Reviewer Flickchart ranking: 4,106 / 5,622 (27%)
A supermoon causes one billion people to turn into werewolves until dawn. Werewolves places us one year after, when another supermoon is to appear. Lou Diamond Phillips plays the lead doctor of a team trying to find a preventive spray to keep people from turning under the lunar light. Citizens around the world are ordered to stay indoors, board up windows, avoid the moonlit, and hope they don’t become food for the wolf man.
We open on Lucy Marshall (Illfenesh Hadera), her brother-in-law Dr. Wesley Marshall (Frank Grillo), and her daughter (Kamdynn Gary) as they prepare their home for the upcoming invasion. Lucy’s husband died during the last werewolf feeding spree, and her buff, ex-military in-law must leave to assist in the experiment to find a cure. As luck would have it, things go awry at the lab and the gruff, buff, oiled-up Dr. Marshall must battle through an urban hellscape with the wolf expert Dr. Amy Chen (Katrina Law), whose husband was one of the lab’s participants.
As expected, few narrative points will matter as the film moves haphazardly from scene to scene and side characters are casually dismissed and forgotten. While lacking blatant incompetence throughout most of the runtime, there are a couple of instances when the action from one scene to the next is not from the same sequence. Whether this was lazy editing, a consequence of a strained budget, or thrown in for a laugh is up to the viewer’s judgment. The urban action lacks thrills, but the house sequences with Hadera do feel more intense (if poorly constructed). Director Steven C. Miller doesn’t show his hand on the precise type of tone he intends for his horror film, so one isn’t certain how positive or mean-spirited Werewolves will turn… though he does prove that you can include lens flares in nearly every scene. While Hadera’s character moves erratically from emotion to emotion, her character is the key to Werewolves’ successes, giving you someone to care about, if only tangentially.
While poor CGI does abound, practical effects are highlighted throughout. Miller’s canine monsters take inspiration from An American Werewolf in London (1981) rather than Lon Chaney Jr.’s Universal creature, though Werewolves may remind cult horror fans of Howling sequels more than anything else.
Werewolves is a mess from the opening scene to the slow-mo pause on Frank Grillo’s shining abs. But it is successful in creating an entertaining piece of junk cinema, with okay kills, acceptable gore, passable performances, and most crucially the right pacing that keeps the plot moving whether or not each piece makes any sense. If you think hairy tall monsters and women toting shotguns is fun, go ahead, walk into the moonlight.
