Hellhounds (2024)

Hellhounds Review

Werewolf bikers, you’d think they’d be all over movies, but aside from Hellhounds here tonight I can only think of a couple. There’s 1971’s Werewolves on Wheels, which has more to do with Satanist than lycanthropes and more recently High Moon, where a gang of old west werewolves find themselves in the present and saddle up on more modern iron horses. There is also Bikers vs Werewolves being promised for later this year, but that’s it.

Hellhounds starts or should I say starts off all over the place. We’re introduced to three separate sets of characters with no clue what their connection is. A woman chased down and abducted somewhere in the desert. A member of the Hellhounds biker gang tracked down by a bounty hunter then by members of The Silver Bullets. And lastly, a woman whose husband is suffering from a strange wound that apparently is a bite mark or something.

Eventually we end up at a biker rally where among some fights and lots of bare breasts we find out the Hellhounds biker is Alias (Nathaniel Burns, Summer of Grace, Krampus The Reckoning), and that the bounty hunter’s name is Mia (Dana Kippel, Cannibal Comedian; The Cove). More importantly they’re both looking for Dave (Daniel Link, Watch Over Us, Ghost Town), who got The Hellhounds all but wiped out by The Silver Bullets.

Almost as soon as we learn this writer/director Robert Conway (Exit to Hell; Battlefield 2025) goes back to hopping between plot threads again. This time we find out that Kevin (Cameron Kotecki, Senioritis; Selling Silence), the guy who got bitten, has attracted the attention of a strange woman named Lucella (Eva Hamilton Ruin Me; Blood Harvest) who claims to be his mother.

And the guy we saw kidnap the girl in the desert? By process of elimination, he must be Dave, and he just abducted another woman.

All of which is extremely frustrating because Hellhounds is long on talk, but nobody really says anything. The word “werewolf” isn’t even spoken or hinted at until nearly forty minutes into the film. It’s treated like a big secret even though there’s one right on the poster.

Oh and forget what it says about a war between biker werewolves and biker werewolf hunters. That happened before the film started, and the skirmish we see at the start of the film is all we see of The Silver Bullets. Hellhounds is actually about tracking down Dave and Lucella. And much of that is played like a straight thriller.

When we finally do get to see a werewolf it’s a disappointment. The CGI transformation is way too smooth and easy looking, lacking those intense painful looking moments with sounds of bones snapping and flesh tearing you’ve come to expect. I was actually relieved when the next transformation happened off-screen. Unfortunately, two after that aren’t either. The gore does look practical, but there isn’t that much of it more people get shot than torn apart.

I immediately recognized this as a Robert Conway film so i knew the budget was not going to deliver the plot that was advertised. But the plot it delivered could have been great. Werewolves, hunting each other among the violent criminals of a modern day Hole-In-The-Wall.

What we get instead is a talky movie with some massive plot holes, way too much clunky dialogue and an entirely dissatisfying non-ending. To his credit, Conway does sex up Hellhounds with plenty of bare skin quite a first for him but that alone isn’t enough, nor are weak replays of a couple scenes from The Howling sufficient to hide the mange on this mutt.

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