Dead Howling review – werewolf hunts zombies in tough-love apocalypse horror

Every bog-standard cliche is employed – and fails – in this moribund Aussie thiller, which entirely lacks both bite and bark

When talk here turns to what would happen if the film’s werewolf hero were bitten by a zombie, the term coined is “wombie”. Sadly, this inter-species thought-experiment never comes to pass in this otherwise lifeless and crushingly derivative Aussie post-apocalyptic slog, the only point of note in which is a very brief cameo from Mr Once Were Warriors and Jango Fett himself, Temuera Morrison. He drops off his niece and nephew, Megan (Téa Heathcote-Marks) and Billy (Riley Stiles), before succumbing to a zombie pile-on.

The pair quickly encounter Carter (Armie Hammer lookalike Joel Jackson), a hulking former scientist turned one-man undead clean-up squad who still can’t get his head around this bog-standard apocalypse: rampant virus, flesh-eating zombie hordes, overwhelming guilt over not saving his wife and child, etc. But this whiskey-slugging misanthrope is also a lycanthrope, thanks to a super-serum he developed while trying to counteract the plague. Able to metamorphose at a second’s notice into a rabid canine, and seemingly equipped with an infinite supply of new black T-shirts for afterwards, he is the perfect protector for the teens as they attempt to reach a safe zone they insist exists inside Perth’s city limits.

The brief flicker of interest on their journey is Carter’s tough-love approach to survival: he forces Megan and Billy to make their first kills unprotected in a derelict school gymnasium. But the daft werewolf gambit (possibly something to do with this sharing a producer with British horror classic Dog Soldiers) kicks the legs out from under this attempt at flinty realism.

Otherwise, Dead Howling is saddled with dreary pity-party discussions when it isn’t shambling into every apocalypse-film cliche trap going, from the emotionally shut-down journeyman, to agonised euthanising of soon-to-be-zombie colleagues, to a closing message of hope somehow more dispiriting than the complete collapse of civilisation. The zombies are evolving, we are told – but it only highlights this moribund movie genre’s urgent need to evolve itself.