Y2K and Werewolves - Combined would make an interesting movie

I got to see two movies this past week due to having the week off. Y2K and Werewolves. Cause nothing says holiday cheer quite like horror movies.

While I didn't LOVE either, they had their moments. Let's discuss shall we...

Let's go back to a much simpler time...1999. The internet is still paving its way forward, cell phones were simpler and used to actually call people, The Matrix blew our minds, Buffy just finished facing off against The Gentlemen and I was in my first year of college. Those were the days.

It was also the time of the Y2K scare. Some leaned towards doomsday, others knew it wouldn't be a thing since people were preparing for it. The basic fear being that at midnight all the computers would think 2000 would be the year 1900 and all systems would go nuts.

In this movie, its part horror, part coming of age. A young lad is on his way to a new years party with his best friend with the hopes of telling his crush he likes her and get that magical New Years kiss.

Spoiler alert, he doesn't. She kisses her jerk boyfriend at midnight. Then things go a little crazy. This wasn't the typical Y2K fears, this was a Transformers type virus. All the machines, anything electronic, from toys to beepers were infected with a mysterious virus and started killing people and rounding everyone up at the closed school.

The young boy, his crush and bestie, and some of the local stoners fight to survive the night and save the town from a ghost in the machines.

At the start of the movie, I didn't have much love for many of the characters, except for Eli and Danny, besties for life. The rest grew on you as the movie progressed. Based on the trailers I thought it was just going to be the machines going all killer. To an extent it was, but there was so much more to it for a goofy horror movie.

There weren't a lot of scares, more just them running from Voltron electronics trying to kill them. It had moments of levity and heart. It had a lot of potential, but didn't really live up to what it could have been.

A24 is a great production company and coming up with interesting horror movies on the scale of Blumhouse, but it needs to tighten up some of the writing. Overall, it was fairly decent, I just think it could have been better.

2/5

Moving on to Werewolves...

This one was better to me than Y2K. The fun part was, I was the only one in the theater so I got to make sarcastic comments out loud. They also changed some of the rules of what it means to be a werewolf.

We begin our movie with the history of how the werewolves came to be. During a previous Supermoon over one billion people turned. There's no "you get bit or scratched you become one". In this universe, its the moonlight that turns you. Anyone and everyone can be turned.

The Supermoon is coming back and the CDC is working and hoping on a cure. The rest of the world is basically setting up for Purge night. Barricading their homes and using electric fencing and doing everything they can to stay out of the moonlight so they won't be turned.

The movie is more of an action-horror than straight up horror. It was also kind of broken down into two main stories.

It centers on family...a mother (who lost her husband during the last Supermoon incident) and her daughter. Their uncle works for the CDC. As the sunsets and the bad moon rises they prepare to keep their home safe.

The uncle, Frank Grillo (Captain America 2) works with a team of scientists headed by the great Lou Diamond Phillips and one of my favorites Katrina Law (Arrow, Spartacus). They worked and believed they found a cure. With the assistance of four test subjects they try to see if it works.

It's a horror movie, so you know it goes horribly askew. Grillo and Law face the monsters as they try to get Grillo home to make sure his family is safe.

The two traverse a hellscape of werewolves, hunters, and a cure that only works for an hour. The movie creates a lot of tense moments as they made their way through the city. Law was a force of nature and very much a badass and Grillo was a man determined to get to his family and protect what he loves.

While I won't go out of my way to see this again anytime soon, I might give it another watch when it streams. It was good, but didn't do a lot to be memorable. If you love horror, it's worth at least one watch.

3/5

COMING SOON...IT'S KRAVEN TIME!!