An alcoholic surgeon that everyone calls Dr. Dan screws up big time on the job and finds himself ostracized from his peers and forced to uproot his family and move to a small town in New Hampshire. If only tourists during the fall season were the worst things they have to worry about! As you can guess from the title, this town is full of slavering, hairy beasts, only a few of which appear to be supplanted Bostonians. Unfortunately for Dr. Dan and crew, you can’t throw a rock in this place without hitting a werewolf. Some are just friendly folk tryin’ to get by like everybody else and who just happen to have a rather inconvenient glandular disorder. Others are full-on evil bastards who declare war on all who oppose them. Prepare for the battle to end all battles! Werewolf vs. werewolf with Dr. Dan and his family caught in the middle!

…Is what I would say if this movie weren’t laughably terrible. In fact, if you are a fan of “outsider art” like The Room, Birdemic or Troll 2, then Lycan Colony will exceed your wildest dreams. With actors so wooden, stilted and WICKED AH-SOME (seriously the constant thick Boston accents from like 2/3 of the cast were cracking me up) that the ones reading from cue cards on-screen offer some of the better performances, with special effects that are so mind-bogglingly terrible that they approach arthouse cinema levels of esoteric gibberish, with a sound design best described as having been recorded in a port-a-potty about a block away from the actors, Lycan Colony is a midnight movie just waiting to happen. Special mention must be made of the editing. I feel like after the film was shot, they took all the footage, cut it into chunks, threw it in a hat and then taped them back together based on drawing them back out blindfolded. Here we have an editor that has never heard of the phrase “scene transition”. Prepare for random, abrupt cuts from one scene to another with no rhyme or reason and scenes that go on far too long. Also you may want to max out the contrast on your TV while watching this since the whole thing seemed to be shot in somebody’s dark basement during an eclipse. Oh plus, random aspect ratio changes because WHY NOT. I also want to call out the bizarre use of computer-generated effects. Instead of recognizing that they lacked the resources to really tackle some of the outsized ideas they wanted implement, they seemed to take the opposite approach and use CGI to attempt to render crazy stuff way outside their budget as well as even random simple things like a tattoo on a character’s neck that is distractingly fake. They spent so much time thinking about whether they COULD, they never stopped to wonder whether they SHOULD.

Thank God for Visual Vengeance salvaging what could’ve been an abysmal piece of trash. They have completely loaded this disc with juicy extras! On the production side of things, we have a full-length commentary and an interview with director Rob Roy who is pretty candid and humble about how awful his movie is. He knows that it’s bad and is just glad that people are entertained by it all these years later. There’s nothing really revelatory about the information he doles out in terms of the production. There are no insane stories like the rumors of Tommy Wiseau’s background and behavior surrounding The Room. It’s basically just a group of amateur filmmakers trying to put together something resembling a movie with friends and family on the extremely cheap who didn’t really know what they were doing (having said that, there are some amusing anecdotes peppered about, particularly around the effects and costume). I also appreciate that he hasn’t done any of Wiseau’s nonsense about “oh, it was supposed to be a comedy HA HA”. Also included is a commentary with Sam Panico of B&S About Movies and Bill Van Ryn of Drive-In Asylum, and they offer a mix of legitimately useful information about the production, some of which Roy didn’t cover in his commentary, as well as occasional jabs at how bewilderingly strange the movie is. To me, the best extra here is a full-length Rifftrax commentary and makes the film go down MUCH smoother than it might otherwise attempting to watch it stone-cold sober. There are certain scenes, particularly “action” scenes that are so poorly staged and tedious that even the Rifftrax guys can’t jazz it up enough, but overall, it’s got some great zingers in there that enhance the fun of the experience of wallowing in this nonsense. We also have a somewhat pointless blooper reel (it seems so arbitrary what was cut out vs. what was left in anyway…), some trailers and a music video of the terrible nu metal theme song. Given we’re talking about Visual Vengeance here, of course you can expect some fun physical bonuses as well. We have a fold-out mini-poster, VV’s usual fun little VHS rental-style stickers and, unique to this release, a booklet with an essay from Sam Panico and an air freshener! I’ll leave it to you to try to guess the scent. Is it wet fur? Wolf dong? New Hampshire Forest? I’m not telling!

Yes, this movie is incredibly awful. The Room awful. Birdemic awful. After Last Season awful. Neil Breen awful. Maybe even worse… But there’s a certain kind of person out there, reading that description that will absolutely become entranced with what this movie has to offer. Plus if you love Rifftrax, this should be an easy buy as well.