Dog Soldiers: Collector's Edition - 4K Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Dog Soldiers: Collector's Edition



Movie:
4K Video:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:



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Movie
British director Neil Marshall made his mark in cinemas back in the early 2000s, and then disappeared from feature film directing to focus on producing and directing some TV shows, only to come out of retirement for the abysmal Hellboy remake 3 years ago. I have to say, the man certainly has a gory taste for horror, and his early stuff was nothing short of perfect guilty pleasure. Dog Soldiers was his first attempt at feature directing, but stuff like The Descent, Doomsday and Centurion put him on the map for good pulpy fun. But as I said, he sort of disappeared from the major directing table for quite a few years, but seems to be back with The Reckoning and a few other projects coming up. Still, my most loved film of his entire repertoire will always be his first film. An intimate tale for survival, it blends classic werewolf lore with dark horror, and an incredible penchant for near 100% practical effects in an era when everyone was switching to CGI.

The film starts out with two seemingly unrelated vignettes, the first being a couple in the woods being killed by some form of “beast” outside their camping tent, and the second being a young soldier washing out of a special ops unit when his commanding officers tries to force him to shoot a dog for no reason. Fast forward to the present and we see that Cooper (Kevin McKidd) has moved on to a new unit, and that unit is now out for a series of war games in the Scottish Highlands. His team, commanded by Captain Wells (Sean Pertwee) are there to sneak up and capture an elite team of operatives and report back to headquarters as soon as the “win” is completed. However, when Cooper and Wells along with the rest of their team find the special ops unit, nothing is left but bloody entrails, a smashed camp site, and a HEAVILY wounded Captain Ryan (Liam Cunningham), who just so happens to be the same man who washed cooper out in the opening vignettes.

Turns out Ryan’s met were hit by “something” (which he won’t disclose), and as they try to escape the camp site are met by local Megan (Emma Cleasby), who knows a bit more than she should, and taken back to a local cabin to escape the beats chasing them. Turns out that this cabin very well may be their grave, as the werewolves surround the encamped cottage and lay siege to it. What happens next is an all out war for survival as the remaining soldiers try their best to pick off the over powered beasts, and have to fight not only the dogs on the outside, but their own men when it becomes clear that Ryan’s “secrets” are a little more dangerous than he let on.

Dog Soldiers thrives by being simple. It’s not flashy, it’s not huge into a massive plot. Instead the movie revolves around one simple revelation. This team of soldiers are wounded and surrounded by supernatural wolves, and they NEED to make it to dawn to escape. That’s it. It’s that simple. The movie starts off rather slow and builds to the meeting of Ryan and his destroyed special ops team, but once they get back on the road and are attacked by the wolves, the movie just does NOT slow down one minute. It’s one nonstop gunfight with slashing, hacking, shooting, blowing up, and generally throwing EVERYTHING but the kitchen sink at the wolves in order to make it out alive.

I do chuckle that the British and Scottish accents make it a bit hard for me to understand at times, but Dog Soldiers is an incredibly fun and underrated film. Neil Marshall employs the same sense of claustrophobic dread made him famous in The Descent, combined with practical effects gore, and a general sense of pure unadulterated terror. This movie is pure werewolf madness, and instead of trying to go so deep into the lore to explain the WHY, Marshall just shrugs that off and accepts the wolves as a matter of fact. Which does sincerely help keep the audience hooked. We’re not trying to figure out some mystery of the universe and what makes the wolves tick. We’re just intensely watching the screen seeing how the men make it out of their alive.

Marshall was also very adamant about using practical effects for the movie. He didn’t want it to look CGI goofy, so he used dancers in the wolf costumes in order to give them a hauntingly graceful look, and used visual sleight of hands to make it not so obvious that these are just people in wolf costumes (kind of like how the first Underworld movie did with their Lycans). Funny enough, there are some really cool easter eggs in the movie as well. Sean Pertwee was in the movie Event Horizon, and if you look closely, the corpses on meathooks in the cellar is actually leftover pros from that movie. And one of the soldiers is called Bruce Campbell, and obvious nod to famed Army of Darkness, whom Marshall was a huge fan of. Supposedly when Megan cuts her hand on the glass it was supposed to set up a sequel for an intended trilogy, but according to Marshall, that trilogy will almost certainly never see the light of day. “What’s done is done” and all that.




Rating:

Rated R for strong violence/gore and language




4K Video: Video:

The first edition of Dog Soldiers we had on Blu-ray was back in 2009 from First Look Studios, and the source material was in such bad shape that the end result was just ATROCIOUS. The DVD was never a looker by any stretch of the imagination, and the Blu-ray barely looked any better. Then back in 2015 Scream Factory took what sources they could and gave us a moderately better release. It was never great (I topped out at 3/5 for the picture score), but it was what it was. Now some 7 years later Scream goes back to the drawing board and has sourced some better components, and under the supervision of director/writer Neil Marshall gone and struck a brand new 4K restoration of the film. The end result is simply stunning. And while I understand that Dog Soldiers will never look bright and shiny due to the fact that it was filmed in incredibly low lighting on 16mm film, this new restoration looks about as good as 16mm film shot in low level lighting is ever going to look. Not to mention leagues better than both Blu-ray releases from First Look and Scream Factory.

