This past weekend, my friend and I decided to watch the recent horror/thriller movie “Wolf Man“.
When I say “we decided to watch it”, I mean I was dragged to watch this movie, much like a dog on a leash. Ironic, no?
Anyways, if you know me, you know I don’t mess with horror movies, not unless I’ve already seen them, because at that point they can’t hurt me anymore.
A quick summary of the story; Blake, along with his wife and daughter, Charlotte and Ginger, venture back to his childhood home to gather the belongings of his father who was recently declared as ‘deceased’. Upon their arrival, they get into a car accident due to an abnormal-looking beast. Blake is then attacked by the beast, which leads him to become very sick. His wife an daughter start to realize that this is more than just a regular run-of-the-mill flu, and that Blake’s characteristics become more animalistic leading him to slowly transform into something more sinister.
I did this movie justice from my synopsis alone, I feel like I’m owed something now because that was brilliant.
Unfortunately, this summary practically sums up the entire plot of the movie with no other exciting nuances hidden anywhere else in the film, which ultimately made the film fall flat.
The problem with a story that has to do with a character as popular as the were-wolf is that everyone knows it, and it’s a story that has been done several times before, so in the defense of the filmmakers, it’s very difficult to create a new and more grounded version of this story.
With that being said,
Can we please stop making horror movies that have the characters making uncharacteristically dumb decisions?! I get that this is the fun of horror movies with audience members yelling at the screen, telling the characters to ‘run for their lives’, but with this movie, it’s like any sort of logic when it came to decision making went right down the shitter. I mean, the daughter and the mother in this film were so idiotic that after a certain point in the movie, my friend and I were actually rooting for the Wolf Man to get them.
Aside from the severe problems with the writing, Wolf Man does have some redeeming qualities in the ways it builds suspense and also through its use of special effects. The film did utilize the theme of the grotesque through the transformation scene which actually had me looking away from the screen (but, that might not come as a surprise to most because of my tendency to be a complete chicken-shit).
Along with that, it’s not a movie that relied on jump scares, which is where I think the movie personally shines. Rather, the movie focuses on trying to put the audience in the position of the characters and utilizes the visuals and the elements of the story to scare the viewer rather than use cheap and loud sound effects.
All-in-all, Wolf Man is…a movie, can’t argue with that.
All jokes aside, this movie might have something for someone, and while there was a large amount of problems that I found in the movie, it still proved itself to be a movie that’ll have you sitting on the edge of your seat, whether that be waiting for something to jump out and scare you, or wondering when the movie will end so you can finally leave and hyperfocus on the $14 dollars you spent to watch this piece of shit.
God, even the poster sucks. It’s like, “Go see Wolf Man, the movie with the poster without the main character on it”, so dumb.
Solid 4.5/10.
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