“Werewolves” Review: an old school throwback that gets lost in the gunfire

At this point, I think it’s safe to say that Frank Grillo has fought just about everything.

He’s fought gangsters, cops, demons, aliens, timberwolves, Mel Gibson multiple times, and even Captain America. And in his newest film Werewolves, which released this weekend in theaters, Grillo is fighting — you guessed it — an army of werewolves.

I firmly stand behind the belief that B-movies are crucial to the movie ecosystem. No big-budget studio is going to say, “You know what? Let’s have Frank Grillo as a scientist in a remake of The Purge but instead of the elites hunting people, it’s werewolves.”

But you know what? Steven C. Miller and his production partners did say that. And while it’s not the greatest slice of cinema and in some cases it’s actually pretty bad, it had enough to be an entertaining albeit numbing 90 minutes of werewolf schlock.

The setup for Werewolves is odd in that it almost feels like a sequel to a film that doesn’t exist. The beginning of the film uses some on-screen exposition to tell us that a year ago, a supermoon event caused some kind of mutation with human DNA, turning over 1 billion people exposed to the moonlight into werewolves. Unlike the traditional lycan lore of needing to be bit by a wolf to turn, the moon itself was all that was necessary.

Now, a year later, the world is preparing for yet another supermoon event. This is where we meet Wesley Marshall (Grillo), a military scientist who has been developing a cure to the supermoon’s impact on human DNA. At home, Wesley takes care of his sister-in-law Lucy (Ilfenesh Hadera) and niece Emma (Kamdynn Gary) after the passing of his late brother.

Werewolves feels in many ways like the story of three different plots trying to find each other. First, Werewolves feels like the story of scientists trying to find a cure to this supermoon lycanthropy, and after their “moonscreen” initially has some short-lived success, it soon fails and causes them to have to discover a way to survive the night.

The second plot of Werewolves is a guns-blazing survival action movie that follows Grillo as he and his partner are working their way to Lucy’s house in order to protect them from the wolves. Between them are streets of lycan-hunting vigilantes, but of course most dangerously, werewolves.

Which brings us to the werewolves themselves. Honestly, they look fantastic.

Rather than going the CGI route, Werewolves goes all-in on practical creature effects and that decision gives a tangible texture to these wolves as they live and interact with the film’s environments. With so much rain, smoke, blood, fire, and gunfire, these practical wolves engage with all of these elements in much more real way than they would had they been made in a computer.

Visually these wolves are something much more akin to Dog Soldiers mixed with a crocodile than any other werewolf you’ve seen on film, but the film also makes the clever decision to have werewolves bring distinct elements of their human selves through their transformations so that we never lose track of who is a werewolf.

And finally is the Purge spinoff that Werewolves feels like it was initially conceived as. Much like how The first Purge film begins with people preparing for another purge, Werewolves finds people preparing for another supermoon. In fact, there are a lot of similarities shared between both film franchises, particularly Purge: Anarchy (which also starred Grillo) as they both follow their characters traveling through an abandoned city trying to avoid death at the hands of those purging — or in the case of Werewolves, “moonlighting” as wolves.

But once the film leaves the science lab, Werewolves becomes a no-holds-barred survival B-movie. Unfortunately, this is where Werewolves also becomes more a loud action mess than a horror/science thriller. As soon as the plot demands, Wesley and his partner Dr. Chen (Katrina Law) seemingly go from scientists to Navy SEALs, tactically moving through the city of Miami dodging werewolves and moonlight.

And this is fun, but in becoming this loud action fare, it loses some of the horrific intensity of trying to hide from these wolves — because in a movie where werewolves are susceptible to gunfire (no silver bullet rule seems to apply here), why not shoot your way out?

In one standout scene, Wesley and Chen find themselves hiding under a truck as wolves sniff all around looking for them. The truck is slowly crushing down on them as a werewolf jumps on the top to howl. It’s a moment of heart-pounding tension that relies on the characters avoiding detection rather than blasting their way through the city. It’s when the film is its strongest and sadly it abandons that fairly quickly.

Despite all of this, Werewolves does deliver the finale that you want and closes the book on a messy, loud werewolf movie. But by the end, no matter how exhausting, this piece of werewolf schlock gives enough to put a smile on your face.

RATING: ★★