The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Essner is a fan of Werewolves, as more sane people are. He’s also a fan of seeing all kinds of movies, which is why he dragged me off to see The Wolfman last Friday. Now, I had saw a preview for this movie, and it looked kind of interesting! Up until the title. I thought the title was lame. Then I learned it was a remake, and my interest went down even farther. But, you know, being social and all is important. I went to watch it.

This movie has absolutely no characters in it, and that is its real flaw. Sure, people were getting murdered right and left! Death and death and death! But you didn’t know anyone, and couldn’t really give a shit if they died or not. There was no tension in it, because nobody was interesting in any way. They tried to make these people characters by listing off things from their past, but a list doesn’t make a character. It’s a good starting point, but it doesn’t work on its own, and that’s all they do. It also doesn’t help that, in their rush to flip between actions at full moons, we miss huge chunks of time where, supposedly, these characters would have gotten to know each other, developed relationships, and so on. You know, the kind of things I needed as a viewer to care about them at all.
Because you don’t care about the characters, there’s nothing interesting in the plot, either. The moment Mr. Hopkins turns up, you go “Oh, he’s the villain.” It’s so transparent. There are absolutely no surprises, because there’s nothing inherent in the characters to make them do anything surprising. If you could write a short summary of “Generic werewolf movie” on a piece of paper, it would exactly mimic The Wolfman.

The whole generic thing is not helped by the weird choice of effects in the movie. I know this is a remake of a really old film, where effects were constrained by the tech of the time. But attempting to recreate the same-looking Wolfman just did not work. It was so stupid-looking, it wasn’t the least bit scary. This was a monster that was decapitating people without any problem, but you just couldn’t find anything to fear about it. Worse yet, when it became obvious the movie was going for a Werewolf on Werewolf showdown, I cringed. I knew it would look stupid. And it totally did. It was almost comical.

The movie tries to keep that comedy away by making it incredibly gory. You see all kinds of awful wounds, dead bodies, and chunks of flesh. I had to look away a bit. However, it’s very realistic gore. It’s not over the top, and I think that’s a problem. The movie isn’t trying to be cheesy, but it has cheesy-looking Wolfman. It’s trying to be serious, but it doesn’t spend any time making serious characters. It wants to be scary, but it just goes for lame jump-scares time and again, and doesn’t actually attempt to create any sort of atmosphere were one could actually be scared.

The movie isn’t bad enough to laugh at, and I feel that’s a problem. There was one humorous moment, where the female lead opens an Encyclopedia, it seems, looks at the page for “Lycanthropy”, and then turns the page… where the next article is “Ancient Gypsy Lore.” That was entertaining. But the movie as a whole is far, far from good. It’s painfully mediocre. It assaults you with mediocrity. I really can’t recommend giving this movie a view. It’s pretty much a waste.