Universal Studios: Werewolf: The Beast Among Us

            Why do I put “Universal Studios” in this title? Because this film was quite clearly billed as being from Universal Studios.  Seriously, this film wanted you to know that this came out of the same film company that gave us the big four: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and…the Wolfman.

 

            But first let’s talk a little history here.  Back in 1941, Universal Studios cranked out what has become a horror classic “The Wolfman” where Lon Chaney Jr. portrayed Larry Talbot, a man afflicted with lycanthropy after being bitten by a werewolf.  That movie went on to spawn a handful of indirect sequels where Lon Chaney Jr. continued the Talbot character as he struggled with the beast within.  In some of the sequels the writers even bothered to explain how he came back from the dead (spoiler alert, Talbot dies in the Wolfman).

 

But the point is this character became a staple of the horror genre, so much so that the story itself is almost constantly replayed in other films, with varying degrees of success.  However, it wasn’t until 2010 that we got our first straight forward remake of “The Wolfman”, this time with Benicio Del Toro as Lawrence Talbot, the man fated to become the titular monster.

 

This was…not a good movie.  It failed horribly in the box office.  It failed on DVD, even with it’s “Unrated: Extended Cut” edition.  What made it worse was that it was straight out of Universal Studios, which brought it into the canon of those classic monster movies.

 

Universal Studios had actually intended to spin “The Wolfman” into a series of movies, making it their own franchise.  However, given the financial and critical failure of the remake, they initially adjusted their ideas.  The sequels wouldn’t be of 2010’s turn, but rather of the 1941 classic.  That idea was also scrapped, since few of the horror movie going audiences would pay money to see a sequel to a movie nearly sixty-five years old.  At least that’s what the executives at Universal thought.

 

So that brings us around to “Werewolf: The Beast Among Us”, a sequel-in-spirit to the Wolfman concept, if not one specific storyline.  Universal Studios had so little faith in this film that if it wasn’t released simultaneously to NetFlix, Red Box, and DVD, then the releases were pretty darn close.  I caught it on NetFlix so I missed out on any special features that were present on the DVD.  Our story follows that of a group of werewolf hunters, because apparently in this world, the werewolf plague is so prevalent that you actually need werewolf hunters…several groups of werewolf hunters, so many groups that, they run into each other regularly.  Come to think of it, the supply of werewolves doesn’t seem to meet the demand of hunters.  The film opens up with what starts off as a relatively intense scene where a young woman, left outside on the night of a full moon, is seeking shelter at the home of a small family.  The father, in all his loving hospitality, takes several shots at her through a slot in the door, fearing that she is in fact the monster that has been menacing the area.  The house is then attacked by a werewolf tearing, literally tearing, a hole in the roof and descending.  The film tries a “less is more” approach with the monster effects in this scene because you rarely see the monster straight on, rather we are given shots of the monster’s talon and the bodies that fall as it swipes.  The monster kills the mother and father before the boy, all the while fingering a strange talisman hung from his neck, backs against a wall.  As the monster approaches the boy, he sets off a trap where in a chandelier falls and impales the beast.

 

Here we are met with CGI of a lesser quality, as the monster slowly transforms back into the girl from earlier, validating the fear the father had.

 

The boy grows into Ed Quinn, best known for his role as Nathan Stark from Eureka.  I’d tell you his character’s name, but I honestly can’t remember it and nothing I found in research to this film gave it to me.  By the time this review posts, there will probably be a hundred different sources telling me what it is, but the important thing is I don’t care what his name is.  He’s portrayed as a “Billy Badass” stereotype werewolf hunter, with long coat and jaunty riding hat, so we’ll call him Billy.

Billy has his team of hunters, including a patch eyed braggart, a young woman with a flame thrower, and Adam Croasdell as Stefan, the resident ladies man of the team.  They are hired to solve a werewolf problem in a village who is suffering under the attacks of a werewolf that is apparently larger and faster than anything seen before.  Whatever, the pacing came to a sliding halt at this point so I didn’t honestly care about Billy’s motivation or the introduction to characters that would have little to no impact on the story.  What we do get is a traveling scene where in we meet “new” creatures called wurdulaks.

I had to do some research on this, but a wurdulak, or wurdulac, is a vampire like creature from Russia that rises from the dead to feed on the blood of its still living family.  It’s also a death metal band, but that’s beside the point.  Here, the wurdulac is a significant problem since many of the deceased victims of werewolves will rise as these creatures if the bodies are not torched.  This adds a new wrinkle to the concept, and could have been made very interesting if they had played a bit more with it, at least more so then they actually did in the film.
 

Our hunters make it to the village where we meet the rest of the essential characters.  There is Daniel, played by Guy Wilson, a physician’s assistant who wants to study at university but won’t leave his village while the werewolf plague is still in place.  There is his girlfriend, who is written rather blandly, his boss, the Doc played by Stephen Rea.  You may remember him from another werewolf movie, Underworld: Awakening.  Or you may not.  He pops up from time to time in these kinds of movies with moderate success, usually playing the same character. 

Also in the town is Daniel’s mother, Vadoma, played by Nia Peeples.  She runs the local bar/brothel in “the village”.

 

            For me, the setting is very weird.  I think it’s likely to be Romania, but it’s never clear as no one has a consistent accent.  Daniel, who is established to have grown up in the village, has a clearly American accent, as does Billy Badass.  The girlfriend may be American or thinned British, and there are some vague European accents floating around.  They do nothing to firmly establish where the hell we are!  It could be anywhere, but it’s probably nowhere.

 

Remember how I said there were other groups of werewolf hunters?  Yeah, there’s another character with his own team of targets who runs afoul of… “our heroes?” and the two teams end up getting in each other’s way while the werewolf tears up the town for another night.  I’m not going to get much into how this story unfolds, or spoilers about whom the werewolf ends up being, but I have to say there were some really good ideas put out in this movie.

 

            While the identity of the werewolf’s human form is still secret, we have a lot of red herrings thrown about.  Before one werewolf attack, we see the constable suffering some sort of fit.  Before another attack, Vadoma goes missing, and even the Doc is put into suspicion before the identity is revealed.  This was played, I think really well, and really kept you guessing.  They treated this like a mystery and I had a lot more fun dissecting the identity of the monster.  It even distracted me from the Sy Fy channel grade special effects.

 

            The flip side to that is I don’t think the actor properly portrayed their shock and horror when they realized they were in fact the monster.  Again I won’t spoil it for you, but what starts off as a really good sequence of realization and regret gets quickly forgotten and it looses all momentum entirely.

 

The wurdulac subplot is brought up one last time, though you kind of see it coming if you are paying attention, and the pay off is “meh” at best.  You are kind of left with an equal measure of “what made you think that was a good idea” and general disinterest.

 

            So, would I recommend this movie?  Maybe if you just want to kill a little time.  It’s not a good werewolf movie, by far, but it’s also not the train wreck I thought it was going to be.  It lays some good foundation to build better movies on, but at the same time, its quality may keep those better movies from being made.  It is somewhat in spirit of the old Wolfman movies I mentioned before, but different enough to make it its own story.

Images for this review are the exclusive property of Universial Studios.