The Dog Soldiers are the antagonists in the 2002 film, Dog Soldiers.
During a routine nighttime training mission in the Scottish Highlands, a small squad of British soldiers expected to rendezvous with a special ops unit instead find a bloody massacre with a sole survivor. The savage attackers of the special ops team return and the men are rescued by Megan, a zoologist who identifies what hunts them as werewolves. Without transport or communications, the group is forced to retreat to a farmhouse to wait for the full moon to disappear at dawn.
Appearance
Dog Soldiers are tall bulky wolf like humanoids who are completely nude with brownish grey fur streaked with black, long lanky legs and arms, elongated hands with sharp claws, a very short tail at the end of the spine, a shaggy lion mane of scruffy fur and the head of a grey wolf with slanted fiery eyes, bluish black noses with tinges of black around the snout, long ears and bright white fangs as long as daggers, the leader Megan is a even taller werewolf with blackish/red skin, curvy ears like a jackal, exposed ribs and only one bile yellow eye.
Powers and Abilities
Dog Soldiers possess the following powers and abilities:
- Teeth and Claws
Fate
Some Dog Soldiers are killed
Trivia
- Neil Marshall chose to use dancers as the werewolves instead of the typical stuntmen in order to highlight their grace and elegant movements. The set was also designed size-wise to force the creatures to have to bend a bit upon entering thereby highlighting their statuesque physiques.
- Some of the corpses hanging around in the basement were originally created for and used in Event Horizon (1997).
- There is very little CGI used in the movie because the people involved in the filming believed that CGI was being over-used at the time and that it would take viewers out of the movie because they would be focused on how the special effects looked rather than the story, thus the werewolves are animatronics and body suits with stilts.
- The line, "There is no Spoon" is a nod to The Matrix (1999).
- One of the soldiers in this movie is called Bruce Campbell, a reference to The Evil Dead (1981)
- This movie is absolutely loaded with references and homages to other films
- Jason Statham was originally the top runner for playing the part of Cooper, but he had to back down at the last minute to do John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (2001).
- How they went about the werewolf transformation there were two choices, the transformation effects from An American Werewolf in London (1981) which was impossible as they didn't have the time or resources to do it and the other lesser option was CGI which at that point CG effects were not all great, some were great as it was post Jurassic Park (1993), Neil Marshall explained he didn't want to do some "cheesy morph" so he went back to some old school techniques, having them hide behind the furniture and pop up as the werewolf.
- Neil Marshall is constantly asked about a sequel, but "I think I can fairly safely say that there's never going to be a sequel now." He had a whole trilogy planned, but he says it was never up to him anyway as the rights don't belong to him. His own sequel plans alternated between Cooper (McKidd) battling more werewolves or facing off against other supernatural creatures instead. He jokes that it'll probably end up getting remade before it gets a sequel.
- Megan says that the werewolves are kind people in human form but it's most likely a lie because the stew in the cottage that the soldiers eat is described as tasting like pork. Towards the end of the film, the corpse-filled cellar seems disturbingly like a meat larder, and real-life cannibals have commonly reported that human meat tastes like pork. This works two ways: it reveals the werewolf family when in human form were not only hiding their victims' bodies around their house but were also cooking and eating them, and it indicates the soldiers were unknowingly eating human stew.
- Neil Marshall claims he wrote this film as a knee-jerk reaction to An American Werewolf in Paris (1997) which he thought was terrible.
- Since Megan claimed that Werewolf packs are led by a younger male, it can be assumed that the younger, single man is the alpha male in the Uath family photo.
- The sadly never produced sequel would have been about Cooper being locked up in a mental institution as part of a cover up by the British Government, only for Cooper to discover that a werewolf was already inside of the asylum, the camper played by Craig Conway from the beginning of the original, had actually survived his encounter but had been turned into a werewolf, turning numerous inmates, doctors and nurses into werewolves, forcing Cooper and the surviving inmates and staff to fend off the new pack.
- Not including Megan and Ryan, there are 5 werewolves in the film.
- It is unknown what happened to the final werewolf not present in the house.
- Ryan (as a werewolf) gets killed by Cooper by getting shot in the head the same way that he killed the dog in the beginning of the film.
- The sequal title was rumored to be Dog Soldiers: Fresh Meat.
Photo Gallery
