Late Phases: The One in a Retirement Community
2022 Halloween Spooktacular: Werewolf Week Day #3
Late Phases (aka Night of the Wolf) is clearly low-budget, but it’s pretty great for a werewolf flick. Blind war vet, Ambrose McKinley (great old ass-kicker name), is moved into a retirement community by his son. On his first night there, his neighbor is brutally murdered and he is attacked by some sort of large animal. Ambrose survives but he has to put down his fatally injured guide dog. This isn’t exactly an old blind John Wick vs the Wolf Man situation, but he’s certainly pretty pissed about losing his friend and it sets him down a path for revenge.
When Ambrose talks to the local vet the next day, she says that attacks like these in his community are common, especially around the full moon. “Full moon, eh?” Well, the old guy knows what’s up right away. Just because werewolves aren’t real, doesn’t mean you should be in denial when you’re so clearly dealing with a werewolf. I like that our protagonist isn’t an idiot. He starts getting himself and his apartment prepped to go to war again with the beast — doing pushups, buying silver bullets, stashing firearms around the house, and, most importantly, sniffing out who in the community is moonlighting as a monster.
This all might sound silly, but the film doesn’t treat it that way. Ambrose is played super straight by Nick Damici and he absolutely pulls it off. Damici had a pretty good run in the 2010’s as a writer and star of some well-regarded indie films: Stake Land, We Are What We Are, and Cold in July. I think I saw some of those, but I don’t remember them well enough to comment on his performances. I can tell you he’s great here though. He acts circles around most of the cast, even outshining screen vets like Tom Noonan and Lance Guest. He’s believable, which makes it easier to engage with the plot.
Speaking of which, there’s a bunch of family drama in there between Ambrose and his son Will (Ethan Embry). It’s fine, but also fine to ignore. This is Ambrose’s journey — from an old bitter man wanting to quietly die to someone with a purpose. From the standpoint of the subgenre, this is a much different approach than the last two werewolf films I wrote about. Those were sympathetic stories about the cursed individuals themselves. This is more of a whodunnit (another popular type of wolf man flick) from the perspective of the monster hunter. Once their identity is revealed, we get a little insight into the person plaguing the community. They’re not entirely unsympathetic, but it’s clear their affliction has warped their mind into that of a villain.
The final scenes feature some great action as Ambrose has to go to war with a whole slew of lycanthropes. Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those “everyone in town is a werewolf!” reveals (I hate those). The main werewolf knew they were in trouble so they went on a little bit of a biting spree, that’s all.
The werewolves themselves, how do they look? Well, not great. There’s no getting around that. They look like overgrown gremlins in some cases. I’m not even sure we can blame it on the low budget because I don’t actually think they look cheap. They just look like something you’d see pursuing Jim Varney, not in a relatively-serious horror film. We even get some pretty gnarly transformation scenes, so I don’t know what happened getting to the final product. A less-is-more approach in some places could have done some good. Oh well. If this shit were easy, there would probably be a lot more good werewolf films out there. I’ll still file this one in the victory category — despite the costumes.
Is it scary? Not really. The ultimate showdown is a little more on the fun side, but the intial attack does have a nice build to it, filled with dread and suspense.
Streaming: Late Phases is available on Tubi, Peacock, and Amazon Prime.
