The Werewolf Game is about several kidnapped individuals, I think there are twelve, who are forced to participate in a deadly game. The game, in short, is about voting on which one of your fellow contestants will be eliminated. Or in plain English – murdered. I’m not sure if the movie’s name has sprung from the Squid Game series. It seems likely, considering it’s a game and that there’s an animal in there as well. Ok, I get what you’re thinking. A Werewolf isn’t an animal; it’s a mythological being. It might be so, but even if it’s something between human and animal, it’s still more connected to the animal kingdom than humans, if you ask me.
But then I discovered that there’s a whole series of Werewolf Game movies, but from Japan. I can’t understand Japanese, of course, and I haven’t seen them. But if I just look around a bit, they sound very similar. A game of life or death where the participants need to eliminate each other but voting. I think I need to see some of these originals.
I was not surprised to see Tony Todd in the list of actors in Werewolf Game. He did tons of work and often just small, but important, parts. Just see his contribution to the Final Destination series. At the end, his part is highly important even if it didn’t seem so at first. I was, however, surprised to see Robert Picardo in it. Not that I have followed his acting career in any depth, but as a Star Trek Fan, he’ll always be the holographic doctor in Star Trek Voyager for me. It seems odd to see him in a violent horror movie about death and murder.
Other names, like Bai Ling, are names that I don’t really associate with anything, but when I’m doing a quick research on IMDb, I realize that she’s been in tons of movies that should interest me. You know, cheap horror movies where the execution might not be the best, but where the plot and story at least are somewhat original. Lydia Hearst, whom I found to have an amazing presence, has been in a lot of interesting movies as well and is perhaps most known for a few episodes of Z Nation. I could go through the names one by one, but what is essentially the point? They’ve all done some acting work here and there, but nothing that made them a star.
Anyway, the rules of The Werewolf Game are explained to them. Every day, they must vote on who to get murdered. There are “werewolves” among them. Those who have the opportunity to hunt and kill the other participants for one hour every night. We also get to know that there is one “body guard” who can protect another player and one “oracle” that gets the identity of one participant each day. I think this was a great idea in theory, but it didn’t really make any difference in the film.
All in all, Werewolf Game was a pretty uninspiring and two-dimensional story. The acting wasn’t very good at any time, and the suspense was lost somewhere along the line. It was kind of entertaining trying to figure out the “werewolves”, and I must admit that I was wrong. I overthought and overanalyzed it a little too much. I should have kept it simpler and not thought that the writers would do a double bluff. I think it could have been made with a little more depth. Think about the reality show “The Traitors”, this is essentially the same thing, except that the player gets eliminated for real.
Oh well. The ending might be called somewhat of a surprise, but it still wasn’t exciting enough to be really memorable. It was a nice way to spend some 90 minutes, but nothing more.
