Don't Stop Stock Footaging

I’m going to let Netflix take care of this:

“Using a risky transplant operation, Dr. Hewlitt (Justine Bateman) restores the vision of newly blinded Aaron (Cory Monteith) by replacing his eyes with those of an injured wolf's. Now, Aaron can see in the dark, and his dangerous wolflike behavior only increases with time. Part wolf as well, museum curator Lydia (Tinsel Korey) decides to help Aaron, but Dr. Hewlitt's colleagues are convinced the man-wolf is dangerous and resolve to hunt him down.”

RIGHT?!

Quick Plot: In gloriously foggy stock footage, wolves hunt bison across a beautiful prairie.

I'm going to pause right now to say something of vital importance: I hope you really like watching stock footage of wolves. Because if you choose to watch Hybrid, you are essentially choosing to watch about 58 minutes worth of, you know, stock footage of wolves.

Still with me? You're brave. Brave, like a WOLF.

After what feels like 9 hours worth of wolves running freely as credits roll, we meet a biologist (played by the lesser Bateman Justine) explaining to two dozen local doctors that she's heading military experiments on transplanting animal body parts into humans. The "confidentially recruited" 24 local doctors are asked to help find possible participants for such an experiment but to be really quiet about it. Somehow, the fact that every single doctor from the nation of Canada knows about this "secret" and therefore it's no longer a "secret" is never acknowledged.

We'll forgive this, because while Dr. Not Jason Bateman is describing her work, we get the pleasure of seeing a chimpanzee with Siberian husky eyes. It's cute.

Moving on...

Finn Hudson--er, "Aaron" but it's oodles more fun to refer to every character Corey Monteith ever plays as "Finn Hudson" so we shall--works as an operator at some sort of plant. Or something. I thought he was a security guard who spends his work days playing video games, but I'm apparently just not as smart as this movie. Or maybe I’m just lost because for a good 8 minutes, there was no insertion of stock wolf footage. Now I’ve forgotten what movie I’m even watching.

Pull it together Emily! Be one with your spirit animal!

(sigh) That's better

A fire breaks out at the plant security video game land where Finn works. Ever the hero, Finn races through flames to save the idiot whose chainsmoking habits started the explosion in the first place. I guess that’s supposed to tell us that his character is  noble (like a WOLF), and we’ll have to accept it since it’s the only—and I really do mean only—thing we ever learn about Finn Aaron Hudson.

Meanwhile, over in the local Native AmeriCanadian reservation, teacher Lydia (although the Netflix description says museum curator, but who’s counting?) drives home to discover a dying—you guessed it--wolf. She promptly drives it to the vet, who even more promptly passes it on to the local military biological research facility (EVERY town has one of those) where the overenthusiastic doctor from the intro does some radical surgery. Before you can say Don’t Stop Believing, Finn Hudson wakes up with beady yellow wolf eyes.

Sometimes the universe is very generous. Sometimes the world seems to say, “Emily, I haven’t been nice to you lately and I want to make up for it with a gift. It’s nothing extravagant or expensive—heck, this being SyFy, it probably cost less than a trip to Super Cuts with a Groupon—but it’s just a little something that I think you’ll appreciate. Something to say, ‘don’t feel lost and alone. I care.’”

Oh Universe! You’re making me tear up here!

See, Corey Monteith doesn’t just get wolf eyes (and therefore, wolf night vision). He gets misaligned wolf eyes that seems to keep one pupil located south and the other pointing to the sky. He doesn’t just start having wolf feelings; he begins to FEEL what wolves FEEL, mostly in stock footage form. His appetite changes towards the rarer meat side, making him become, dare I say it, HUNGRY LIKE A WOLF (a song which, hey! was even covered on Glee).

Best of all, Aaron/Finn catches the newest symptom of 21^st century werewolfishness: an allergy to shirts.

Perhaps it’s the presence of Twilight franchise actress Tinsel Korey, but by the end of the 90 minute Hybrid, Corey Monteith gives Taylor Launtner a run for his residuals in the Who Wears a Shirt Less contest that every young male actor dreams of winning.

