If the classic monsters of yesteryear have proven anything, it’s that it’s imperative that you must be able to change in able to survive – and who knows change better than a werewolf. As times moved on from the timeless vision of a wolf man in ripped clothing loping across to moors, to a more modern, animalistic phase and beyond, the sight of a giant, bipedal/quadruped wolf creature bearing down on a terrified victim has been a fairly constant image as of late and one film hoping to tale full advantage of that is Steven C. Miller’s Werewolves.
Essentially one of those films you can virtually explain in full with just four words (The Purge With Werewolves), this is a film that you instantly realise isn’t going to busy itself too much with pointed social commentary or nuance – not when you’ve got a scene of Frank Grillo raking lycanthropes with a mini gun – but sometimes, I guess it’s just best to let a werewolf action action just be a werewolf action movie…
A year ago, a supermoon somehow managed to alter the DNA of anyone caught in its glare, transforming millions instantly into slavering, hulking werewolves who obviously went on a destructive rampage that claimed untold lives. Well, a year later and it looks like that devastating lunar happening is about to happen again and as everyone either leaves town or tools up, Wesley Marshall is battening down the hatches on his sister-in-law’s home before he joins up with the CDC in order to see if their experiments to offer up a cure have been successful. Things are tense, not just because of the werewolf invasion that’s about to hit in mere hours, but because Lucy lost her husband who was a first responder during the first supermoon event and Wesley feels guilty leaving her and her daughter at home alone – even if he has turned their house into a damn fortress.
Night falls and as the moon rises, everyone at the CDC have their volunteers ready to see if their new form of “Moonscreen” is successful (what, was Wolf-B-Gone voted down or something), but while the solution managed to repress any initial transformation, it regrettably only lasts for an hour before everyone exposed goes all wolfy and breaks out of their cages. But with the experiment an utter wash, Wesley realises he never should have left Lucy and Emma alone and with gun totting scientist Dr. Amy Chen by his side, they spray themselves with Moonscreen (I’m sorry to keep on about this, but wouldn’t Moon Block just sound cooler?) and try to forge a path through a werewolf infested city to get to his family.
However, Lucy must have a fridge full of rare meat I her house or something, because despite sticking to Wesley’s rigid rules, all of her wolfed-up neighbours (including the local gun nut) are sniffing around her property like her daughter and her are the three little pigs.
It’s a bad joke – but things really are about to get a little hairy…
OK, cards on the table. Werewolves is dopey as fuck. Not only does the presence of the always reliable Frank Grillo make the film resemble a direct remake of the second and third Purge movies only with masked psychos swapped out for animalistic predators, but it doesn’t even really do anything with its mindlessly kickass premise other than try and be as mindlessly kickass as the budget will allow. This no doubt will be a sticking point for those hoping that a flick involving everyone turning into eight foot wolves was going to use its adolescent concept to explore the beastial nature that lurks within all men, but for anyone looking for dome cheap thrills and some cool, old school werewolf effects, the movie manages to just about punch its own ticket.
Steven C. Miller has previously displayed a talent for maximising a tight budget in order to mimic the type of slick production values seen in much bigger productions in the likes of seasonal slasher reboot, Silent Night, and here he manages to pull off the same trick, giving everything a nice cinematic sheen mostly by brazenly using lens flare whenever and wherever he can. Grillo is good value for money too and while he adds precisely zero to the base line of his usual, grizzled, tough-guy-with-conscience act, that saw him get through the likes of Beyond Skyline relatively unscathed. In fact, it’s so reminiscent of previous roles, I’d probably think that if you were to edit in shots or looped snippets of dialogue from his previous movies you wouldn’t actually notice them; and yet if I was casting a movie about a global plague of werewolves, Grillo is exactly who I’d want to cast. While some of his action hero patter could use a little refining (“Go fetch!” is hardly the standard of 80s level Schwarzenegger and one scene just has him grunting “Motherfucker” repeatedly as if his character has run dry of puns), the sight of him hopping behind a mini gun to put down some really wild animals is so B-movie right, it hurts.
Unfortunately, some of the attempted world building seems to have been cut off at the knees due to budget restrictions as the movie keeps insisting on hinting a bigger, more interesting things while never fully investigating them further. For example, there seem to be groups of people who were turned a year prior who cannot wait to be turned again and who wear their copious scars as badges; elsewhere, in the aftermath of this year’s influx of transformations, our heroes stumble across a group who seem to collecting people up in cages in order to stop them transforming, but it’s never actually explained – nor are the tooled up strike team who drive around like werewolf exterminators who are soon ripped to shreds before the film can explore any further.
However, while many aspects of Werewolves cries out for a bit of context, one thing the movie does not skimp on is, mercifully, the beasts themselves and Miller even makes sure he does right by the genre by making sure that the titular were-bastards are realised in-camera by some awesomely crafted practical rubber suits that snarl, drool, roar and look great as they’re rampaging across sets painted with Aliens style strobe lighting. To be honest, to a lover of old school techniques such as myself, watching costume performers running about in fully articulated suits, courtesy of the guys responsible for a whole raft of Alien, Predator and Tremors movies, while real rain drips in their hair manages to help instantly a huge amount of sins. The fact that some of the lycanthropes also still carry some physical remnants of their human life – such as some torn clothing, a septum piercing, or even a pair of hoop earings – make things even cooler and a had to chuckle at the MAGA neighbour who transforms with his “Wolf Killer” flak jacket still intact (I guess it stands for Maul Americans Gruesomely Again, now).
Yes, the film suffers from too focused on its bitchin’ core concept to actually do anything amazing with it, but as a loud, ratatat-tat nod to the glory days of practical effects, Werewolves is ‘Were’ it’s at.
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