Wolf Man Review

 

Wolf Man is a horror movie and reboot of the iconic 1941 film, The Wolf Man. Blumhouse Productions and Cloak & Co. were in charged of production with Universal Pictures distributing. Leigh Whannell directed as well as wrote the story with Corbett Tuck.

The story is, after being told his father has died, Blake decides to take his wife and daughter to his childhood home in order to repair his relationship with his spouse. But as soon as they get there a bloodthirsty wolf like monster wants to devour them. Now the family must survive the night or perish.

Initial Reaction

I was excited to see this solely for Leigh Whannell. He's a tremendous director, I loved what he did with his version of The Invisible Man and I had a good feeling he could do something great with Wolf Man.

Cons

I've got nothing to say for this section.

Middle Ground

There's a lot for this section starting with the pacing. In some areas it wasn't too bad pretty good actually. But there are a lot of instances where it's slow, so slow you almost feel the runtime. Then there's the tension. There's quite a few scenes that are executed really well, there are times though where I wasn't exactly scared but I was still enjoying what was going on. For this next part I'm gonna lump dialogue and characters together. Because they were both the same thing and that was serviceable. For me, I wasn't disappointed in those aspects of the movie and at the same time I wasn't blown away either. Both of these things were just fine nothing to get completely upset about. For the last part of the middle ground portion I'll dedicate it to the Wolf Man itself. Let's start off with the good. I loved what they did with the transformation. As suppose to doing the typical thing of bite then one howl later werewolf, we're instead treated to it being more like a flesh eating disease. The guy loses his teeth, his hair falls out, his skin looks like it's decaying. It's really sick stuff and helps separate it from other wolf man transformations. However design wise...not so impressive. Sure the makeup and stuff is really good, I can't fault the artist for that it's just the final form just didn't look cool. From what I've heard Leigh Whannell was shooting for something that looked like it was wolf and man clashing. That sounds great but what we got looks like the transformation stopped at the halfway point.

Pros

Really the only thing I truly liked was Leigh Whannell's directing. While he and Corbett didn't have the strongest script, I can't say his directing sucked. He did a fantastic job directing.

While not Leigh's worst work as a filmmaker, it is one of his weakest, especially compared to the previously mentioned Invisible Man and his criminally underrated sci-fi film Upgrade. Having said that it's fine for what it is. I'm not gonna rush in to get the DVD or Blu-Ray but I'm not gonna feel like my time was wasted either.

My final rating is, Okay.

So that's all for now. Come back on Monday, Jan 20th, where I'll be stepping back from reviewing and write about censorship and how one shouldn't be traded for another. If you want to know what I'm talking about like I said before come back on Monday. Until then, enjoy the rest of your day.