WEREWOLVES - Mark Reviews Movies

Werewolves, Briarcliff Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 5, 2024

With its silly premise and cheesy monsters, Werewolves is trying to be a very particular type of movie. It might well have succeeded, too, with even a little bit of imagination in its action and humor.

Instead, director Steven C. Miller seems to think the sight of actors in cheap-looking werewolf costumes aided by rudimentary puppetry is enough to make this material work. Everything around the creatures is so seriously handled, though, that one starts to wonder if the filmmakers aren't in the joke the movie appears to be attempting.

It has to be a gag, right? The setup here, from screenwriter Matthew Kennedy, is that, a year prior to the story's start, a supermoon caused the overwhelming majority of the world's population to become werewolves, which killed millions of people who weren't in contact with the moonlight. A catastrophe of that scale, in which everyone on the planet becomes either a monster or fodder, would probably have a more devastating impact than the one depicted here, in which the survivors just seem to go about their business and kind of surprised when another supermoon is scheduled to occur that night.

Sure, some people are trying to solve the problem of the entire human population, apparently, being susceptible to becoming a werewolf. They include our protagonist Wesley (Frank Grillo), an expert on pandemics and basically an action hero in waiting, and a CDC team led by Dr. Aranda (Lou Diamond Phillips). Aranda warns everyone to stay indoors in order to avoid contact with moonlight, but apparently, enough people got a taste for lycanthropy that there are still plenty of werewolves roaming the streets, trying to break into houses, and killing anyone insensible enough to ignore the obvious rationale behind a shelter-in-place order.

Then again, it's not as if the scientists are much smarter, either. They've developed a spray-on formula dubbed "moonscreen," which they distribute among a group of people who did transform into wolves the previous year and then expose them to the light of the supermoon. Once one sees the setup for the experiment, the problems with it become patently clear, and sure enough, the formula wears off, leading the test subjects to turn into werewolves and start tossing the bloody corpses of scientists throughout the lab. Wesley and his lab partner Amy (Kartina Law) escape the carnage, sending them out into the streets to try to return to Wesley's family.

His family, by the way, is the pair of his sister-in-law Lucy (Ilfenesh Hadera), widowed when Wesley's first-responder brother was killed during the first werewolf outbreak, and niece Emma (Kamdynn Gary). They spend the story locked up in their house, which Wesley has transformed into a veritable fortress earlier in the day.

The fence is electrified, and that might be the best defense, really, compared to the couple of bear traps Wesley leaves on the yard, the plywood board he covers in nails, and the single brick wall he installs at the backdoor. The bigger problem, perhaps, is that Lucy, as well as everyone else in the neighborhood, just sits around with every light in the house turned on—save for any where a werewolf can hide in a conveniently darkened hallway, of course. The light doesn't hurt the werewolves (Has no one considered using ultraviolet light against them, or is that too practical a hypothesis for a movie this ridiculous?), and it doesn't exactly give the impression that there's no food for them in the house.

It's not as if we need to see the werewolves in Lucy's house, anyway, because they're kept off-screen when they inevitably do arrive. It's a peculiar sight—Lucy firing rounds out of frame at monsters that apparently have broken into her home—and a seemingly unnecessary one, too. After all, Miller lets us see the wolves in all their hulking, scruffily assembled not-glory on multiple occasions. The filmmakers seem proud of the unconvincing beasts. A couple of them even have amusing little costumes, like the one with a leather jacket and a red-dyed mohawk. In a movie that wasn't so formulaic in its plotting and comedy (Apart from the premise and the costumes, it amounts to Wesley's on-the-nose one-liners), we might appreciate the scrappiness of them, too.

Instead, we get a lot of repetitive and awkwardly staged action sequences, in which people shoot and seem to constantly miss the giant monsters right in front of them. One character dies because she can't wait to get into the safety of a truck to smile, and even the promise of a werewolf-on-werewolf brawl at the climax of Werewolves comes far too late—well after the notion of some dumb silliness has proved to forget the second part of that description.

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