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| The Wolf Man (2010) How can a movie without vampires or porn stars have so much suckage?! |
| Although it’s been years since I actually sat down and watched them, I’m a big fan of the Universal Monster movies; Dracula, Frankenstein, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Phantom of the Opera, and of course, the Wolf Man. Obviously, I’m a big fan of monsters in general, but I always found these movies to be entertaining. By today’s standards they’re hokey and more than a bit cheesy and there’s not much in the way of scare. However, they are fun and enjoyable and if you turn off all the lights and let your mind go you can still squeeze a little bit of suspense out of them. They are reminiscent of a more innocent time, if I may use this tired cliché, a time when you didn’t need 13 gallons of fake blood, juggy-dancer boobies, and sex scenes that are {} this close to being hardcore porn to keep your audience entertained. Despite this fact, when I first heard that they were remaking The Wolf Man, I have to admit that I wasn’t particularly keyed up. I thought it was neat and definitely considered checking it out, but I wasn’t especially passionate or even excited about it. To be honest, I completely forgot all about it until the day it was released and the only reason I remembered it then was because I heard an ad on the radio. Thus, when I did go to see it I really had no preconceived notions about it. I wasn’t expecting it to be good, I wasn’t afraid that it would be bad, I basically just went to check out the movie. Let me tell you right here, right now that that helped out A LOT! And that should kinda clue you into what direction this review is going.
One quick side-story: the night before this movie came out, I had a pretty strange dream in which I was a werewolf. It was pretty vivid and even today a week or two later I can still recall it in detail. Keep in mind that I had not thought of this movie in a month or more and that it wasn’t until the next morning (after the werewolf dream) that I heard the ad for The Wolf Man. Odd, ne? Dat’s me! =D. |
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| The Wolf Man is a remake of the Universal Monster classic of the same name made in 1941 and starring Ralph Bellamy, Claude Rains, and Lon Chaney Jr. as the title monster (growing up, The Wolf Man [1941] was one of my favorite movies and Lon Chaney Jr. was one of my favorite actors as a kid). The Wolf Man [2010] stars Sir Anthony Hopkins (!!!!!), Hugo Weaving, and Benicio del Toro as the title monster. This movie is indeed a remake in the 1941 original, with most of the original characters and the basic plot present; of course, it skews radically in certain elements, plot points, and story. In a particularly awesome move, the 2010 film even starts off with the original poem seen in the 1941 original:
Even a man who is pure of heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright. However, whereas the original takes place in modern day 1941 England, this new one is set in 1890 England. Oh, and the other difference is that the original is a lot better. Okay, the movie opens with a guy walking in the woods at night while the moon is full and bright in the sky; you can see where this is going. Sho’nuff, Harry, having left the Hendersons at home, guts him. I said before that the old monster movies didn’t need gore to capture an audience, and honestly neither does this one. Oh, there is a ton of gore, nearly as much as an Eli Roth crapfest, but it really does nothing to capture an audience, it’s just kinda there because dammit it’s 2010 and they can get away with it. Anywho, turns out the guy is Ben Talbot, son of John Talbot (Sir Anthony Hopkins), a rich, white, big game hunter. In addition to his father, Ben leaves behind his fiancée Gwen (Emily Blunt) and his brother Larry (Benicio del Toro), an American Shakespearean stage actor. How