Ok, certain readers have been whining about not having enough to read, so I hope to gorge you all over the next several days. First up, my review of the Wolfman:
3.5/5 stars
The Good - The Wolfman embraces an old school storytelling style that makes this movie feel like a 1930s script filmed today, and I do mean that in a good way.
The Bad - Movie was delayed and reworked a lot, and the plotting suffers for it
The Ugly - Dumbest set up for a sequel ever!
Longer Take - The new Wolfman movie featuring Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins is a fun night at the movies. Anthony Hopkins deserves a lot of praise for his most entertaining performance since Silence of the Lambs. His almost casual chewing of the scenery is a complete joy to watch. Credit should also go out to Hugo Weaving for being the first intelligent police office I have ever seen in a horror movie. Before seeing the wolfman in person, Hugo Weaving's character does what you'd hope a policeman would: he asks questions and follows the laws he's supposed to protect. This includes defending suspects from a growing mob threat. Once the threat has been experienced, he also does what you would do, namely, get all the officers you can with a crapload of guns to solve the problem, but blowing it to pieces. Benicio Del Toro enunciates in this movie, which makes it one of his better performances, but his accent is so painfully not British or standard American that it is not a little distracting. Emily Blunt is very pretty and she's in the movie too. Her character is more or less a plot device so there's not much else to say about that.
What Really made this movie enjoyable though was not the cast, but the setting and style of the film. I felt like I was watching a film from the 30s or 40s with up to date camera work and CGI. The story contains certain tropes that give you an old timey feel: there is the mysterious old mansion, a legend of a supernatural beast, the simple minded townsfolk fear the magical gypsys, and the owner of the old mansion has a non-white manservant who knows something about monsters. Unlike the disaster that was VAN HELSING, this movie is staunchly old-fashioned and never tries to be "hip" or "modern." everything feels old and comfortable. The CGI is not great, but not terrible, and the Wolfman creature is an extremely faithful design that I quite liked. The only thing apart from the effects that updates this movie is the gore, and there are buckets of blood to go around! The most successful part of the movie happens before we get a good look at the creature. We get lots of violence and gore but only a glimpse of the monster. It reminded me of why movies like JAWS are so successful, there is something so much more terrifying about a creature you can't see. The Wolfman could have benefited from continuing this "less is more" approach, but it does do a nice job overall.
The last thing I want to talk about is what this movie does to differentiate itself from the current crop of werewolf and vampire movies, books, and TV shows. There are only two werewolves in the movie, and the movie shows how brutal and tragic it is too be one. Because there is a small number of monsters, each one gets to be as brutal as possible. You ever notice how a vampire or a werewolf's power seems to diminish has the number of them grows. You have to balance the power in order to tell a compelling story and that is why you get relatively weak monsters in the True Blood, Underworld, or Buffy universes. Oh sure, they may have some powers, but there are always other monsters to balance that power and make it seem weaker. Not here. When you only have one (or two), the brutality quotient goes up. Also, there's nothing sexy about being a werewolf. Sorry girls, no hairless man boys who instantly transform into pretty dogs, You get hairy, middle aged men horribly contorting into ugly man-wolf hybrids who rip off limbs, slash throats, and spill guts like it's going out of style. And that should make any horror movie lover happy.
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