A Wolf In Creep's Clothing.

This week's VHS was 1995's Project: Metalbeast. I'm nearing the bottom of the pile, as evidenced by this merchant copy complete with hole-punched barcode and intermittent burn-in's of “for screening purposes only”.

An unstable CIA agent (John Marzilli) who injected himself with werewolf blood is cryogenically frozen for 20 years and then thawed out for use in military experiments involving synthesized skin. It doesn't go well.

You know, I was in good shape at the start of this movie because I knew that Project: Metalbeast could not possibly as awful as the trailer that proceeded it for Paul Rodriguez's dramedy(?) A Million To Juan. Man, the shit they put out on tape in the nineties. The eighties I understand, but we should've had the hang of this by '95.

Anyhoops, Metalbeast starts off with musician Conrad Pope doing his best Elfman impression, giving us some overly dramatic music during the opening credits. Then, enter a pretty decent looking - or at least way better than I would have expected - werewolf. Until the aforementioned CIA agent with a haircut you could set your watch to, blows it away with silver bullets. After extracting its blood, he makes the completely rational decision to inject himself with it. goes haywire and is then put on ice by his boss, Barry Bostwick.

-“It shrinks?” -“Like a frightened turtle!”

More than some of this movie is a bore, which is why I actually nodded off in the middle. It's actually unusually quiet in the second act, while science people do science things. And complain several times about having to eat PB&J sandwiches. Hey, fuck you dude. I've literally eaten ten PB&J's a week for decades and still love 'em to death. Thankfully, the eventual screams and death snapped me back into consciousness.

As you might have guessed, the metal skin somehow gets on werewolf dude and viola - METALBEAST. And he looks pretty badass, even though every time he was onscreen I wanted to yell, “Fuck you Honey Badger” like in that Love, Death & Robots episode. What's funny is there's a shot of it walking down a hallway and I thought to myself, “hey that guy walks like Kane Hodder”.

Turns out it was actually Kane Fucking Hodder! Until he gets exploded with a silver rocket. Lastly, Kim Delaney was looking pretty hot in this and I'm glad she booked her role on NYPD Blue shortly after so no one was tempted to make a Metalbeast 2.