come Larry is American while the rest of his family is British? Because after a stint in an insane asylum, he was carted off to the good old USofA, lost his Brit accent, and took up British theatre. Circle of Life. Gwen writes Larry to tell him about his brother’s death (actually disappearance since at that time his body had yet to be found, but it is found later). Larry happens to be in London performing and rushes back to the family estate to investigate his brother’s death. Turns out he hadn’t been to the old homestead in ages and it really went to shit. It’s falling apart, there’re leaves everywhere, cobwebs, it’s like the Crypt Keeper’s mansion in Tales from the Crypt. John and Larry share a tender moment before Larry goes to the morgue/slaughterhouse to view his brother’s body. He asks a few questions of the villagers and discovers that everyone’s pissed with the gypsies; everyone’s always pissed with the gypsies. Turns out 3 village men have been brutalized and eaten by the monster and it all started about when the gypsies rolled into town. Larry goes to question the gypsies and is followed by a mob of torch-carrying villagers ready to get some answers the old school way, by kicking the crap out of the women and children. Just when the arguments start getting out of hand, the monster shows up and runs roughshod over the whole crew, making no distinction between villager or gypsy. It makes like the Flash and zips all around in a blur, ripping legs and arms off, spilling intestines and basically just having a gore orgy while everyone runs around screaming and shooting each other. During the fracas Larry is bitten and thus the curse of lycanthropy transfers to him. |
| 02-20-10 |
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| Since it’s a month until the next full moon, we get a lot of exposition in the form of Larry’s flashbacks. Turns out he walked in on his father holding his mother’s lifeless body after she had cut her throat with a straight razor. Clearly that would screw anyone up, and Larry was sent to an asylum in order to cure his madness. Upon leaving there, he headed to America for a better life. Gwen, her brother’s fiancée, also begins falling in love with Larry and we find out that John is dead inside, he’ll remind us of this fact no less than 27 times.
Larry eventually turns into a wolfman and rampages the countryside. With a lot of blood spilled in torrents, Scotland Yard sends out detective Francis Aberline (Hugo Weaving) to investigate. If the name Aberline sounds familiar in reference to Scotland Yard, that’s because Frederick Abberline was the inspector that worked on the Jack the Ripper case. Yes, Francis Aberline is a reference to Frederick Abberline and, yes, this Aberline supposedly also worked the Jack the Ripper case. Yes, they tried to be cute with a crappy gag that 10% of the viewing audience even noticed and 1% of that actually understood. That right there should tell you everything you need to know about this movie. Aberline eventually catches Larry and sends him to an asylum in London. You see, everyone knows Larry is the killer, but they don’t think he’s an actual werewolf. They just think poor Larry is a nutcase that THINKS he’s a werewolf…wolfman. |
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| Real quick, let’s make a distinction between the terms werewolf and wolfman, and yes, there is a difference. Stop rolling your eyes! A werewolf is someone that actually turns into a wolf, in that they become a literal 4-legged dog-like creature. A wolfman is someone that grows hair, claws, and has the combined powers of Superman, Spiderman, and the Beast. A wolfman also wears pants so you can’t see his wolf nards, or in the case of wolfwomen, blouses so you can’t see their six breasts. Oh, and major props to those of you that recognize the wallpaper used in this review! ;) |
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| And now we’re back.
