Werewolves is a movie filled with baffling choices. These choices are easy to understand, but the film never takes advantage of them. Worse, it misses the most fundamental point of werewolf movies: the transformations.
Steven C. Miller is no stranger to the horror genre. I dug his 2012 Silent Night, a remake of the classic Silent Night, Deadly Night. It was an amusing slasher with some gnarly kills, a healthy dose of self-awareness, and a solid performance by Jamie King that suggested more than two or three dimensions.
Werewolves, sadly, has none of that. By contrast, it has no sense of humor, is visually unpleasant, and is filled with stock characters so thin that calling them caricatures feels too complimentary. Admittedly, had Werewolves been the big stupid fun time it clearly wanted to be, none of this would have been an issue. While it is certainly stupid it is also never any fun.
Matthew Kennedy’s script doesn’t help matters. The movie opens with a text crawl explaining that a Supermoon has triggered a latent gene in humans that causes people to turn into werewolves. This is the second year the supermoon has occurred, and the CDC and the world are trying to prepare.
The opening of Werewolves is the first sign of trouble. Miller and Kennedy give us a text crawl combined with footage of Dr. Anada (Lou Diamond Phillips ) giving an interview about what is happening. It shows a lack of faith in the audience and the early signs of how the film constantly undercuts itself when it comes to mood and pacing.
Frank Grillo plays Wesley, a scientist at the CDC. His brother was killed in the first supermoon event, leaving Wesly to care for his sister-in-law Lucy (Ilfenesh Hadera) and his niece Emma (Kamdynn Gray). In the beginning, Miller spends a lot of time setting up the family’s grief and loss, but it never feels like anything other than plot fodder.
Grillo continues to be this generation’s Charles Bronson. He is an actor more charismatic and interesting than most films he is hired to do. In a way, he is perfect for a movie like Werewolves, acting as a narrative shortcut. He is someone who, at first sight, tells us he is, at the very least, competent, so the film doesn’t have to do much work convincing us he is a badass.
Hadera, however, is as wasted as Lucy. A stunning actress, she spends most of the movie either crying or screaming for help, with Miller and Cox’s camera more in awe of her beauty than anything else. Though it’s never sexual, she is the sister-in-law, and that kind of torrid romance would be too interesting for Werewolves. At the very least, they could have made Lucy more than just the world’s worst shot with a shotgun.
Occasionally, she’ll try to fight, but it usually involves her firing a shotgun and missing, wasting precious ammo. Werewolves is so badly paced that we leave Lucy with something like seven rounds, and when we cut back to her, she’s firing into a room and down to her last two shells.
At times, I wondered if maybe there were crucial parts of the film left on the cutting room floor. Brandon Cox’s camera feels like it’s trying to craft a world out of the rubble and claustrophobic shadows. Especially in how he frames the CDC workers in their suits, with the camera inside, their faces illuminated and looking like the great and powerful Oz.
But in Miller’s hands, they come off as cheap visual tricks. Werewolves needs a John Carpenter, someone willing to infuse the film with a sense of scope. We meet many characters, such as Wesley and Amy (Katrina Law), a fellow scientist, fighting their way to Lucy and Emma. But none of them leave a lasting impression.
The most promising bit about Kennedy’s script is how the supermoon event affects everyone. This means that ANYone can be a werewolf. But don’t worry, Miller and Kennedy do nothing with this to build tension. Werewolves is a movie populated with people who could turn into a werewolf at any moment if they are touched by moonlight but never reaches even the most basic level of “the floor is lava” suspense.
Thankfully, werewolves aren’t hard to kill. Yep, no need for silver bullets; any bullet will do. The issue isn’t that Miller and Kennedy play with werewolf lore; they don’t replace it with anything; they merely strip it away. The reason why there’s no suspense or tension is because nothing matters.
Anyone can become a werewolf, but that’s no big deal because you could just kill them with any random gun if they do. However, don’t worry because no one who has lines in the movie will become a werewolf. It’s worse than nothing matters. It’s a world without stakes.
Miller and Kennedy make matters even worse by making the bizarre choice to cut between the kinetic action of Wesley and Amy to the stationary confines of Lucy and Emma playing Home Alone with a pack of werewolves. On some level, I am aware that Miller and his editor Greg MacLennan, are attempting to employ the age-old “back at the ranch” form of storytelling. A storytelling style that cuts back and forth between two separate stories at two different locations. But this really only works by building to a climax and then cutting to the other story before reaching it.
In a sense, Werewolves is a movie of nothing but climaxes. The action in Werewolves is rote; the scenes lack any punch because it’s all just busy work. Worse is how Miller and Kennedy use Emma as nothing more than a cheap, lazy way to build the tension they never want to put in the work to build themselves. Except Werewolves never hint that it’s a movie that will let anything happen to a child.
While Werewolves is more of an action movie than a horror movie, it still requires mood and atmosphere. But Miller feels too rushed, trying to get to the next scene as quickly as possible. Except it only ever succeeds in stalling what little momentum Miller archives.
The less said about Wesely’s brilliant idea at the end the better. Suffice it to say that for a werewolf movie that spent so much of its time acting like a zombie movie, it’s amusing to me that it ended like a vampire movie.
The mixture of computer and practical effects is balanced well enough. But Miller denies us one of the true joys of a werewolf film, the transformation scene. Instead, these scenes are hacked to bits with choppy editing, allowing us to see the beginning and cutting straight to the final form. Werewolves lack any of the visceral feel of the fragility of the flesh so prominent in werewolf movies. It’s a sterile film interested in only the occasional kill to showcase a hardworking effects team.
Speaking of the effects team, the werewolf design comes off as ungainly. However, I adored how each werewolf retained a bit of its human personality, whether it be clothing, a piercing, or face paint. Only it would have been nice if the werewolves had been allowed to have some personality or, at the very least, been lit well enough to see them.
Miller takes what is clearly meant to be a 90s sci-fi action film and turns it into a typical modern movie devoid of tension, atmosphere, playfulness, style, and human beings and instead stuffed the film chock full of lens flares.
Images courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment
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