Does anyone know how to make a good, scary, entertaining or even passable horror film anymore? With the junk that crowds the marquees these days as evidence, the answer is a sad, emphatic NO! The most alarming new trend is to steal the names of the classic black and white Universal horror films from the 1940s, tease film buffs with one or two resemblances to their plots, and pass them off as cheesy re-makes. Poor Dracula has been trashed so many times that he no longer resembles the suave but deadly Transylvanian count created by Bram Stoker and immortalized by Bela Lugosi. Now hack director Leigh Whannell, the bus-and-truck company version of Val Lewton, and the man who turned The Invisible Man into a colossal bore, returns with another moronic version of The Wolf Man so violent and silly and over the top it makes you wonder why werewolves were ever scary in the first place.
WOLF MAN ★ (1/4 stars)
Directed by: Leigh Whannell
Written by: Leigh Whannell, Corbett Tuck
Starring: Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth
Running time: 103 mins.
What you hear is not screams; it’s the angry protests of Lon Chaney, Jr., Claude Rains, Ralph Bellamy, Patric Knowles, Evelyn Ankers, Maria Ouspenskaya and the rest of the distinguished cast of The Wolf Man that made the 1941 original one of the best horror films ever made. What, they must be yelling, have they done to our unforgettable fright-film masterpiece? I love The Wolf Man. Every Halloween, I suspend disbelief and watch it again. In the new version, essentials like character development, dark and daunting special effects and narrative coherence have been replaced by so much screaming, bleeding, vomiting and thrashing all over the place that it wears itself out before any semblance of a plot is decimated before the first sentence is spoken. Gone is the mythic lore of lycanthropy that have kept werewolf movies alive for decades. No more wolfbane, garlic, pentagrams or silver bullets through the heart to keep a wolf man’s victims safe. All you need in this movie is one bite from a wolf man’s fangs, and you’re a goner forever. What passes for a plot is a prologue in which a hunter takes his son into the woods to shoot a deer. The man disappears, and the mystery is forgotten. But first, the warning words: “There is nothing here worth dying for.” They must be referring to the movie itself.
Cut to 30 years later. The boy has grown into a man with a wife and daughter of his own who, for reasons known only to screenwriter Corbett Tuck, drags them back to the cabin in the Oregon woods where his father disappeared. Several snarling offscreen growls later, with a truck that won’t start, a flashlight that won’t work, and a total absence of cell phone service, Dad is medium-freaked until a full-fledged werewolf who turns out to be his long-lost father bites him and the alleged terror begins. The hair he grows like gorilla fur serves as a warning that all is not right when the moon comes up, but when he begins to eat his infected arm and (no pun intended) wolf down his own blood like bloody-mary mix, his family knows it’s time to haul ass. The one ingredient that matters in any film about the curse of lycanthropy is how believably any human can transform into a wolf to keep the audience awake and ready for the next thrill. The special effects in this Wolf Man look sinister enough, but that doesn’t make it a better movie—just sometimes creepier. The entire running time of one hour and 43 minutes is devoted to one savage attack after another, as the werewolf’s daughter begs Daddy for parental logic. To make matters worse, she can read minds, so she always knows what the wolf is thinking. This leaves viewers to do some thinking of their own—like what time is it, and where are the exit doors?
Credulity is strained on every level in scene after repetitive scene. The shallow screenplay robs the actors of success whenever they strive for any kind of badly needed comic relief, which is probably why the acting seems so bland and unconvincing. Christopher Abbott as the wolf has only a few moments of ferocity that are not obliterated by relentless gore, but Julia Garner and Matilda Firth, as the wolf’s tortured wife and daughter, never manage to find a pulse. Sloppily crafted, chronically exaggerated and drowning in contrivances and cliches, Wolf Man is gritty but underwhelming, and never scary because it is never believable. Watch Lon Chaney, Jr. in the 1941 Universal again and get to know something memorable about suspense, terror, imagination, anxiety—and fun in the dark.