Larry does indeed turn into a wolfman right in the middle of his doctor cutting a promo to a roomful of other doctors about how Larry is crazy. In full wolf man mode, Larry breaks out of his leather restraints and hacks and slashes his way out of the hospital before rampaging through the streets of London. With the help of his brother’s ex-fiancée and his new bedmate Gwen, Larry makes his way home to have it out with his father John. Turns out John is really the werewolf that killed Larry’s mother and brother and cursed him with lycanthropy. Whoopsie-doodle, spoiler-alert…well, not really. About 10 minutes into the film you’re able to figure out the ‘vat a tvist!’ ending, so it’s really not a twist nor is it particularly shocking. How did John get to be a werewolf in the first place? During a hunting trip to Tibet, he was bitten by Gollum from Lord of the Rings; presumably John was looking for the One Ring. No, that is really not a joke as the wildchyld John meets and is bitten by looks suspiciously like Gollum. A fight breaks out, someone wins, someone dies, someone else turns into a werewolf, I don’t really care anymore. THE END…or is it??? Judging from the box office receipts, yeah, it’s the end all right. Let me just be perfectly blunt and say this movie sucks. Wolf Man 2010 sucks…it just sucks so much. And yet I kind of liked it. It was a stupid movie, no doubt, but it was fun in that MST3K riff-able sort of way (Mike, Kevin, & Bill over at RiffTrax are gonna have a field day with this one). Honestly, the script was oh so horribly written, although the acting, given the grave limitations of the script, was actually pretty good, especially Sir Anthony Hopkins, but he’s good in anything and always gives a stellar performance. Benicio del Toro played a good wolf man, although I would hardly say he was as good as Lon Chaney Jr. Of course, Emily Blunt was hot in her turn-of-the-century English garb and her tears were convincing. The directing was quite horrible. When the werewolf wasn’t ripping people to shreds, the movie really dragged on and on and on and on and on, and there are a lot of times when the same stuff is repeated over and over as if the director was afraid that the audience would forget something that was mentioned 10 minutes before. Of course, with the ever slow pace this was possible as I nearly fell asleep a couple of times. There are many times when the director was trying to go for those artsy, pretentious camera angles & tricks and they just plain did not work. And don’t blame the movie, either, those crappy fast mixed with slow mo cuts and double exposure sleep walking shots wouldn’t work in ANY film. The director also used the old “let’s scare the audience by having it be really quiet and then have something jump at the camera accompanied by a loud noise” trick. That’s not scary and it’s really annoying. And this movie used it a lot. I mean, a hell of a lot. I saw this movie Thursday, it’s now Saturday and I can vaguely recall most of the flick, but I distinctly remember counting no less than eight times the director threw a barking dog at the camera. Making it worse, it was executed in such a way that you knew exactly when it was coming, so the intended effect was completely lost. It did, however, have a lot of comedic moments, both intentional and unintentional…mostly unintentional. There is a ton of gore, from gushing blood, to limbs being ripped off, to guts spilling out onto the floor. However, it’s so over the top that it, too, loses the effect the director was going for and came across as exactly what it was: gore for no other reason than to show gore. It was kind of cool, but nothing new or shocking, you can see the same thing in any other cookie-cutter horror flick these days. Interestingly enough, there is a lot of CGI effects, and not the amazing Avatar CGI, but the SciFi channel original shitty CGI. The gypsies have a dancing bear (the subplot being that the villagers originally blame it for the killings) and it’s clearly CGI, as is a buck that the same villagers use as bait for Larry the Wolfman. Would a real dancing bear and deer really have been that much more expensive? It should go without saying that if they CGI’d a dancing bear, a lot of the werewolf scenes were also CGI as were the changing scenes. At least for the gore they went with good old fashion makeup and wet effects. The changing scenes were pretty cool, but were handled and directed with much more competence by John Landis in An American Werewolf in London. For the record, AnAWinL is a far superior werewolf movie. Hell, the 1941 original Wolf Man is far superior. In the end, Wolf Man was a horribly directed, horribly written shitty movie, but I had fun watching it (aside from the parts that dragged). There is one very cool scene I have to mention in which Gwen is researching lycanthropy. As she flips through different books several pictures are shown that are woodcuts and lithographs of classic werewolf cases. This was cool to me because not only did I recognize all of those pictures, but I know the stories behind them as well as I have done quite a bit of werewolf research myself. That being said, I still cannot in good conscience recommend this movie to anybody. I really can’t think of anyone else that would enjoy it quite enough to pay even matinee ticket prices while it’s still in theaters. If you’re really curious or enjoy monster movies where people get ripped to pieces before your eyes and don’t want much if anything else, it’s probably best to wait until it comes out on DVD where you can skip to the money scenes and bypass all the crap. I give The Wolf Man 2010 ½ a Nokie for being such a piece of shit plus an extra 2 Nokies because I admit that it will be a guilty pleasure of mine that I will no doubt purchase on DVD but not Blu-Ray in its 2nd week of release when it has been marked down to $10. |
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