Wilderness
Wilderness
| 30 September 1996 (USA)
SEASON & EPISODES
  • 1
  • Reviews
    Noutions Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .
    Manthast Absolutely amazing
    Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.
    Stephanie There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes
    Tweekums Alice White isn't like other women as each month on the night of the full moon she turns into a wolf. Due to this complication in her life she avoids getting into relationships preferring to pick up men at a local hotel and have a one night stand to satisfy her sexual needs. This changes when one day as she leaves her job at the library she witnesses a man hit a dog in his car... together they take it to the vet and gradually grow closer.The other main character in this is Alice's psychiatrist, Luther Adams, to whom she tells about the wolf. In a series of flash backs we learn how it first starting appearing when she was a thirteen year old child living in the countryside who would sneak off into the nearby woods at night to become the wolf. She also tells how she became the wolf and killed a farm worker who attempted to rape her; when she told the police at the time nobody believed her and she was certified until she retracted her claim. Initially Luther doesn't believe that Alice literally becomes a wolf in fact even when he sees her partially change he believes he must have imagined it. As the story progresses he thinks that she will be an interesting case study for a book and later, as he is drawn to her, he decides he would be justified in sleeping with her.The acting in this is good especially Amanda Ooms as Alice and the always excellent Michael Kitchen as her psychiatrist, the story is also pretty good; much less gory than one might expect from a drama about a werewolf. There is however quite a lot of nudity but that didn't seem gratuitous to me. The only real complaint about this production is the effect used as she changes from a person to a wolf, rather than using make up to achieve the effect they just morphed her from one to the other in a second or two, if they didn't have the budget to do the effect well it would have been better if she'd transformed off screen.This review is based on the full broadcast edition of the programme, not the much shortened DVD, I'm rather surprised that it was possible to shorten as much as they did as little in the full version seems superfluous.
    t-meyerhoefer A rather quiet film that shows the werewolf-subject from a psychological and sociological perspective instead of flooding the screen with blood and getting teenagers exited with special effects and action. It is very interesting to see what problems the young woman has with her relationships and her feelings, e.g. her inferiority-complex of being an outcast inside human society. She even has the responsibility to lock herself up in her own cellar when she feels her animal instincts rising again. I was relieved to see that she obviously had the aggressions of the beast within her under more control in the end. So there may be a process of maturing even in werewolves ;-).The psychiatrist is meant to be funny but is rather ridiculous in the end. The special effects are reduced to the transformation into the beast and are rather ludicrous. It seems they used a simple morphing tool like Kay's Power Goo or something similar. Judging from what is possible in that area it looks rather cheap. Here they could have done better even by using old-fashioned means like make-up etc.Apart from these flaws the film has a good and interesting story to tell and does its job well. The acting is good and the feelings shown a believable. This authenticity is held up even in details (like when she tries to convince her new boyfriend of her true nature by applying self-hypnosis and doesn't succeed because somebody's close to her and watching).P.S.: I saw the movie-version and not the total length of 174 minutes.
    Noel (Teknofobe70) "Wilderness" was originally aired as a UK mini-series and ran for a total of 174 minutes. Unfortunately, the version I saw was a movie edited together from the series which runs for only 100 minutes or so, which means there was over an hour of material missing -- so bear in mind that this is a review of the edited movie rather than the series.It's immediately apparent from watching Wilderness that it's based on a novel, and fact is you probably already know the story. There's a whole bunch of books of the same type -- a woman has been living as a werewolf since she hit puberty, which causes problems in her relationships so she goes to see a psychiatrist and there's this guy that she really likes but she's scared he won't understand and he has this ex-wife who's a complete bitch and ... yeah, it sounds like popular British fiction alright, and if you're familiar with it you can predict all of the twists and turns here a while before they actually happen.The directing feels like your average UK TV series, and so does the acting. Everyone does an okay job, but the real stand-out performance would have to be from Michael Kitchen as the suffering psychiatrist who becomes increasingly unhinged as the story goes on. The fact that there's an hour missing explains why the pacing is all wrong, I guess, and it's possible that I would have enjoyed this a lot more in it's original form as a mini-series.I wouldn't generally recommend this unless you're a big fan of British TV. You may want to check out the mini-series if you ever get a chance, though.
    IByte ! I'm kind of surprised to see this is the first comment, but here it is...I haven't seen all of this movie, because (as you can see here in IMDb) it's a TV movie, and I put the channel on when it was already halfway or so, though I would have liked to see the rest of it. This movie is correctly categorized as drama, but I found certain aspects actually quite amusing. (possibly a minor spoiler, but I think it isn't) E.g., can you imagine the look on the psychiatrist's face when he sees his patient who thinks she's a werewolf (and she is, but he doesn't know/believe) actually turn in to a wolf? Now who needs a shrink? The story-lines with the psychiatrist, her boyfriend and the wolf expert all work quite nicely together. My vote is 8 out of 10.