The werewolf genre, in my opinion, is one that’s been pretty underserved.
Not that there haven’t been some really fun modern examples of the genre – from Wolf Man to The Wolf of Snow Hollow – but it feels like pretty much every major monster in the horror canon has gotten at least a dozen movies in the last few years alone, while the lunar shape-shifter has been left mostly out of the equation. Which is a shame, because there’s a lot of fun stuff you can do with the werewolf – not least make a good old-fashioned B-movie creature feature, which is exactly what I had hoped for from Stephen C. Miller’s 2024 release, Werewolves.
And, to make myself very clear, I did not go into this expecting much – I mean, it’s led by Frank Grillo with his signature boot-polish black hair dye as an ex-Marine-turned-scientist trying to treat an outbreak of mysterious werewolfery across the globe with something called moonscreen. I was very willing to accept a bit of tropeness for that delicious B-movie hit, but even a bad film lover like me can only take so much, you know?
Werewolves is a rip-off of various, more interesting horror franchises – most significantly The Purge, of which Grillo is also a star – that’s dressed up in one of the most unbearably nonsensical scripts I think I’ve ever seen make it to screen. It truly feels like at least an hour of this movie has been cut at complete random, with glimpses of stories and settings that are too detailed to be a passing hand-wave but then are glossed over entirely to make way for another sequence of three werewolf be-suited extras menacing the same street for the sixth time in a row.
The action is matched in quality only by the acting, which is to say, exceptionally terrible – there’s not an actor here who does anything other than embarrass themselves, and with a script this awful, it’s only partly their fault. The scare sequences and action are nonsensical to the point of comedy, with about the same pacing and balance as my cat falling out of her chair when she does too big of a stretch when she wakes up after a long nap. It’s like they’re constantly rushing to get to the next part of the plot, but, when that’s as painfully thin as the one we got, it’s hard to see why.
The most irritating thing about Werewolves, though, it’s not what it screws up but what it does right – namely, the production design and the gleefully cheesy real effects. There’s clearly a lot of love for the B-movie genre here, even if it’s not exactly coming from the director or writers, and I wish the movie had leaned into this more fully. The best moments of this slogfest are the goofy great werewolf costumes, the over-the-top gore that looks straight out of Peter Jackson’s early work, the little details in the background of certain scenes that fill in this post-werewolf world, and if this was what we got over the course of these ninety minutes instead of this pseudo-action monster movie thin enough to see through, maybe it would have been able to heave itself out of the dregs.
But, as it stands, that’s not what we got – Werewolves is a spectacular howler, a shockingly incompetent film on almost every front and a frustratingly limited one when it shows little flashes of actual passion. Full moon or otherwise – this one isn’t transforming into anything worthwhile anytime soon.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Variety)
No But Listen 