Crew
Director – David DeCoteau, Screenplay – Barry L. Levy, Producers – Paul Colichman, Andreas Hess & Stephen P. Jarchow, Photography – Horacio Marquinez, Music – Harry Manfredini, Production Design – Deana Sidney. Production Company – Christopher Filmcapital GmbH & Co. 1. KG.
Cast
William Gregory Lee (Jeffrey Allen), Elisa Donovan (Annabelle Morris), Eric Roberts (Dyson Keller), Michael Bergin (Vince DeGray), Jason Shane Scott (Meeks), John Paul LaVossier (Barnes), Bradley Stryker (Kennison), Louise Lasser (Landlady)
Plot
Jeff Allen has moved to New York City to further his dream of being a stockbroker. However, the only jobs he is offered is as a secretary. He confides his woes to the barmaid Annabelle Morris and she gives him the number of Dyson Keller, the head of the top stockbroking firm Wolfe Brothers. Dyson is impressed with Jeff and offers him a chance at earning a position. Jeff persuades Annabelle to go out with him, despite her rule about not dating brokers, and they became involved. Jeff is accepted to a position at Wolfe, but is required to give more and more to the job, including Dyson insisting that he must leave Annabelle. Jeff then discovers the secrets of the other brokers – that they are werewolves – and that he too is required to become one.
David DeCoteau is a prolific B-budget director. DeCoteau came to prominence in the video era of the 1980s. He began working for Charles Band at Empire Productions and continued at Empire’s successor Full Moon Productions. There he made a steady output of low-budget horror and occasionally science-fiction films with titles that include Creepozoids (1987), Sorority Babes at the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama (1988), Puppetmaster III: Toulon’s Revenge (1991), Beach Babes from Beyond (1993) and Test Tube Teens from the Year 2000 (1994), among others. DeCoteau currently has over 170 films to his name (frequently made under a bunch of different pseudonyms). A full list of DeCoteau’s other genre films can be found at the bottom of the page.
Around the time that Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) came out, I wondered how long it would take somebody to come up with the inevitable The Werewolf of Wall Street. It is a surprise that nobody has. Some time later, I learned of Wolves of Wall Street. It occurred to me that this was a riff on Jordan Belfort’s non-fiction book The Wolf of Wall Street (2007) that was the basis of the Scorsese film but Wolves of Wall Street came out five years before Belfort’s book, which leads to the interesting possibility that this film might have inspired Belfort’s title. On the other hand, a little research reveals that ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ was a nickname given to David Lamar, a conman who operated in New York City between the 1890s and 1920s and was the basis of the earlier film The Wolf of Wall Street (1929).
Around the beginning of the 2000s, David DeCoteau began to pivot from being just another B-budget director for Charles Band to specialising in independent genre content with a strong homo-erotic content. DeCoteau’s films from the 2000s onwards come filled with a great many gratuitous softcore scenes where young good-looking guys strip off their shirts, take long shower scenes and the like.
You sit watching Wolves of Wall Street expecting more of the same. The surprise is that this isn’t another of DeCoteau’s softcore homoerotic films. Certainly, such element is there not far beneath the surface. There is one scene where all of the young associates are made to strip of their shirts and get down on their hands and knees and crawl towards two seated women. On the other hand, the film does have a hetero romance at the centre of it. Although DeCoteau’s proclivities are never more evident in the contrast between the two – focus on a gratuitous scene where the guys tear their shirts off in slow-motion vs the scenes between William Gregory Lee and Elisa Donovan where they simply wake up in bed together and the first kiss, seduction etc is not even dwelt on.
I liked Wolves of Wall Street better than most of David DeCoteau’s other films of the 2000s and beyond. It is not quite as B-budgeted, although the brokerage firm looks as though it is simply taking place in the library of a rented house. The film has managed to bring in Eric Roberts who adds presence as the head of the firm and gets some decent dialogue. William Gregory Lee is better than most of DeCoteau’s usual talent-free pretty boys and paired well with Elisa Donovan.
What also works quite well is the central metaphor the film operates on – the werewolf as a Wall Street broker, which leads to all manner of allusions between the rapacious pursuit of money and being a predator. Although it is not a metaphor that you feel the film uses to its true advantage. The broking scenes needed to be opened up more with scenes on something like an actual trading floor rather than characters merely tapping on a laptop or a single person on a phone in the corner of a library.