Except unlike the buff and brown Launtner, Monteith sports a farmer’s tan and runs like a kid who ducked out of gym class his whole life with falsified claims of asthma.

And run he does! Hilariously! And a lot. Almost as much as those stock footage wolf actors run, but in more of a gentle jog kind of manner. It’s fairly wonderful.

So to break down: Hybrid is essentially a hybrid film of four ingredients:

1-65% stock footage of wolves. Did I mention the stock footage of wolves?

2-25% long shots of Corey Monteith’s awkward 5K training

3-7% bland dialogue by Lydia about the importance of heritage and landzzzzzzzzzzz

2%-other stuff of little importance (although watching a nurse at the research lab discover adorable loose chimpanzees and react as if fleeing from Leatherface is kind of amusing)

4- 1% stock footage from the buffalo’s point of view

Of all this action, 80% is scored to what must have been public domain Native Ameri-Canadian tribal drum and flute music, with the remaining 20% playing out to a very conspicuous, very bad rap reggae something. There’s a love scene, which is about as sexy as flossing your teeth after eating a lot of broccoli. A bar brawl that makes me sad to see so much wasted beer. A last act introduction of villainous soldiers that just leaves you missing that comforting stock footage rather than, one hour and ten minutes into a 90 minute film, having to decipher one camouflage clad character from the next.

We have no real reason to ever care about Wolfboy, because we know absolutely nothing about him prior to his transplant. His romance with Lydia is as stiff as Finn’s scenes with Lea Michelle’s Rachel, only worse because we don’t even get the bonus of choreography. And of course, when all else fails, director Yelena Lanskaya simply cuts to the same reel of wolf film, all scored to the same generic tribal tunes. It’s terrible, and yet, it’s exactly what I wanted from a SyFy movie about wolf eyes.

High Notes

Well um, see, the thing is that…uh…wow! Look over there! I see WOLVES!

Low Notes

Aside from the fact that the film is just not good at any real point, the third act soldier hunt—which literally spends about 10 minutes with brand new characters we can’t tell apart—is just a painfully sluggish way to bring down an already sluggish film

Lessons Learned, Canada Style

So let’s say you’re a world class biologist conducting groundbreaking research for the Canadian military. Where might you go when an experiment goes wrong? Why, hop on that Interweb and hit up LycanthropyResources.Com of course! Modern science at its best

During the process of making love, it is customary that the man removes his shirt while the woman remains fully clothed at all times

In Canada, young men read magazines from back to front

When in need of content to pad out the running length of your film, there are two handy tricks one might try: 1) STOCK FOOTAGE OF WOLVES! and of course, the far less obvious 2) Have your lead character have a spiritual experience that is essentially a montage of the entire film that ran before it, complete with—wait for it—STOCK FOOTAGE OF WOLVES

Rent/Bury/Buy

Thankfully, Hybrid is streaming on Instant Watch and does not require any monetary effort to view. Bad movie fans will enjoy its awfulness, but be aware that this is bad in a ‘so dull it’s good’ way (which makes it more interesting than Basic Instinct 2, if that makes sense on your cinema scale). Considering this is part of SyFy’s “Maneater” series (the same brand that bred the similarly terrible yet on some random level amusing Blood Monkey), you should know whether it will bring you enjoyment or not. Basically, if you like wolves, this was made for you. If you want to see Corey Monteith stumble through dialogue with even more clumsiness than he does on Glee, this is for you. If you want to see a really awkward white dude run like a really awkward white dude, then by all means, queue up Hybrid. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Blood Monkey, That Funky Monkey

Ever go to a party where no one had fun but the host? The food is exotically inedible. The music, a demo CD of someone’s boyfriend’s struggling band. A guest falls asleep or starts a vomitfest in the bathroom just when that weak drink has reached your urinary tract. There’s no place to sit and no one to have an intelligent conversation with regarding the controversial finale of America’s Next Top Model and just when you’ve summoned the strength to hasten an exit, you discover someone has mistakenly grabbed your winter coat, leaving you with an ill-fitting loaner that your still sickenly energetic host has kindly dug up from the basement to put over your shoulders.

