All WolfCops are valid.
Where have all the wolfmen gone? Fed up with the gluttony of CGI monster-mashes, Lowell Dean set out to reestablish his favorite beastie of yesterday. WolfCop (2014) detailed the horrific plight of alcoholic Canadian cop, Lou Garou (Leo Fafard), and his welcomed transformation into the Lycan vigilante. For the first film, Dean relied heavily on genre convention, pushing the envelope of weird as far as he could. For the second outing, the gloves were off. All killer, no filler.
Dean had one goal for Another Wolfcop. Everything had to be crazy. Now that his monster was fully established, he could leave the question mark of the audience behind, and just embrace the absurdity of what he had already crafted in the first film. Another WolfCop is a mad monster party utterly in love with the creature features that came before, but eager to descend deeper into the muck of the grotesque.
I chatted with the filmmaker over the phone as he was making the rounds to promote the new Blu-ray. We dig into the influences behind his very particular brand of monster, and his desire to obliterate good taste. Another WolfCop was shot in 17 days, and it is a mini-miracle that Dean managed to achieve such a feat.
Keep reading for our full conversation.
Where do you even begin to conceive of a sequel to WolfCop?
Yeah. The weird part is, we actually had a million places to go with it, so we had almost a wealth of ideas, but yeah, honestly it was figuring out what people responded to in the first one, figuring out what I want to explore, what’s the second one, and how to make those things kind of mesh together in a way that we could do something bigger but still in a 17-day shoot. So, no telling.
Was there a particular element in this plot that you were desperate to achieve first?
Yeah, for sure. There was a couple things. The big one for me was what do you do with the character? Is it Spider-Man 2 where he quits being Spider-Man, or is it what? So for me, I wanted to go the other way and I wanted to be, here’s a character who has been a loser his whole life who finally gets this insane power. The fun for me is, here’s a guy who goes too far the other way and he doesn’t want to quit being WolfCop. He only wants to be WolfCop. It was that, plus he hadn’t been having his team around him being kind of like, realizing he can’t do it himself, and he’s a pack animal. He needs his team.
You have such a great reintroduction for WolfCop here, behind the wheels, taking down those guys in that truck. It has an iconic stature like something you’d see in RoboCop 2.
Awesome, glad to hear that because you’re never sure. I’m like, “How are we going to bring him back?” There was just a lot of debate and a lot of things attempted, and honestly, a lot of it comes down to budget. I love the energy of the sequel. That’s something that was really fun to discover.
Well, and you don’t have a lot of time, or at least, you don’t give yourself a lot of time for the film. It is really run and gun. It’s like an hour and 20 minutes, something like that?
Yeah. It’s just barely squeaking by what the definition of a feature is, and I think that’s because our mantra is like all killer, no filler. We only had, like I said, 17 days to shoot so we didn’t want to throw in a bunch of shit just to have it there. We’re like, “No, everything here has to be crazy.” I don’t want any of those scenes between the crazy scenes. I just want to find a way to put the exposition and the logic in the middle of a crazy scene.
Right, which I think is always key to a really great, bonkers exploitation movie.
Yeah, yeah. We needed the energy. It’s sometimes hard to do on that breakneck schedule but that was our obsession.
The post Lowell Dean on the All Killer, No Filler of ‘Another WolfCop’ appeared first on Film School Rejects.
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