I gave the film a fairly high rating due to the fact that the main character is just so different in all the right ways. While I doubt too many viewers will find the monsters scary I feel that the way the monsters and the main character interact more than makes up for the lack of scary moments. Further on the subject of interaction, the way the main character deals with his new living arrangements and the new people that he has to deal with are what really sold me on the movie. All in all I would recommend this to anyone who likes a little comedy and a bit of drama with their monster movie.

I won't lie, I went into this with some slight reservation. Spanish director Adrián García Bogliano's previous feature film, Here Comes the Devil, was NOT a favorite of mine. But I will give anyone a second chance, especially when it's for the sake of a werewolf flick.Late Phases focuses primarily around Ambrose (brilliantly played by Nick Damici), a willful, independent, and blind (the least important of his traits as far as he's concerned) Vietnam veteran who moves into a retirement community with the help of his son, Will (Ethan Embry). Things start to go horribly wrong on his first night there, with both his neighbor and his service dog, Shadow, dying a grizzly death at the hands of an unknown animal attacker. While the police shrug it off quite casually as an animal coming into the community from the nearby woods, Ambrose is convinced it's a werewolf, and he becomes determined to defeat it.Firstly, Ambrose is just such a great character, and Nick Damici plays him so well. I feel like a character like that — the grizzled, determined-to-get-by-on-his-own war veteran — could so easily become almost a spoof, but he manages the perfect balance of serious determination and dry humor.I appreciated the fact that it explored the concept of the elderly being forgotten and discarded. Ambrose is far from frail or dependent, and yet he is dropped off at the community to quietly live out his days. His son and his daughter-in-law treat him like he's a 5-year-old, constantly rolling their eyes at things he says or insisting that they baby him. He's physically capable of living just fine on his own, and yet his own mental state paired with the way he's treated has resigned him to statements like "I don't plan on being around much longer anyway" and "All I got left are consequences".There were a few scenes that were particularly awesome, but the one that stood out to me was when Will comes by to tell Ambrose that him and his wife are moving. Ambrose is already pretty deep into his obsession with defeating these werewolves, and he could really care less about Will's skepticism. When Will leaves, Ambrose sort of slowly retreats back into the pitch blackness of the closet he had been hiding in, and it's just… too good.Considering the quality of the movie overall, it came as a pretty decent shock when I saw JUST HOW TERRIBLE THE WEREWOLVES WERE. I mean, WHOA. They were… so bad. The movie has its funny moments but it isn't nearly campy enough to justify such terrible creatures. Depending on the scene they vary from just moderately unconvincing to "holy crap yeah that's just a dude in a werewolf suit" to laugh-out- loud hilarious. In some they're almost cute in the way that only a man-sized rat could be. I think the shock factor would have been much higher if they had kept them more in the shadows, and some scenes (punching through the wall towards the beginning, appearing in the headlights of the car and then punching through the windshield) could have been BADASS had they not been so laughable.Same with the transformation scene. I mean, everything pales in comparison to the transformation in An American Werewolf in London, really, so why even bother. I did like the initial bursting open of his skin and him pulling the rest of his face off though… that was cool.But despite how awful they looked, it was an interesting twist that the werewolves' existence gave Ambrose new life. He went from a state of depression and hopelessness to doing push-ups in the livingroom and crafting a plan to defeat them. It gave him direction.Oh, and bonus shoutout to Tom Noonan, who plays Father Roger Smith — always such an amazing supporting character, and a huge favorite of mine ever since his role as John Lee Roche in the The X-Files' "Paper Hearts" episode (so good).Overall, a super strong werewolf movie, which I think is pretty hard to pull off.

A blind war veteran moves to a retirement community. He soon he realises that the area is plagued by werewolf attacks.Along with the Spanish comedy-horror Attack of the Werewolves (2011), Late Phases is among the best werewolf movies of the past few years for me. It benefits in a large part from having an interesting protagonist very well played by Nick Damici. He is a well-developed character whose spiky nature is used as an effective inroad for the audience quickly getting to know the community where the action takes place. His blindness also adds an additional angle, where he is simultaneously more vulnerable to the physical dangers but is more attune to what is going on under the surface. This latter element is typified by a mystery thread to the plot which is quite common in werewolf films whereby we try to find out who in the cast is the lycanthrope.The film benefited also from having a retro feel to it. I was almost put to mind of the kind of thing John Carpenter might have made back in the 80's if he had directed a werewolf movie. The music certainly harked back to that era with its moody synth heavy sounds being a very effective mood setter. Quite a few people seem to have a problem with the werewolf make-up in this one but I must say that I disagree. Pleasingly the film-makers opted to go for costumes and physical effects as opposed to cheap CGI and the result – to me at least – was quite organic looking monsters. There was one transformation scene, and while it didn't bring anything new to the table exactly, it was executed very well in my opinion. My favourite individual moment, however, was the scene where a werewolf leaps into the air and crashes down on a car windshield. It was an unusual and menacing moment which really stayed in the memory.All things considered, I have to put this down as a fine effort. With strong acting, a decent script, some good atmosphere and a few memorable werewolf scenes, I think this can definitely be considered a superior effort in its respective sub-genre.

The "geriatric horror" subject and the picturesque rural atmosphere of Late Phases might suggest some resemblance to the film Bubba Ho-Tep, but I found it more similar to Silver Bullet, because both include tenacious main characters following the track of a werewolf, defying their physical disabilities and the incredulity of those around them. In Silver Bullet, the hero was a boy on a wheelchair, and in Late Phases, we have a sightless man; but both movies share the value and sense of duty impulsing their main characters, something which brings them more deepness than other samples of lycanthropic cinema. I also want to point out the fact that Late Phases doesn't exclusively exist to display its monster; on the opposite, the screenplay places the main character's investigation on the spotlight, gradually plunging us into the experience of the sightless man, who employs his sharp instincts and agile mind to implement a plan which could kill the creature stalking during the night... or run the risk of ending up as dead as the people who were victims of "domestic accidents" and "bear attacks" (according to the local police). And we also have Nick Damici's solid performance, displaying conviction and personality in his role. Screenwriter Eric Stolze keeps the story on a constant movement, even though he's not afraid of occasionally stopping to focus on an introspective moment from the main character, or to point out the injustice against "older adults", relegating them to oblivion when they still have a lot to offer to society, or to their own families. However, Stolze also portrays the other side of the problem in the shape of the main character's son, who doesn't know how to handle such a difficult and stubborn father. We rarely find these topics in horror cinema, and that's why Late Phases feels like something special which transcends genres and makes us forget of a few small logical leaps which slightly decrease the realism of the story, which is very human and endearing for the rest. I had seen werewolves employed as a metaphor of addiction (The Howling), the teenage hormones (Ginger Snaps) and the futility of war (Dog Soldiers); and in Late Phases, they symbolize the triumph of human dignity, even if we only realize it during the full moon.