Sausages: The Making of Dog Soliders
Published by Encyclopocalypse Publications, 2022. 307 pages.
By Janine Pipe

I picked up this book some time ago, but like most of the books I buy, they each anxiously await to be read. When you buy as many as I do, sometimes that can be a long wait. But due to another book coming out about a movie directed by Neil Marshall, and co-written by the same author here, I figured it was about time to dig into this.

Right off the bat, the thing that I really enjoy about Pipe’s writing is that it comes across like talking with another fan. Her love and passion for the subject is front and center, which can’t help but engulf the reader in it. This isn’t just a fan gushing about a favorite movie, but so much more. In fact, it was Marshall himself that suggested the idea to Pipe about tackling this book project. Pipe has interviewed so many people involved, from most of the major cast, and plenty of the crew, with each of them gives insight into their little part of this world that Marshall had created. Working all together, they have left us with one of the best werewolf films with practical effects since the early ’80s, that still holds up after two decades.

Marshall speaks very frankly about this film, especially being his first picture, where he says in the intro, “I didn’t know what could be done, but better still I didn’t know what couldn’t be done.” This tells me that his passion for the project would overcome any beginning hurdles he would come up against and still make the film that he and his producer Keith Bell wanted. In fact, at the end of the book, there is the initial proposal for the film, which is not only very interesting seeing how they envisioned the film to be, but also that they were determined to make it the way they wanted, without interference. In the actual proposal, they state, “We are always open to suggestions, but the bottom line is that it will be our film, and we would rather stand or fall on our own two feet than have ideas or constraints imposed up on by people who believe they know what will or will not work.”

There is so much information about the making of the film that it will make you appreciate it even more the next time you watch it. Reading that main actor Kevin McKidd broke a rib on the first day of shooting but didn’t tell anyone for fear of getting fired. Several days later, where he figured there was enough shooting done, they couldn’t replace him, he tells Marshall, “I kind of broke my rib.”

We get to hear from the actors, but there is also a lot covered of what is going behind the cameras, such as the effects and especially the production design, with pics of behind-the-scenes and storyboards.  At the back of the book there are interviews with Marshall, actors Sean Pertwee (Wells), Kevin McKidd (Cooper), Darren Morfitt (Spoon), Liam Cunningham (Ryan), Leslie Simpson (Terry), Craig Conway (Camper), producer Christopher Figg, co-producer Keith Bell, cinematographer Sam McCurdy, production designer Simon Bowles, and special makeup artists Matt O’Toole, Justin Pithkethly, and Anthony Parker.

You can’t walk away from this book without having much more of an appreciation of the film and those involved. Pipe has done an excellent job telling the story of a group of young military unit holding up against an army of werewolves in a small house in the middle of nowhere. I’m pretty sure that once you finish reading this, you’ll be busting your copy out of the movie to watch again. And if you don’t have a copy, you’ll soon be buying it.