By SHAWN MACOMBER
Starring Frank Grillo, Katrina Law and Lou Diamond Phillips
Directed by Steven C. Miller
Written by Matthew Kennedy
Briarcliff Entertainment
Once upon a time, staying out of a werewolf’s jaws seemed such a simple proposition, didn’t it? Carry a silver-headed cane, THE WOLF MAN taught us. Avoid secluded, nympho-infested self-help retreats like the Colony, we took away from THE HOWLING. Keep off the moors, the Yorkshire townies at the Slaughtered Lamb pub warned David Naughton and Griffin Dunne in AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON–and if the wisecracking pair had followed that advice, the seminal horror film would’ve been a coming-of-age drama.
All this advice proves quaint at best in WEREWOLVES, a smart, timely, wolfbane-huffing, practical effects-laden, action-packed epic in which the entire planet has effectively been reconstituted into a moor and a Colony–and a regressive-gene-activating supermoon has transmogrified more than a billion people into the titular monsters.
The film opens a year after the first mass transformation calamity. Shades of our recent real-world pandemic lockdowns, the unthinkable has become routine: The public retreats to its individually booby-trapped and werewolf-proofed homes in a high-stakes form of social distancing, while the government struggles to preserve shaky societal structures and mechanisms of control as it pursues a cure.
As both a scientific researcher and caretaker of the widow (Ilfenesh Hadera) and daughter (Kamdynn Gary) his werewolf-slain brother left behind, Wesley (Frank Grillo) exists between the worlds of waning power and proletarian survivalist necessity. When his boss Dr. Aranda (Lou Diamond Phillips) bites off more than he can chew (experimentally and, uh, physically) and their lab is overrun with lycanthropes, Wesley and his research partner Amy (Katrina Law) go full alpha and engage in a street-by-street battle with an army of the hairy beasts to save his family–and just maybe the world.
It’s a big, big swing that easily could’ve been a gigantic CGI miss in lesser hands. Instead, writer Matthew Kennedy and director Steven C. Miller knock it out of the park with a tight 94-minute action-horror ride that nods to all the right were-touchstones (which Miller discusses in our interview here) while not skimping on the heart and resonance of the family angle.
In short, it’s one of the most inventive, feral lycanthrope films to scramble out of the den since LATE PHASES (2014). Every aspect–from the full-commitment performances by Grillo, Phillips and co. to the detailed world-building to the macro/micro philosophical introspection to reverence for the lore of this most sacred of subgenres–feels like a labor of love. Does it hurt that the diverse array of imposing and gnarly practical-effects werewolves were designed by legendary artists Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr., who have helped elevate classics from ALIENS, STARSHIP TROOPERS and IT to THE MONSTER SQUAD, TREMORS and THE PREDATOR?
No. No, it does not.
Or that at least one terrible, swaggering, all-too-realistic human character gets a spectacularly gruesome comeuppance?
Also, a no.
For Miller, WEREWOLVES feels like a synergistic culmination–the film he was born to direct after cutting his teeth on vehicles for zombies (AUTOMATON TRANSFUSION), an evil Santa (SILENT NIGHT) and killer AI (MARGAUX). WEREWOLVES should serve as a great appetizer for Leigh Whannell’s big-budget WOLF MAN, due from Universal next month.
“Hollywood werewolves most often embody the ‘id’ function,” professor Tony Rondinone wrote in Psychology Today last year. “According to Freud, humans have created civilization as a repressive, if fruitful, buttress against our ‘primitive impulses.’ The id represents the primitive part of our mind, the part motivated by the ‘pleasure principle’ which must in turn be tamed by the ego’s civilization-building ‘reality principle.’” WEREWOLVES is a fun film, so I don’t want to overintellectualize it, yet on a subtextual level, it explores both sides of this civilizational coin as well as the tension between the two, overlaying Freud onto our fraught post-pandemic environment. And as we seek a way to navigate our way forward, a reminder that sometimes the wolf is us, and that a billion monsters ultimately can’t tear down the best of what we’ve collectively created, is a welcome message indeed.
