Werewolves

by Mike McGranaghan

I wouldn’t have guessed a super-gory werewolf movie could be dull until I saw Werewolves. The two-and-a-half minute trailer for Leigh Wannell’s upcoming Wolf Man provides more thrills and entertainment than the entire 94-minute running time of this picture. It’s little more than a bunch of scenes the filmmakers seemed to think were “awesome,” without the benefit of a compelling story or characters who have more than a single dimension.

The premise is reminiscent of The Purge. A year ago, the supermoon inexplicably turned a huge percentage of the world’s population into werewolves, leading to mass casualties. Now that supermoon is scheduled to arrive again. For one night, everybody is encouraged to stay indoors and to fortify their homes. Wesley (Frank Grillo) makes sure his sister-in-law Lucy (Ilfenesh Hadera) and niece Emma (Kamdynn Gary) are secure before heading off to work. He’s part of a project, led by Dr. Aranda (Lou Diamond Phillips), to test a new treatment by exposing several volunteers to the lunar event. They’re given a concoction called “moonscreen” to see if it will protect them. Yes, moonscreen - as in the opposite of sunscreen.

You don’t need a degree in rocket science to predict that the substance doesn’t work and werewolves are unleashed. And you can similarly guess that they make their way straight to Lucy’s house, requiring Wesley to launch a rescue mission. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…

Werewolves is incompetent from beginning to end. Matthew Kennedy’s screenplay is laughably stupid and devoid of even the tiniest shred of originality. The performances are stiff because the actors clearly don’t know what to do with such weak material. The film has been directed with all the grace of a drunken sorority sister trying to walk up stairs in high heels. It’s got no sense of pace, and chaotic editing takes the place of actual suspense. Worst of all, director Steven C. Miller makes the amateurish decision to have every single light source produce a massive lens flare. To say they’re distracting would be an understatement; at times, the flares are so enormous that they obscure the action onscreen.

Here's another example of the ineptitude: A minor supporting character in the story is Lucy’s next door neighbor Cody (James Michael Cummings), a former Marine who inexplicably sports face paint, fetishizes his guns, and screams “Oorah!” a lot. (Because veterans in bad movies are always either unstoppable killing machines or outright lunatics.) Despite minimal screen time, he suddenly becomes an important figure in the finale. He’s not a useful villain because we hardly know him. Dr. Aranda, who could be a useful villain, ends up sidelined. This movie doesn’t even know how to generate basic level drama.

No amount of violent werewolf mayhem can compensate for these problems. The visual effects used to create the lycanthropes aren’t even all that impressive. We’ve seen them before in other films. This is really the bottom line on Werewolves. In 1981, John Landis gave us An American Werewolf in London. That same year, Joe Dante delivered The Howling. Both those movies had better action, more effective humor, and greater technical skill. If you can’t do a werewolf flick at least as well as they did it 43 years ago, why even bother?

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