If Blood Monkey is that party, then bless dear old Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham for having a ridiculously good time hosting it, even if it’s at the expense of the rest of the cast, crew, and more importantly, the baffled audience who really just want more blood monkeys.

Quick Plot: Abraham plays Professor Hamilton, the typical Col. Kurtz-esque genius living deep in the jungles of Thailand with his badass female bodyguard Chenne. The pair are soon joined by a jeep-ful of attractive and annoying anthropology graduate students taking a semester to study with one of the preeminent minds in the field.

Also, to be eaten by blood monkeys.

Who are these young brainiacs with charming accents, you might ask? Or you might not, since like virtually any movie made today starring twentysomethings, the twentysomethings are the least interesting things onscreen. There’s a blond who carries the most luggage (cause she’s blond, duh), a nerd identified as such because he wears glasses, a screamy girl with a video camera, a good-looking guy who seems to make the most decisions, his dull love interest who seems smart because she’s a brunette, and in a feat of screenwriting superiority, the guy who introduces himself as such:

“I’m Greg. The good-looking one. And I’m also like a genius in anthropology.”

You gotta love when a script is fully aware that its audience identifies characters by their rating on an Are You Hot scale. Greg—or Craig, I don’t really care—also gets the fun job of sexually harassing every female  in sight in that charming manner that only happens in movies and would be sue-able in real life. I actually found myself pitying poor actor Matt Reeves for having to say some of the Neil LeBute-ish dialogue about that silly but sexy child-bearing gender.

You know who else I pitied? Me. That’s right, when I queue up a film called Blood Monkey, I expect little more than what its title promised. You know what it promised? A blood monkey.

It’s not that Blood Monkey didn’t have blood monkeys. Throughout its 90 minute running time, we see various evidence that blood monkeys—a separate branch of evolution—are well and good in Thailand. And that their point of view is very orange. And that they set the kind of traps you’d find on Endor and that their brains are really big. That’s all fine and dandy but WHERE ARE THE BLOOD MONKEYS?

I asked that question a thirty minutes into the film. I asked again at the hour mark. Do you want to know when director Robert Vampire Circus Young answered? In the very. Last. Shot.

That’s a lot of time to waste when one could be filling it with blood monkeys.

High Points

I joke about F. Murray Abraham’s role here—especially when he opens up a can of whoop tush—but it’s actually nice to see such a celebrated actor having fun in the boonies of SyFyVille. Never does Abraham show the slightest sign of being too good for this material, and his clear enjoyment at such a villainous and physical role is ultimately the only REAL reason to watch this blood monkey-less Blood Monkey movie.

In a similar vein, the only character who comes close to matching Abraham’s enthusiasm is his bodyguard/maybe lady love Chenne, played with such angry violence by Prapimporn Karnchada. Watching her smack nerdy anthropologist students or drop-kick their makeup caboodles is oddly wonderful

Low Points

Is it really THAT HARD to write and direct young people as likable, interesting creatures? As movies like Blood Monkey and Grizzly Park seem to suggest, the answer is yes, yes it really is that hard

Lessons Learned

Chekhov’s rule of handheld video cameras: if the feature ‘night vision’ is referenced, you can bet a barrel of blood monkeys that we’ll be seeing green in the final reel

Most idiots can’t resist taking a ride on the baggage carousel, especially the self-proclaimed good-looking ones

The jungle is not good for the complexion

Rent/Bury/Buy

Blood Monkey wasn’t originally made for the SyFy Channel, but that’s where it ended up and really, that’s where it belongs. The location is gorgeous, the characters dull, action not terrible and script generally more funny than it ever meant to be. What makes it mildly recommendable is the energy and talent of F. Murray Abraham, coupled, of course, with the fact that he’s actually in this movie. So while it might not satisfy your taste for blood monkeys, it will quench your Salieri salivation and hey, I suppose that’s more than King Kong can say.