Werewolf stories are one of those things that often thrive on having established mythology/rules—the fun for audiences become not just in seeing the specific execution of those rules (i.e. more and more elaborate transformation sequences), but also seeing that mythology used as a parallel or an allegory (i.e. adolescence), and sometimes in seeing those rules subverted. Project Metalbeast is an attempt at subversion, taking the supernatural angle of the werewolf story and messily grafting it to a Science Fiction-Horror concept, all in the name of creating a new kind of monster for the direct-to-video gorehounds of the mid-nineties. There is novelty in exchanging the typical curse plotlines and uncontrollable transformation with science-gone-wrong medical trauma and Alien style bases-under-siege and conspiracy backstories, but the question is whether the movie realizes that novelty or is simply okay putting out the bare minimum of horror schlock.
To begin the transition from one tradition to another, the film opens in 1974 with a group of American black ops visiting an abandoned castle in the night-drenched backwaters of Budapest, representing the old country of monsters. Inside the castle, the group finds, shockingly, a werewolf hiding in the rafters, almost as if the team members of “Operation Lycanthropus” were seeking one out. One member of the team gets torn a new one, just enough of a distraction for the other to put the beast down with silver bullets, and then begin draining its blood. “Operation Lycanthropus” is revealed to be a secret military experiment to potentially inject soldiers with werewolf blood to make them into super-strong killing machines, because in this universe werewolf-ism is apparently not spread through bites as per tradition, but is some sort of genetic condition—a scientist examining the blood comments that it has an extra chromosome. Wow! This provides a mildly pseudo-scientific explanation for one of our culture’s most well-known irrationalities, and one that doesn’t quite make sense. One may have questions about all levels of this experiment—why they need to have the werewolf blood tested at a facility where no one can know that they’re working with werewolf blood, for example, or why they gave one of the lead roles in the project to blatant psychopaths
One such psychopath is Donald Butler (John Marzilli), the one who let his cameraman die and shot the silver bullets in the opening sequence, and who is impatiently waiting for the initial tests with the blood, because he’s really rarin’ to become the first test subject. He’s so impatient, in fact, that he steals most of it and then injects himself in the facility’s bathroom, a bizarrely pathetic initiation into the lycanthrope club. The changes begin immediately, and despite his newfound sensitivity to light, he seems pretty happy about becoming the first in a new breed of soldier, sitting in his dark office and looking at the photos of the dead werewolf over his dead comrade—the “normal” werewolves in this movie look like guys in werewolf costumes, but the quality of lighting in those photographs makes them look even more fake, so much so that I have hard time believing that the other people who see them over the course of the film don’t initially think they’re phony. As Butler slowly wolfs out (with one full-on monster claw that he casually tries to hide behind his back), he finds himself able to hear conversations in other rooms and even smell the blood of a lab assistant who accidentally cuts herself, which leads him to track her down and sexually assault her. Putting aside the tastelessness of the moment—its aftermath is played almost realistically—it also suggests a movie where a macho figure uses his newfound monstrousness to become wilfully animalistic, asserting the secret heart of his army man masculinity, but that characterization doesn’t stick. In fact, after that moment, Butler is portrayed as either a purely mindless monster, or surprisingly, a victim of his even more amoral superior, Colonel Miller (played by Rocky Horror Picture Show‘s Barry Bostwick), who puts him down with silver bullets, puts him on ice for twenty years, and orders all the witnesses in the laboratory to be offed.
So the rest of the movie takes place in 1994, and there’s only so much that they do to differentiate the two eras—there’s a man with a bad moustache at the end of the ’74 sequence—and even Bostwick has evidently not aged in those two decades. Part of this could probably come down to the grungy, stolidly direct-to-video direction by Alessandro De Gaetano (also co-writer alongside Roger Steinmann and Timothy E. Sabo), where everything looks generically “old” even by low budget 1995 standards, although the look could also be chalked up to the indifferently-executed VHS transfer for the current home video and streaming versions of the movie. In any case, hallways, labs, boiler rooms, and fake cryo-tubes probably look about the same in any decade.
