You never know what you might whistle up, although Sgt Harry Wells (Sean Pertwee) finds that not all members of the canine family are friendly as his section is stalked by a deadly enemy, below, in the fur-raising, gut-spilling and side-splitting Dog Soldiers.

This will leave you howling with delight – and fright
Dog Soldiers


Stars Sean Pertwee, Kevin McKidd, Liam Cunningham and Emma Cleasby
Rated MA

Reviewer :: The Big Irish Git

Prepare to have your blood curdled, your stomach churned and your sides split – Dog Soldiers is coming.

With barely a sniff of Hollywood formula, this British gut wrencher will surprise, shock and haunt you for a long time.

I saw it at a special preview (yes, I am bragging) about a month ago and I still cringe, shiver and grin all at the same time every time I think about it, which is quite often (and if you ever saw an Irishman cringe, shiver and grin all at the same time you’d probably lock him up).

In Dog Soldiers a section of Brit soldiers are on a routine exercise in the Scottish highlands on the same night as one of the most important football matches in British history. If that wasn’t bad enough, there’s a full moon out and things start to go bump in the night.

Before long our hapless heroes are up to their elbows in guts – literally. You wouldn’t want to rely on what happens next for first-aid tips on the classic disembowelment, but you will be left in no doubt as to what it might look like!

Now caught in a seriously hairy situation – between opposing forces and a bitch at the wrong time of the month (I’m not being rude; the leader of the pack is a female werewolf and there’s a full moon) – the boys take shelter in a recently abandoned farmhouse.

But, with the porridge still steaming on the kitchen table, all the chairs in their proper place and all the beds nicely made up, there’s no friendly bear family round these woods.

One by one the soldiers become dog meat ... well, you get the picture and I don’t want to spill my guts (’scuse the pun).

Dog Soldiers is seriously scary, seriously bloody and seriously funny (in a very black kind of way), leaving you with the kind of realism-overload feeling you got when you first saw Saving Private Ryan on the big screen.

If you want to see a movie that grabs you by the fur, shakes the frighteners into you and makes you belly laugh at the sickest things, then Dog Soldiers is definitely not a movie you want to miss.

And thanks to Becker Entertainment, 300 of you are off to see it for free as a result of the competition we ran in the last edition. Just don’t take the other half if he/she/it is even the slightest bit squeamish.

Dog Soldiers hits the big screen on March 20.

The Big Irish Git rates this movie 5 shamrocks

You can view more than 100 other movie reviews by The Big Irish Git on his personal web site www.bigirishgit.com