One of the virtues (or vices depending on your viewpoint) of
boutique labels dedicated to unearthing and rereleasing regional SOV
(shot-on-video) horror films is you get a real sense of which do-it-yourself
filmmakers cared deeply about quality and which ones couldn’t give a rat’s ass
about the outcome of the finished product.
Nowhere is this more evident in
writer-director-producer-composer-cinematographer-editor Rob Roy’s astoundingly
inept, inane and borderline unwatchable Lycan Colony, rescued from the
depths of mid-2000s DVD Hell by Wild Eye Releasing and distinctly SOV tailored
label Visual Vengeance.
A movie where its réalisateur displays a peculiar panache of
incompetence in nearly every area, it is the straight-to-video equivalent of Animorphs
if it were rendered on FMV full motion video on a Sega CD-ROM disc with
green screen effects that make those in the videogame shooter Corpse Killer look
polished by comparison. You don’t watch
this sort of thing for storytelling or anything other than slowly losing your
mind to the inanities onscreen. Its bad
but Visual Vengeance has done a fabulous job with it. Alas a film which somehow makes even less
sense technically or narratively than Mad Mutilator or Devil Story actually
exists.
Incompetently filmed and edited by Roy
himself, aspect ratios and screen proportions change in between shots for no
reason, going from vertically stretched to horizontally stretched before
luckily accidentally happening on normal screen proportions. With actors faces or heads being clipped off
due to the director’s self-taught understanding of how digital cameras work and
a green screen built in the director’s garage for special effects sequences
that defy explanation, floating matte effects, terrible sound effects and cheap
makeup, Lycan Colony is neither good nor all that watchable.
But that isn’t to say there can’t be some absurd ridiculous
inane fun to be had from this full-motion-video looking movie distinctly made
in the 2000s but with the feel of a late 1990s videogame. Digital effects are used in ways never
thought of before including but not limited to a floating tattoo that moves
around the back of an actor’s neck, nonsensical uses of infrared vision,
digital screen wobbling and a werewolf “transformation” that has to be seen to
be believed. Makeup effects themselves
either consist of human figures painted in black with wolf claws and masks on
or, in later scenes, a fully sewn somewhat mobile werewolf furry costumed
character shows up.
Trying to make any sense of this madness that could’ve only
emerged from a homegrown “filmmaker” who come-Hell-or-high-water got his movie
made and released locally in New Hampshire is an exercise in futility. Trying to follow this film’s alternate plane
of reality slightly resembling our own has the capacity to cause brain
damage. At a certain point I stopped
caring about the plot and just kept seeing increasingly peculiar and strange
technical and narrative choices being made.
Closer to Neil Breen than Tommy Wiseau with indescribably weird
digitally rendered visuals, Lycan Colony is among the most fascinating
bad movies ever conceived.
--Andrew Kotwicki