In the nineties, Miller has hijacked a project to create synthetic skin grafts, led by Anna De Carlo (TV regular Kim Delaney), thinking he can improve Operation Lycanthropus by taking advantage of the experimental flesh’s “defect” of turning steel-hard, so he unthaws the clinically dead Butler for them to experiment on. None of the people working in the lab like Miller in the slightest—being obviously evil has that effect—but even though they complain about his refusal to actually give them crucial details, he’s higher up in the chain of command, and they gotta follow orders. The person with the biggest problem early on in is the belligerent Italian cook (Mario Burgos), who demands that, since they’re storing the body in his freezer, they either get a priest to cleanse his kitchen with holy water or he walks; the lack of a cook leads to team member Larry (Lance Slaughter) to complain about only being able to get peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
The middle portion of the film turns into a bit of a medical ethics drama, with De Carlo and her crew wary of working on a cadaver whose origins are obscure, and are even more wary when they remove the silver bullets from his chest and the cadaver suddenly starts moving. De Carlo is particularly perturbed by the whole situation, because her motives for creating the synthetic skin are entirely beneficent, as indicated by the sob story she tells about watching a child die from horrific burns. Bizarrely, she follows that up by asserting that its possible to bring people back from the dead. I guess in a world with real werewolves, that is only somewhat off the wall rather than completely so.
While our medical crew are mostly confused, we in the audience already know what’s up, and witness how the character of Butler has changed post-cryosleep. Given the violence the movie opens with, and how willingly Butler turned himself into a monster, the turn to him being a semi-conscience being of pained stares and involuntary excretions (visible bed wetting in this movie!) is quite a bit of tonal whiplash. Are we supposed to feel sorry for him? This might have made more sense if most of the set-up focused entirely on Bostwick’s scenery-chewing human villain (another case of an actor knowing exactly what kind of movie he’s in and pitching himself accordingly) forcing this upon him. Instead, the weird turn into medical horror to bide the time between werewolf moments feels disconnected from the opening scenes.
Eventually, the full moon rises and Butler transforms again—people die, and the whole claustrophobic/cost-effective location goes into lockdown. Larry’s attempt to call for help using the phone is ignored because De Carlo and their resident computer expert (Musetta Vander) are too busy hacking into military files, computer hacking being one signal that this is 1995. Despite the filmmakers cheating the viewer out of a new and creative take on the classic werewolf transformation, there are some decent make-up effects—first with Butler and all his skin grafts, and then him in a grotesque half-wolf state, and eventually his transformation into the titular Metalbeast, which despite looking as much like a mangy porcupine as it does some sort of enhanced werewolf, is a perfectly fine monster suit. Inside the suit is longtime Jason Vorhees actor Kane Hodder, so you also have an expert at playing predatory man-beasts. There’s a lot of first person perspective shots of the monster roaming hallways, and from them we learn two new facts about werewolves: they love hiding behind things or in rafters, and they HATE drinking birds.
For all of Miller’s glowering evil, there’s a big flaw in his plan: why does he think that the metal-skinned werewolf version of Butler would start listening to him? Before the transformation, we see him try to rouse his subordinate’s memories with the same cruddy-looking dead werewolf photos, but that doesn’t seem like much help. To be honest, it’s questionable how useful Operation Lycanthropus would be in general, considering that your super soldiers would only be at peak capacity during certain nights of the year. The history of monster movies have shown an often interesting relationship with the US military—sometimes they’re the unquestioned heroes, and then other times they’re the villains—that might be worthy of a full historical investigation, but the way Miller and the whole secret military plot is played here is so silly and over-the-top that it’s hard to know if it reflects any real viewpoint at all.
While Project Metalbeast is seemingly okay with discarding parts of the werewolf mythos that don’t fit its purposes—the whole “curse” aspect, both in how it spreads and how those afflicted view it—other parts are embraced wholeheartedly, such as the silver bullets. Having covered their monster with impenetrable hide, the movie is given permission to go completely buck wild, with the lab’s security guy and halfhearted love interest (Dean Scofield) melting down his collection of silver medals and collectible coins to create silver rockets to use with a conveniently available bazooka. It’s 1995, we gotta make sure every part of this is as extreme as possible!
As we can see, while some things (like the werewolf blood) are used to change a magical monster legend into something more down to earth, they double down on everything else without feeling the need to augment them much beyond mere escalation. If the point of this is to have science mutate certain pieces of werewolf iconography, taking a monster from the past and upgrading it to something tougher and meaner, the half measures don’t change things enough to declare the Metalbeast a truly new monster. Which is the shame, because there is definitely something potent in the idea that the old model of monster just isn’t good enough for the military-industrial complex.
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