LATE PHASES REVIEW

Adrian Garcia Bogliano stunned me with his last film, Here Comes The Devil, an art house possession flick that dealt head on with a crumbling family unit, sexual abuse and incest. It's a jarring and unforgiving film with one of the best endings I've seen in a horror film. The Spanish director's follow up is an even smaller, more intimate story of a blind war vet being dumped in a retirement community to wait for death, but not the death he expects.
Late Phases wastes little time getting to the horror. Only a few minutes in we get our first glimpse of our werewolf pass by a window and the sight made my wife scream a bit. Like the demons in Here Comes The Devil, the werewolf sets the movie up and then takes a backseat, while Bogliano delivers a moving character drama about fatherhood, death and estrangement. Nick Damici (Stake Land) is perfect as Ambrose, a widowed Vietnam vet who's gone blind along with dealing very poorly with his disintegrating relationship with his son. Ambrose is a course and stand offish man who gets on the wrong side of some of his neighbors while charming others. He finds a sort of friend and confidant in Father Roger, played by the always fun to watch Tom Noonan (House of the Devil, Manhunter).
On the horror side, Late Phases does not let viewers down. It's a scary, gory, and tense film that defies expectations, doesn't dumb things down, and goes for the throat with very cool creature FX and action. It's yet another win for Dark Sky Films and Glass Eye Pix, who will be remembered in film history as fondly, if not more, as Hammer or Universal. Late Phases works, not because its a good werewolf movie, but because it's a good movie with werewolves.