A young man falls for a female werewolf.
Review by Emily Craig (@emillycraig)
Directed by: Marc Leland
Starring: Tiffany Shepis, Debbie Rochon, Timothy Mandala, Ruby Larocca, Tina Krause, Nicola Fiore
All criticisms aside, I found myself hooked to the screen and wanted to know the fate of our beloved Jake Bubar, which I hate myself for but it’s the truth; his character is so ditzy and stupid that you have to love him in the end.
She Wolf Rising is directed by first time feature film director Marc Leland, and it’s one of those films that is so bad it’s (almost) good. So if you’re into that kind of stuff then keep reading. The film is about a young naïve man named Jake Bubar (Timothy Mandala) who falls in love with true scream queen, the famous Gina Skylar (Tiffany Shepis). The film is structured with flashbacks and follows Jake telling his friend the story of how he met and fell in love with Gina.
To start off with, I wouldn’t call this film a true horror, not in the traditional sense anyway; I kept switching my mind throughout the film, is it a horror or is it a love story? It definitely has horror elements incorporated into the plot, especially considering Gina plays a Werewolf, but it’s not in there enough for me to class it as a horror. There’s actually one scene that made me cringe inside which involves a montage of lovey-dovey clips of Jake and Gina falling in love (bearing in mind they must have only known each other at the most a week).
The acting is utterly rubbish; there isn’t one actor/actress in the film who impresses on that front. The acting is so bad that I actually rather enjoyed it and got used to the ridiculousness in the end. The plot is extremely incoherent; the film changes what it wants to be and what road it wants to take far too many times. I found myself just getting comfortable with a plot change, and then it would happen again – make your mind up She Wolf Rising; in the end it was just a jumbled up mess that didn’t amount to anything in terms of plot.
Special effects and costume I rather enjoyed, again not because they were good, but because they were so bad. Gina has many different looks for the creature she is portraying on screen and sometimes she doesn’t resemble a Werewolf at all; I’ve seen children at Halloween with more believable attire.
All criticisms aside, I found myself hooked to the screen and wanted to know the fate of our beloved Jake Bubar, which I hate myself for but it’s the truth; his character is so ditzy and stupid that you have to love him in the end. The film’s not original and I don’t really have anything professionally good to say about it, and yet some part of me deep down has some love for She Wolf Rising, just for being so bad.