The Wolfman (2010)

I wasn’t planning on reviewing this next. I wasn’t planning on reviewing it at all. I had other older movies to write up, and newer films to watch. But it was on TV the other night, I tweeted about it, and was amazed by the negative responses I had received. Even from my own daughter, who declared it, “Crap”! Little squirt, she’s eighteen and still likes Spongebob Squaredick.

My first favourite monster was The Wolfman. Lon Chaney Jr brought his tortured antihero Larry Talbot to life, though in fact my first exposure to him was in, of all things, ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN. I loved he seemed to have the strength of the Frankenstein Monster, but with speed and savagery. I also loved the black shirt/beige trouser combo, but that’s just me.

The bipedal werewolf stuck around until the mid-70s, until THE BEAST MUST DIE (which I reviewed here) but it was AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON and THE HOWLING, and the advent of incredible special effects, and that a quadruped werewolf became the norm. Which is all well and good, but I never lost my affection for Talbot and his werewolf mask. So when I heard the story was being retold in 2006, with one of my favourite actors Benecio Del Toro (an avid fan of the original movies, and a collector of Wolfman memorabilia) in the lead, and directed by Joe Johnston (JURASSIC PARK 3, CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER. And I waited. And waited. Years. Just when I thought it had been shot with a silver bullet and buried in the hills of Hollywood, it was released in 2010. Was it worth the wait?

The movie opens in London, 1891, as Ben Talbot (Simon Merrells) is in the woods at night, which is never good unless you’ve got a beer, a gun, a girl and another gun. But Ben has nothing but a pair of trousers that undoubtedly get filled as he exits, pursued by a bear – or something with fangs and claws, killing him.

“No, I wasn’t Keyzer Soze!”

In the following weeks when the body doesn’t turn up, Ben’s grieving fiancée Gwen (Emily Blunt, LOOPER) contacts Ben’s brother, Shakespearean actor Lawrence Talbot (del Toro) to have him return home. He does so, in time for the body to be found, and for him to be reunited with his estranged father Sir John (Sir Anthony Hopkins, SILENCE OF THE LAMBS). Father and son hardly have anything cordial to say to each other – as a boy Lawrence found his mother after she’d committed suicide, and Sir John had him committed in an insane asylum after he had suffered delusions (I’m sure that won’t be relevant later, however), and the fact that they meet over the death of Ben doesn’t help. A medallion found on Ben’s mutilated body directs suspicion towards his death to the local Gypsy camp, though people in the local village mention similar deaths which occurred there decades before (I’m sure that won’t be relevant later, however).

Claws through the mouth. Almost as bad as paper cuts. Almost.

Lawrence visits the gypsy camp for answers, in time for a strange creature to attack everyone, ripping men to shreds and scaring the children; won’t someone think of the children? Lawrence does, and gets bit by some creature for his troubles. The Gypsies patch him up, some of them urging that he be killed, but one Gypsy, Maleva (Geraldine Chaplin, THE ORPHANAGE) insists that now, only someone who loves him can kill him now (I’m sure that won’t be relevant later, however).

Lawrence recovers back in the family home, though he experiences intense, disturbing dreams, and over the following weeks appears to fully heal, to everyone’s astonishment. Meanwhile Inspector Aberline (Hugo Weaving, THE MATRIX) arrives from London to investigate the killings (those in the know will recognise the character’s name as the real-life inspector who investigated the Jack the Ripper murders in 1886, and the movie confirms that this is meant to be the same man). Abberline suspects Lawrence is the killer, given his past mental history and renown for playing murderers on stage (if that’s a working theory, I want to have it applied to Rob Schneider and sue him for repeatedly disturbing the peace).

You try catching a bus in London after dark…

Sir John proves brusquely unsympathetic to Lawrence’s confusion about his current state, and when hunters take up positions in the woods to catch the creature, when the full moon rises, the creature in Lawrence emerges, hunting down and slaughtering the hunters. In the morning, Abberline and the local constabulary track down a bloodied Lawrence – he’s looking guiltier than a puppy sitting next to a pile of shit – as Sir John lets them take Lawrence back to London, to the same asylum where he’d been locked up years before.

This is gonna end well…

THE WOLFMAN had a long and troubled pre- and post-production history, with many recognisable names attached and detached from the film, including Brett Ratner and Frank Darabont, before Joe Johnston came in at the proverbial last minute. There were also a number of rewrites and reshoots, and delays in the movie’s release, and it shows. The plot is overlong – even the theatrical cut is overlong – and with some needless complications. The tone during many of the werewolf killing scenes move change from deadly serious to joking; there were moments when I almost expected the Wolfman to make a Freddy Krueger-style quip after a death. And though del Toro looks the part, and does the brooding bit well, I’m still waiting for the reason why a young aristocratic Englishman sounds like he’s Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die..

Excellent work from Rick Baker!

But all that aside, it’s a joy to watch. The look, the music, the scenery are all faithful to the original Universal movies, but in glorious colour. And glorious gore! Veteran FX artist Rick Baker created the makeup for the Wolfman, the original movies having been the inspiration for his entering the business, and though he’d also done the work in AMERICAN WEREWOLF, he stayed true to the original movies’ look for the creature, as designed by the legendary Jack Pierce. Most was good old latex prosthetics, but some of the work ended up as CGI, which Johnston couldn’t avoid given the lateness in which he joined the project. And if you ignore the CGI, which isn’t all that bad to begin with, you can watch some decent blood and guts spilled. Del Toro, Hopkins and Weaving deliver solid performances, Emily blunt wears a corset, thus doing precisely what is required of her.

THE WOLFMAN deserves a better reception than what it’s received (certainly better than that piece of shit VAN HELSING). Watch the trailer below, and maybe have a look out for it yourself.

Deggsy’s Summary:
Director: Joe Johnston
Plot: 4 out of 5 stars
Gore: 6 out of 10 skulls
Zombie Mayhem: 0 out of 5 brains
Reviewed by Derek “Deggsy” O’Brien. The D is silent. But to the people of the Sigma Draconis star system, it sounds like “kwakabara”