In news, non-illustrated, Review

Despite being one of cinema’s least interesting monsters, filmmakers seem determined to make more out of the Wolfman sub-genre of horror as there have been countless takes on the premise for decades. Lon Chaney, Jr. made a career out of playing such a cursed character, but whether it’s Chaney, David Naughton, or even Michael J.  Fox, there are limits to what a story can do with the idea of a man transforming into a marauding wolf.

And as soon as the werewolf character starts taking over the narrative, the same old story beats get hit again and again. Attack. Kill. Turn back into a man. Bay at the moon. Etcetera. You get the idea.  Throughout, the protagonist is doomed because of his inability to control those overriding, vicious animal instincts. There’s no reasoning with a werewolf, you see. He’s just a beast who wants to slaughter and eat. Even his friends and loved ones. Been there, howled at that, far too many times before.

Blumhouse Productions thinks it’s giving the Wolfman idea all sorts of new spins with this outing, right down to separating the title into two separate words – WOLF MAN. But after a somewhat interesting beginning, it quickly lapses into too much of the same old/same old. The film starts fresh with a long expositional scene in woodsy Oregon showing a young Blake Lovell  (Zac Chandler), afraid to go out hunting with his ex-military, blowhard of a father (Ben Prendergast, overacting every moment on screen here). They encounter some sort of beastly being, but is it a bear? A wolf? Perhaps a heavy-breathing psycho? No matter, the mysterious marauder spooks them both and embeds a trauma in Blake for the rest of his life. This becomes apparent when the film flashes forward some 30 years and the adult Blake is now a San Francisco nebbish played by Christopher Abbott.

Blake is also a writer between gigs, so these days he’s mostly playing dad to his headstrong 9-year-old Ginger (Matilda Firth). Unfortunately, he has trouble disciplining here and the upstart doesn’t mind his determined parenting very well. Blake has trouble with his wife Charlotte too. As played by  Julia Garner, she’s a strident reporter, the kind who chews out her hack of an editor loudly on her cellphone as she comes home late for dinner. This causes a riff between the already unhappy couple, and it all seems to be a commentary on Blake’s masculinity and inability to have much say over his family and their actions.

Soon enough, there’s even more consternation when Blake receives word that his estranged dad’s disappearance in the Oregon woods years early has now been classified as deceased by a state-issued death certificate. Blake, rather stupidly, thinks it’s a good idea to haul all three of them up to the lonely woods in a rented truck to clean up his father’s abandoned house. Mom and daughter protest but end up going along for the ride, but happy family bonding will have to wait. As soon as they arrive in Oregon, Blake loses his way into the dark, scary woods and not long after, circumstances force their rental vehicle off the road.

Blake says he swerved to avoid a mysterious figure standing in their way. The figure seems to be similar to the one that scared him so as a child, but is Blake hallucinating? No, he’s not as the figure soon attacks the stuck vehicle and leaves Blake with a nasty gash on his forearm. The trio eventually gets to Dad’s old place where they hole up for safety from their attacker, although they are stuck without cell service and seemingly little means to defend themselves.

From there, the script by director Leigh Whannell and coscreenwriter Corbett Tuck starts to tick off all of the Wolfman cliches one after another. The story veers into the familiar and any efforts to infuse the material with something new or provocative seem to have been left back in S.F. The physical transformation of Blake into a beast ends up playing out as less scary or heartbreaking than it should, and part of the blame is due to the same old beats being hit that we’ve seen so many times previously. The poor sap gets sick, starts to growl and grunt, and soon enough the whole shebang is handed over to the prosthetics department. Abbott does what he can with the material, but his character loses empathy when he starts chasing his loved ones all over the compound with only malice in mind.

If the take here was to try to show some teeth by having a Bay Area intellectual turn into a macho ass baying at the moon, count it a success. But too many of the tried-and-true tropes the story employs fail to frighten. It also doesn’t help that it feels like Whannell the director is stretching everything out to fill time because there isn’t enough script to do so. The film is only 1 hour and 43 minutes, yet it still feels like it is 15-20 minutes too long.

Whannell has done superb work before, writing a lot of the scripts for the SAW and INSIDIOUS franchises. He’s also directed plenty of films including the superb UPGRADE and the big hit THE INVISIBLE MAN, both from Blumhouse when they were firing on all cylinders. But it seems that the cliches inherent in the werewolf genre are just too entrenched for Whannell or the studio to do something meaningful with, at least in this outing. Quite simply, there are just not enough decent opportunities in this way too obvious material for anyone to give it some genuine bite.

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