Dog Soldiers (2002), watched after YouTuber Rocklin Graves did a video on it and it felt like a good light werewolf movie to match my mood. No "elevated horror, metaphor for grief" stuff here.

It is what it says it is. Soldiers and werewolves. There's blood, there's deaths, there's a solder fistfighting a werewolf, there's some nice catch phrases, there's badass fight scenes done with low-budget indie passion. It's not going on my rewatch list, but happy to have caught it once.

Key difference from most other modern werewolf films is that you get to actually see the werewolves. There's some quick editing during fight action, but plenty of chances to see the full werewolf design in frame.

[–] redhorsejacket@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago

And what a design it is. Obviously it's guys or gals in suits and stilts, but it's a cut above what you might expect for an early 2000s indie creature feature.

I'm surprised it didn't make your rewatch list. It is, to me, the Platonic form of this type of creature feature, in the same way that Tremors is the Platonic form of the "creatures come to a small town" version. Nobody's winning awards for innovation necessarily, but there's merit to simply executing familiar tropes at a high level. Not an annual rewatch, but I dust it off every few years.