Lycanimator (2018) User Reviews

Stop. Just please... stop.

[tmccull52 · 1/10 · 16 April 2023]

No name, no talent cast. Third grade elementary school play level special effects. Tired, clichéd storyline that's been done to death and back again. That's what "Lycanimator" brings to the table.

Stop me if you've heard this story before. A group of young twenty-somethings find an abandoned building to go party in. Along the way, they run into the crazy old local who warns them not to go to their chosen site to par-TAY the weekend away in. The group ignores the old man and goes anyway.

The group consists of the usual cardboard cut-out characters:

The hard-ass bad boy with an attitude problem whose sole ambition is to get as trashed as possible for as long as possible.

The hard-ass bad boy's long-suffering girlfriend, who for some inexplicable reason is hopelessly in love with a total a**hole.

The reluctant guy who really doesn't want to go, and who really doesn't like anyone else in the group, except for...

... the nice girl who feels the need to support her friends by going along and getting trashed with them.

And finally, we have the sleazy tramp who loves to get trashed, and will bang anyone with a pulse.

Our merry band sallies forth to party hearty, and while they're doing this, the crazy local calls the police to intervene, to prevent the slaughter that only he knows is sure to come. The police blow him off. The crazy old local becomes determined to save those damned kids from themselves, and the werewolf that he knows lives in the abandoned building. Let's call him Captain Cray-Cray.

Captain Cray-Cray visits a local biker-type weapons dealer to arm himself, and obtains a knife. He then sets out to save those crazy kids. Along the way, he encounters another local, a homeless man who lives in the woods. An altercation ensues, during which Captain Cray-Cray suddenly exhibits superhuman strength. After overpowering his adversary, Captain Cray-Cray ambles off through the woods on his quest to save the partyers. Along the way, he stops to urinate several times, and for some reason, feels the need to hang from tree branches, because yanno, that's what heroic types do on their noble quests.

Meanwhile, at the abandoned site, the a**hole bad boy gets into a fight with the reluctant guy, and forces him to drink some sort of goop. A**hole bad boy then gets into a fight with his long-suffering girlfriend and goes off by himself to jerk off.

Yes, you read that correctly; he goes off to find a room where he can jerk off in peace.

While A**hole Bad Boy is spanking his wanky, the reluctant guy begins exhibiting erratic and unusual symptoms, and turns into some sort of creature that looks like a cross between the Toxic Avenger and a collie with mange. Reluctant guy then attacks and rapes his girlfriend. A**hole Bad Boy's girlfriend finds Reluctant Guy's girlfriend and tries to help her, and discovers the monster. She then rushes off to warn the others, who don't believe her.

At that point, the reluctant guy/monster shows up, and A**hole Bad Boy decides to fight him. A**hole Bad Boy gets his ass kicked, and the monster vomits some sort of goo all over his face.

The movie goes completely off of the rails here with an inane, incomprehensible series of shots of some of the worst special effects in the history of motion pictures, interspersed with equally inane references to the Frankenstein Monster, followed by a completely nonsensical montage from older, other horror movies.

This movie is galactically beyond bad on every conceivable level. It's the kind of movie that would make you want to find anyone and everyone responsible for making and distributing it, and beat them to death with a baseball bat spiked with roofing nails and wrapped in barbed wire.

The Feinics Fix

[NoDakTatum · 1/10 · 12 October 2023]

Imagine you and a bunch of friends decided to make a horror movie. That's "Lycanimator." Two couples meet a fifth friend at a creepy house in the woods for some drinking after being warned away by a crazy veteran/former caretaker from the property. After one guy is forced to drink some green fluid they found, he turns into a werewolf-like monster and attacks the others.

To say this was a cheap production would be an understatement. The running time on the DVD I own was 41 minutes, but I keep seeing an hour online (unless they were counting the short film "Fleshflower" and the brief behind-the-scenes footage). The opening crawl has a misspelled word. A beginning dialogue scene can't get the voices to sync to the actors. Toward the end of the film, you can hear the director say cut- whether all of these mistakes are intentional is beyond me. Feinics and Hornick are actually very good in their roles, but this is such a mess. It's nice to see Feinics cast as a lead- she has a great, real quality onscreen, but she's wasted in her role. I understand the appeal of the micro-budget horror film, and it's great to hear stories about how wonderful it was to work on a fun set, but the horror and suspense were forgotten. The film maker commented on my review of this film on another blog in mid-2020, saying what I saw was a rought cut released by a video company, so there's that. I did not seek out any new edit of this film.

Contains physical violence, mild gun violence, some gore, profanity, female nudity, some sexual content, adult situations, alcohol use.

Fun and cheesy indie werewolf effort

[kannibalcorpsegrinder · 6/10 · 27 February 2021]

Taking a road trip to a local house, several couples engaging in a party for the weekend run into a strange liquid left behind and unknowingly partake in it, unaware the liquid was concocted by a mad scientist and turns him into a flesh-hungry werewolf who begins hunting them down one-by-one.

There was a lot to like with this one. One of the better features here is the wholly enjoyable setup that manages to bring about the rather cliche and familiar setup quite nicely here. Focusing on the group of friends having a get-together at a remote house in the wilderness who get scared away by the local loon that knows what's going on but is taken as a joke, they go to the party anyway and end up getting caught in the crossfire of a dangerous figure performing experiments on animals and become involved in the whole affair which is nothing new but still comes across nicely. Seeing their interpersonal relationships at the party and how they interact with each other while going through the other side story involving the connection the caretaker has with the original creators and his search to stop him gives this a fine setup. That this early work leads rather nicely into the emerging horror with the changeover and resulting chases by the werewolf-like creature. Seeing the initial attack when the transformation occurs during the two sleeping with each other and the later discovery that shows the changed beast stalking the friends throughout the house features some pretty enjoyable indie-style action scenes. This is carried over into the flashback scenes of the creature's creation and escape tearing apart the original scientists before rampaging through the community which sets up the fun confrontations in the house with the goofy monster design and indie-style gore for the various kills which becomes rather enjoyable how it all plays out. Overall, these all make for a fun time here while there are a few minor issues with this one. The main problem with this one is the insistence on utilizing a distorted series of camera tricks and visualization tactics that are far more psychedelic and trippy than what would generally be expected here. Throwing up colored filters on many of the scenes is fine enough but to then slow the frame down, add in groovy music and scores of transformation scenes filtering in and out of each other from other classic movies creates a highly disjointed effect that won't be easily digested. There's also a lot to say about the low-budget on display where it comes in so short and brief that it won't feel like a complete film with how it plays out, especially with the cheesiness and campy attitude on display, but otherwise, there's not much else really wrong here.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, Nudity and a sex scene.