The Wolfman Review
Upon his return to his ancestral homeland, an American man is bitten, and subsequently cursed by, a werewolf.
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SPOILER FREE
The Wolf man appears to be trying to take advantage of a cultural trend here in the old US of A. It started with Interview with a Vampire. The quality continued w/Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer [series not movie], and Angel.
Then came the glut of extremely bad copycats primarily in girls’ teen fiction and romance novels and generally called paranormal fiction. In some corners it was called urban fantasy, but all of it appears to me to be romance novel Buffy rip-offs with much degraded quality. It has re-infected the cinema and TV with painful inventions like the Blood Diaries, Being Human, and especially Twilight.
While The Wolf Man does ride the coat tails of a currently dead wave it isn’t as lame as the previous noted creations. It isn’t a bad plot and being a period piece reminds me quite a bit more of Coppola’s Dracula than Twilight. Although I liked Dracula quite a bit more than The Wolfman.
This is clearly a remake Lon Chaney, Jr 1941 classic The Wolfman. The special effects and general look of the film is pretty good as is to be expected these days. Some of the Wolfman make-up shots are a little weak.
The main problem is that it isn’t very scary and the acting is quite wooden. I like Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins but they both seemed to be acting very flat which is a problem because the main drama is the estranged son-father syndrome. The love story was not quite believable as the connection between the male/female lead was barely touched upon and all of a sudden they are in love. There was no significant bonding time to show the proper development of chemistry between them.
I didn’t expect much and I got what I expected. I wouldn’t recommend seeing it in theaters unless you are a big fan of 1800s B-picture monster movies. I enjoyed myself somewhat even though it wasn’t that great.
Next movie viewing likely the new Alice in Wonderland.
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2 comments:
was it trying to be a horror movie or was it trying to be something else. I think, if you do a wolfman story, it has to be scary, but the audience will need to be torn because they feel for the infected human.
It felt like it was in the Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula zone. A little bit horror, a little bit romance, and tragedy. The problem was that the flat acting didn't draw me in enough to care as much as I could.
It was definitely not scare-centric like a zombie movie for example.
The better werewolf as protagonist movies focus on how horrible the man/woman feels when s/he goes on a rampage and bring you there with them emotionally.
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