Chas oborotnya AKA Werewolf Hour (1990)


director: Igor Shevchenko
release-year: 1990
genres: horror, shocktober, werewolf
countries: USSR
languages: Russian
fests: SHOCKtober 2024: WOLFtober

Grigory, a mild-mannered and somewhat socially awkward middle-aged man working at a printing house decides to step up and boldly ask for a promotion from his boss and a date from the coworker he's attracted to.

You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, or whatever.

His boss promises to support him in his career ambitions. They're randomly attacked by a black dog when getting on the tram.

Looks like a labrador.

Grigory goes to the doctor to have his dog bite looked at. His doctor looks and acts like a football hooligan and doesn't care about him or his stupid health problems.

I'm not even sure if this guy has a degree.

His boss is an underhanded liar and promotes Grigory's competition instead. Grigory heads home, sad and defeated, to his daughter and her live-in boyfriend. He has trouble falling asleep that night, wolfs out.

His boss also terminates their friendship.

He turns into a fuzzy puppy and chasing people around in apartment complexes.

Who's a good boy?  Who's a good boy!?

His transition is 5 minutes of annoying grunting, then grimacing through overly-white fake teeth. He scares a man into jumping to his death. In the morning, he has only vague memories. He goes to the funeral and checks the dead guy's leg, confirming that it has the bite mark.

The guy killed himself, actually.

Grigory spies creepily on the girl he's interested in, and finds her embroiled in some uniform sex kink with her secret lover. He wolfs out again that night, and rips his would-be-girlfriend to shreds. The local town cop, who turns out to be Grigory's asshole son, gets there in time to see a wolf fleeing the scene.

This is a morally questionable act.

His asshole son demands that his father help him track down his uncle, who owes him money. The father reluctantly does so, and learns just what a prick his son has become. Regardless, he agrees to go stand in line at the furniture rationing center (it's Soviet…), where the lady calling numbers doesn't give him enough time to reach her, and then refuses to serve him when he does. The crowd starts brawling, and when they kick Grigory to the ground he wolfs out.

Don't make me angry.  You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

Grigory doesn't mean to be an evil wolf. He runs off and cowers in a corner. His animal-torturing son tracks him down, and doesn't care that he's cowering helplessly; the cop beats him violently to death with a pipe. After the cop walks away, he fades slowly back to human form as he succumbs to his wounds.

His son has been waiting the whole film to beat an animal to death.

In Russian tradition, it's a story about how being a good person gets you nowhere. Grigory is, by most accounts, a decent and well-intentioned man. Everybody else in town, including his own children, is selfish or conniving or aggressive or inconsiderate or deceitful. As a result, Grigory loses his children's respect, then his job, then his girl, then his reputation, then his life.

No good deed goes unpunished.