AS mentioned, Dog Soldiers is always going to look extremely gritty and grungy due to the low light and 16mm source material. But the image is much improved here, with decent detail levels and a dim looking Blue tinge (offset by green painted set pieces) and some fantastic ambient sets. The movie takes place mostly in the dark cottage in the woods or in the woods itself, and those splashes of green foliage and dark brown wood tones really pop when necessary. The film itself can be a bit flat and dulled on the color spectrum, but the night time shots still look so much better than I’ve ever seen them before. Sure, there’s some definite texture and grain to the image (this IS 16mm film after all), but it’s very organic and the image doesn’t look like it’s smeared all over the place and one giant detail sucking pit anymore. Faces show plenty of blood, grime, and general cuts, while the background is generally quite good looking (outside of the night vision shots which are intentionally washed out). All in all, Dog Soldiers is NOT a pretty film, but this transfer is about as faithful to the source as you’re going to get, and I’m rating it a 4.5/5 for consistency and faithfulness rather than it being super glossy and shiny.

The Blu-ray included in the set appears to be struck from the same 4K master, but it suffers from the limitations of the Blu-ray format, and looks much more washed out, grainier and definitely suffers from tons of crush. it's simply a case of the film being incredibly demanding on the 1080p Blu-ray format nad it not being able to handle the low light and heavy grain like the higher bitrate 4K UHD can. Thus it's a 3.5/5 rating.







Audio:

The 5.1 DTS-HD MA track is the exact same 5.1 mix from the 2015 Scream Factory disc (you can tell because there’s still the same little audio pop in the right rear channel at the 28:35 mark), and it’s still the same decent track. Again, the source mix for the film was never that super heavy and awesome sounding. It’s slightly boxy, and the dynamics just aren’t there. It gets plenty loud and there’s enough low end to satisfy most people, but it’s a very tamped down mix that doesn’t really have massive swings one way or the other. Surrounds are reasonably done during the battles as you can hear werewolf claws scraping around you, or the scrape of feet on wooden floorboards. Bass isn’t ever super heavy, but does add some weight when the cars blow up, and when a wolf slams through a door.










Extras:

4K UHD
• NEW Audio Commentary by writer and associate professor of Film Alison Peirse
• Audio Commentary with Director Neil Marshall
• Audio Commentary with producers David Allen and Brian O'Toole

Blu-ray
• NEW Audio Commentary by writer and associate professor of Film Alison Peirse
• NEW Werewolves, Crawlers, Cannibals and More – an interview with Neil Marshall
• NEW A History of Lycanthropy – author Gavin Baddeley on Werewolf Cinema
• NEW Werewolves, Folklore and Cinema – a video essay by author Mikel J. Koven
• Audio Commentary with Director Neil Marshall
• Audio Commentary with producers David Allen and Brian O'Toole
• Werewolves vs. Soldiers – a look at the making of DOG SOLDIERS featuring Interviews with Director Neil Marshall, Producers Christopher Figg and Keith Bell, Actors Kevin McKidd, Sean Pertwee, Darren Morfitt, Leslie Simpson and Emma Cleasby, Special Effects Artist Bob Keen and more!
• A Cottage in the Woods - a look at the production design with production designer Simon Bowles
• UK Theatrical Trailers and U.S. Home Video Promo
• Combat – A short film by Neil Marshall
• Two Still Galleries – Photos from the Film and Rare Photos from Production Designer Simon Bowles and Special Effects Artist Dave Bonneywell's Archives
• Optional English SDH subtitles for the main feature

Final Score: ​

Dog Soldiers is one of my favorite werewolf movies that slides under the radar. It’s not flashy, it’s not showy, and it’s not a mega blockbuster cast either. It’s a dark and gritty survival movie with Neil Marshall’s signature cramped scenarios and very very gory action. The 4K UHD is easily the best version of the movie out there, outclassing the old Blu-rays without even a second thought, and even adds some new extras to stack on top of the already feature rich 2015 Collector’s Edition set Scream put out 7 years ago. All in all, I have to give this one a highly recommended status.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Sean Pertwee, Kevin McKidd, Emma Cleasby, Lima Cunningham
Directed By: Neil Marshall
Written By: Neil Marshall
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 HEVC
Audio: English: DTS-HD MA 5.1, English DTS-HD MA 2.0
Subtitles: English SDH
Studio: Scream Factory
Rated: R
Runtime: 105 minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: August 23rd, 2022

Recommendation: Great Watch