Fifteen years ago, Neil Marshall was pegged as horror’s next big thing after his first two movies were received hugely enthusiastically by critics and audiences alike, coming in for high praise after taking familiar tropes and putting a unique and entertaining spin on the formula. While the filmmaker has carved out a solid career for himself since, the argument could be made that he’s never truly lived up to that early potential.
The Descent may have been his calling card after raking in $57 million at the box office on a budget of less than $5 million, but his debut feature Dog Soldiers is pure B-level trash and all the better for it. The action/horror hybrid with no shortage of jet black comedy sees a group of soldiers sent on a routine training mission to a remote part of Scotland, who find themselves fighting for survival against a pack of werewolves.
Dog Soldiers doesn’t even try and hide the fact that the budget is minuscule and the entire premise is ridiculous, and the combination of gung-ho style and a tongue in cheek approach to the material has seen it become a firm cult favorite over the last eighteen years. Of course, fans have always wanted to see a sequel, and in a recent interview, Marshall admitted that now could be the ideal time to finally get around to making it.
“There’s more of a chance now than ever before. There’s things in the works and we’re seeing what we can do. Certainly, myself and Kevin McKidd and producer Chris Figg are up for it to revisit this world. Over the past eighteen years the question I get asked pretty much more than anything else is, ‘When are we going to get Dog Soldiers 2?’. Part of me thinks I’d like to go back and re-visit that world somehow. And if Kev’s up for it, then that would make it worthwhile for sure. So we’ll see. You never know.”
There’ve been several attempts at producing a follow-up over the years, but it never ended up materializing. With his latest effort Reckoning in the can and awaiting release, though, the genre specialist has a clear gap in his schedule, and based on his latest comments, a Dog Soldiers sequel seems to be a more realistic proposition than it’s been for a long time.
