Project Metalbeast (1995)

With an all-star cast, Barry Bostwick (Brad from Rocky Horror) stars along side Kim Delaney (Darkman II) and Kane Hodder (Pumpkinhead II) in this 4:3 aspect ratio military sci-fi monster flick, which can't have been anything but direct-to-video. The unfittingly professional orchestral soundtrack is by Conrad Pope, who would later achieve great fame as one of the four background composers for future wolf film The Wolfman (2010).

A large, partially-stop-motion-animated wolf puppet jumps out and eats a military man before being killed by the backup soldier. The backup soldier, a Vinnie Jones knockoff, takes a sample of the wolf's blood, which is clearly why they were here in this blue-lit… church? He takes the blood sample back to Bostwick, where they badly overact their lines at each other. Bostwick is running some werewolf-fueled super-soldier science research lab for a made up government entity. The soldier secretly injects himself with stop-motion-wolf blood, then watches a slideshow of the opening scene that we just watched for some reason.

Dammit, Janet, Bostwick can't deliver a line worth a damn. He somehow suspected that the soldier would inject wolf blood, so he bursts into the office yelling. He's too late, the soldier is now a super-soldier werewolf or something, with super hearing and hairy claws. Wolf blood comes with a lot of super powers, but, sadly, good acting is not one of them.

Bostwick walks away despite the conflict being unresolved, and the soldier violently assaults a female coworker down the hall. When HR goes to tell him wolven assault is forbidden in the workplace, he is already a full stop-motion wolf and HR is doomed. Bostwick walks in and casually shoots him to death. "If the bullets get dislodged, all hell will break loose," he says, so maybe they're silver bullets. They cryogenically freeze his corpse.

Twenty years later, Delaney, the first person who knows how to speak naturally, is poking a glowing red chunk of skin in a petri dish and electroplating it with metal ions. Her new boss, Colonel Bostwick, comes by to unilaterally decide that they're ready to try testing on human cadavers. He delivers the frozen werewolf soldier, of course.

The scientists are suspicious of the cadaver's origins, so they put his hair dust through their magic computer and determine that he had recently been in Budapest due to Hungarian salt crystals. Still, they electroplate him anyway, because who cares where he has been. They notice that he's full of bullets only after they start the plating, remove them, somehow identify them visually as silver despite them being old and bloody, and are dismayed when he surges awake on the operating table.

Delaney gets some character development and some philosophical soliloquys, perhaps because she's the only actress in this film capable of pulling them off, while Bostwick hovers around waiting for the soldier to turn into a Metalbeast. Showing him old photographs apparently speeds it up. The doctors can no longer inject him with needles anywhere other than his inner thigh.

When they scan the soldier's fingerprints, the computer asks for a secret code, so they come back at night to do some computer hacking. trustno1. Night is also when he turns full wolf, breaks out of his bed restraints, and eats his attending doctor. Bostwick erases the bloody wolf prints while the others are distracted.

He doesn't look any more Metalbeast than he was before. He runs around as a wolf puppet, eating various side characters around the compound. They recapture him with a fire extinguisher, and he reverts to half-human-half-wolf. He just breaks right out again, because they didn't change anything about their security protocols. Luckily for Delaney, the werewolf is afraid of her crucifix necklace.

One of the scientists heads down to the smelting furnace in the basement to smelt up a quick silver bazooka bullet. It's quite a lab they've got there.

Bostwick goes full evil and starts shooting his coworkers (again). He expected the metallic werewolf to respect him as an old friend, but this does not actually happen. The bazooka works real well, though.