Dead Howling has one genuinely interesting idea buried inside it: a former scientist injects himself with a lycanthropy serum while trying to cure a zombie plague, becoming a one-man werewolf clean-up squad in the ruins of Perth. That's a hook. The film then proceeds to do almost nothing with it. The setup is bog-standard post-apocalypse furniture. Temuera Morrison — Once Were Warriors, Jango Fett, a man who deserves better — turns up to deposit two teenagers on the plot and immediately gets eaten. Carter, the hulking misanthrope scientist-turned-werewolf played by Joel Jackson (who looks enough like Armie Hammer to be distracting in the wrong ways), then reluctantly shepherds them toward a supposed safe zone inside Perth. He drinks whiskey. He is closed off emotionally. He transforms at will and somehow always has a fresh black T-shirt afterwards. These are the film's attempts at character. The one scene that actually works is Carter forcing his teenage charges to make their first kills unassisted, in a derelict school gymnasium, without his protection. It's the kind of flinty survivalist logic that a better version of this film would have committed to throughout. Instead, Dead Howling keeps undercutting its own grim realism with the werewolf gimmick — which feels transplanted from a different, sillier film — and drowning everything else in pity-party dialogue and apocalypse-cliché checklist items. The zombie genre's problem, which the film itself gestures at in its final act (the zombies are apparently evolving), is that it has been strip-mined. The Walking Dead spent a decade establishing the grammar. Train to Busan proved there was still visceral life in it. What came after has largely been cargo-cult reproduction of those gestures without understanding what made them work. Dead Howling falls squarely in this category: the emotionally shut-down journeyman, the agonised mercy-killing of an infected companion, the closing note of stubborn hope — all present, all inert. The 'wombie' thought experiment — what happens if the werewolf hero gets bitten by a zombie? — is raised and then abandoned. This is the film's thesis statement in miniature: it briefly glimpses a more interesting version of itself and then retreats. The producers apparently share credits with Dog Soldiers, Neil Marshall's 2002 werewolf-versus-soldiers-in-the-Scottish-Highlands film that understood exactly what it was and committed completely. Dead Howling understands neither what it is nor what it wants to be.
