War Wolves: A cornucopia of oddball characters that didn't fit in any other movie

Oh, if only the movie made this much sense...

There's a part of me that intensely disliked War Wolves. It started off too serious and heavy, for one thing, opening with soldiers in Iraq pinned down in a firefight while 'Ave Maria' plays in the background. Then it flashes to six months later, and makes absolutely no sense ever again. Everyone got back to The States, went their separate ways, yet are trying to find each other. There's a lone survivor named Jake that is at the center of it all, with him just trying to control the beast inside himself with drugs and alcohol, and a trio of females trying to ensnare him for their purposes. There's also a couple of old war veterans hunting down these wolf folk, with it supposedly being their life work. Basically I just have no idea who is doing what, to who, or why, let alone why I'm supposed to care. For all of that confusion, I did not like this movie.

Then there's this other part of me that gives me a wink and a nudge and points out how ludicrous this whole mess of a movie is. There are a lot of really funny, off the wall lines. It's also a big melting pot of odd characters that I think were throwaways from other films, but some writer thought they were too good to waste. Some characters only last long enough to delivery a soliloquy about a girl they dated in high school when they should just be shooting the werewolf they worked so hard to track down. Others hop in and out to provide whiplash as you try to keep up with their lines.

One character who does that is Gail, played by Adrienne Barbeau. Gail is a recovering alcoholic who talks about her late husband Kenny, and regales us with stories about dark blue cats, Sasquatch, Jimmy Carter seeing a U.F.O., and other such interesting tall tales. The other is Frank, played by Tim Thomerson. Frank is a war vet, hunts werewolves with his war buddy, and frequently asks you to name your top five whatever at random points in conversation, and sometimes as an answer to a question posed to him. Those are the two which appear onscreen the most, but the movie is peppered with kickboxing hotel desk clerks and an interesting assortment of Alcoholics Anonymous members who deal with werewolf hunters crashing their meeting with an oddly calm demeanor.

Then towards the end of the movie there's some makeup that I'm sure was intended to be scary, but just made me laugh my copious butt off. Three lovely ladies are werewolves. We know this. But they stay in human form for most of the movie. For some reason in the last half hour or so they needed to make it clear they were changing into animals, so they all started to walk around with pointy ears (which were fine), and noses that simply had some dark makeup slathered on. No prosthetic to shape it more into a canine look. Just dark makeup. They looked like someone dared them to take a deep whiff out of a container as a practical joke, and ended up with grease paint all over their nose as a result. Look closer at the movie poster and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.

Maybe I'm just immature and think that's funny when it isn't, but then again, I love bad movies, so my maturity level shouldn't even be a topic of conversation. No matter what, War Wolves is not a good movie, and if I had been in a slightly different mood I think I would have hated it outright. However, it's full of so much ridiculousness that part of me wants to watch it again just to see what I missed. In fact, maybe I'll plan for that some night in the future when I don't have to be at work the next day, and we have a full bottle of Jameson Whiskey in the house. This is definitely a drinking movie.