Plot

After taking time to set up her new life in America, Sarah returns to her isolated countryside home in England for a much-delayed visit. However she comes to back to trouble: her mother is missing and assumed to be visiting a lover; her father has financial issues; and her ex-boyfriend Doug has gotten together with her childhood friend. But when a storm knocks out the power, they realise that they’re not alone in the house as a deadly creature is now roaming the corridors.

Sailing on the coattails of the fact that it’s produced by one of the guys who produced Dog Soldiers, 13 Hrs can’t hide the fact that’s a film low on budget and even lower on fresh ideas. I can't be too hard on it since it was shot in six weeks, edited quickly afterwards on a meagre budget and the fact that it is British (supporting my home film industry and all of that....). Actually I can be hard on it since surely there's more that one can do with a bit of imagination and creativity than simply rehash tired old clichés and band them together with a shoe-string plot.

I honestly had no idea that this was meant to be a werewolf film (shows you how little attention I paid to the DVD cover which actually mentions werewolf!). Nothing throughout 13 Hrs points towards lycanthropy and the brief glimpses of the creature give us nothing to connect the dots. The first section of the film introduces us to the characters and they’re all irritable, bland or a combination of the two. Even the heroine has a rather nasty streak to her. There’s no one to root for as they're continually bitching to each other and this one of the film’s glaring problems. Siding with an unknown enemy against this irritating cast isn’t so good when you’ve made your allegiances within the first ten minutes. 13 Hrs does slowly start to develop into something more interesting once the bickering and back-and-forths between the characters has been put on the back burner but these scenes inside the barn take up a huge chunk of running time. Adding unnecessary human drama when you're about to unleash a werewolf upon the characters doesn't need to happen as they're going to be under enough stress as it is.

There’s a subplot about a local animal handler who is recruited by the police to respond to the 999 call at the house but this literally becomes a dead end plot device which serves no purpose to the film except kill a bit more running time. The plot twist and revelation at the end is signposted almost right from the get-go if you're a bit plot-savvy and is a little too obvious to make the ending anything but unsatisfactory. At least the twist makes sense and is a satisfactory way to wrap things up, even if you do feel unfulfilled with it. But 13 Hrs consistently comes off as unfulfilling, be it the repetitive nature of the group moving from one room to the next and getting trapped before deciding what to do next, or the fact that you never get a decent look at the attacks or the creature thanks to poor production values or deliberate cinematographic choices.

The creature looks more like a relative to the Crawlers in The Descent with its balding head, lack of body hair and sharp claws than it does the traditional werewolf - I get trying to do something different to the usual werewolf look but the film tries too hard to piggyback on the successes of both of Neil Marshall's horror classics that it comes off as a little desperate. You won’t have a clue what it’s meant to be and the characters assume it’s some rabid animal at first. Red POV shots are banded around to try and make the creature seem scary but it’s hardly on screen long enough to even bother turning it into some sort of major threat. Attack scenes are quickly edited so you have little clue as to what is going on and most of the creature’s bloody rampage happens off-camera. The thrills and spills are very poorly executed throughout which, let's face it, are the only reason the majority of the audience are watching these types of horror films.

The cast aren’t great but it’s not like they had a lot to work with. Isabella Calthorpe, a socialite who married Richard Branson's son and also once famously spurned Prince William after he broke up with Kate Middleton, stars and she's pretty solid in the lead role but it's the two supporting cast members who will attract the bigger audiences. Lads mag favourite and Hollyoaks actress Gemma Atkinson has been cast for her physical attributes but must have had a good agent so that she didn’t strip down at any point and show us those attributes. Tom Felton, of Harry Potter fame, is trying to break free of his Draco Malfoy stereotype with a more laddish, uneducated role. It's too much of a binary opposite character for him to choose and you'll just be sat there thinking "what would Lucius be thinking if he heard his son speaking like this?" all the way through. It’s also pretty sad that this was the late Simon MacCorkindale’s last film and his cameo role at the beginning is a pitiful way to call time on his career. Though I’m sure Jaws 3-D was never high on his list either.

Final Verdict

13 Hrs is passable entertainment, no doubt watchable enough for anyone who’s never seen a horror film before but for anyone else, it’s just a film which goes through the motions and makes no qualms about doing that. There is potential here but it's clear that everyone involved played it as safe as possible. Even the bald werewolf.