As Werewolves opens, we’re informed that the previous year a supermoon event turned everyone who came into contact with moonlight into a werewolf, leading to an apocalyptic supernatural event that cost untold thousands of lives. Now, there’s going to be another supermoon in just a few days, and the world is preparing for the worst. That first nightmare night would have been the perfect setup for a low-budget horror movie, but instead, director Steven C. Miller has skipped to nightmare number two, which features A.) a military biochemist (Frank Grillo) working on a vaccine for lycanthropy and who also B.) is worried about making it home to his sister-in-law and her niece once C.) all hell indeed breaks loose again and he and his colleague Amy (Katrina Law) must cross a werewolf-infested city and stay in the shadows (with the assistance of the newly developed stopgap “Moonscreen” that temporarily blocks the light’s effects) in order to make it to safety.
It’s a tantalizing premise that offers so many directions and possibilities, so it’s hard to fault Werewolves for being so excited to just get to the good stuff. Unfortunately, that hurry has led to a movie that feels like both a sequel to a smaller film we never got to see and a wildly underwhelming action picture that doesn’t have the resources to realize its potential, leaving a ton of exciting ideas scattered across the table. The story howls for hordes of werewolves and relentless action, but there’s simply not enough of anything to display. Nobody is asking Miller to be Jim Cameron, but there is indeed precedent for making a couple of sets and a handful of puppets and costumes look like the most convincing of otherworldly environments.
To be fair, what Werewolves does manage to achieve is both amusingly bonkers and technically sturdy. Lou Diamond Phillips showing up as the head of the vaccine project with his mad scientist experiments is just the beginning. Despite the supposedly dangerous city crawling with werewolves being reduced to a couple of generic city block sets populated by one or two monsters, the action is relatively free of chop, and the animatronics and costumes are shown just sparingly enough to convince. In other words, very good work is done here on very thin shoestrings.
But this is also what makes it all the more disappointing that other, more promising, situations never really materialize — the mind wanders to thoughts of werewolf religious cults or people who actually want to turn and wreak havoc, or even what the motivation of the monsters could possibly be. Sometimes, they’re just presented as killer beasts, while at other times, they seem to possess some measure of human intelligence. It’s these little things, arcs, and ideas that could have been explored on a big scale, slipping through the cracks, that make the film’s ambitions such a double-edged sword, and it’s ultimately too tough to ignore the better movie that might have been. In the end, Werewolves just bit off more than it could chew.
DIRECTOR: Steven C. Miller; CAST: Frank Grillo, Katrina Law, Ilfenesh Hadera, Lou Diamond Phillips; DISTRIBUTOR: Briarcliff Entertainment; IN THEATERS: December 6; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 34 min.
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