a film made in the same spirit as, say, Excalibur, but on a much smaller scale — and with werewolves. This is a B-movie at best, but it deserves an A for effort. The filmmakers respect the audience too much to allow even the slightest shred of cheap CGI to creep into the film. Its Haunted Forest is all the more haunting for being an actual forest (the Brecon Beacons mountain range in south Wales), and the titular castle is, or at least was long ago, the real thing. I’ll take well-preserved ruins (and the state of the structure can even be justified within the con- text of the story) over a phony-looking computer-generated palace any day. And now the damn veggies. The werewolves are clearly People in Suits, and that’s the good news; the bad news is that they all wear identical masks, eternally frozen in the same expression, as if they are always mid growl. This must perforce confine the werewolves to the background, which has the upside of shifting the focus to the human characters — among whom I include the leader of the lycanthropes, who wisely retains his hominid appearance at all times. Werewolf Castle tells a straightforward, deceptively simple story (in 90 lean minutes). Werewolves in general symbolize the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy, but the filmmakers establish this duality before and beyond a literal transformation. The young hero, Thorfinn (Peter Lofsgard), leaves his younger brother to the mercy of the wolves so that he can cavort with a plump wench, whom he also abandons to her fate once the monsters attack their village. Thus, joining the “great warrior knights” Hamelin Wiltshire (Tim Cartwright), Thomas Fairhurst (Greg Draven), Osmund Blakewood (Derek Nelson) and the awesomely named Hal Skullsplitter (Jay O'Connell), is for Thorfinn the only way to redeem himself and fulfill Hal’s words: “Where once you were a coward you can now be brave, and where once people took you for a fool, new people might recognize you as a hero.” This movie is by no means perfect, but it has a lot more heart and brains than, say, the neverending, boring, and pointless The Green Knight. If one is forgiving of its rudimentary werewolves, and willing to let them take the place of dragons in an Arthurian pastiche, then there is much to enjoy at Werewolf Castle.