Werewolves

Also, I suppose I should formally welcome you to the 31 Days of Horror 2025 Edition. It’s October and for the last two years I’ve done this little thing where I watch a scary movie every day that I’ve never seen and then write about it. It’s nothing formal. The only qualifications are that the movie has to be classified as a horror movie by some other governing body. It could be listed as such on a streaming service. Perhaps the IMDb has classified it as one. Whatever the case, I’m not determining that the movies I’m watching are technically horror movies. I’m letting that job fall to someone else and I’m just perusing their catalogs. The second, as I’ve already mentioned, is that I can’t have seen the film before. This time of year is ripe for the classics. Once we get into those “Ber” months, there’s plenty of films that tend to linger in that category, be they Spooky or Santa related. Those movies tend to get plenty of play so I like to try and expand my horizons. Outside of those two main qualifiers, I don’t really have any other game plan. Sometimes people will theme things differently. I’ve done this twice. I like the free form to pick a movie each day that suits my mood and catalog the experience. Last year I burned out at 29 days so I’m going to do my best to keep up all the way til the end. So here we go.

Now that you’re invested in this, I’ll let you down gently. This movie is not great. I wanted it to be, despite all the signs that told me it was not going to be. Mostly all the things I read about it that said it’s not a great movie. It just came out last year. It didn’t look low budget or anything so I thought it would be good maybe and people just didn’t get it. I know I was reaching but a guy can hope, can’t he? I will say it wasn’t terrible. I’m not going to launch into my diatribe about how frustrated I get by the entire online community dumping things into amazing or dogshit, no pun intended. Enjoyment exists on a spectrum. It’s not the Ricky Bobby school of criticism where if you ain’t first, you’re last. This movie isn’t great but I did enjoy parts of it. Let’s focus on the positives first and foremost.

Frank Grillo is basically doing most of what he’s meant to do. They do tone him down a little bit which is kind of a shame but if he’s at the helm of the picture, like he is in this one, it’s going to be about this caliber. He’s not a bad actor but it’s clear he’s a not a lead either. I like that he’s trying to stretch himself here. He really tries and in the scenes where he’s churning out a would be one liner, he’s great. The writing doesn’t support said one liners but he delivers them masterfully. I think the problem is it seems like they may have written the part with him in mind but they needed too much from him. They credited him as a marine who became a molecular biology scientist. Now, I’m not saying that can’t or doesn’t happen. But if you want me to buy a marine turned biologist, Grillo isn’t on that casting call. He’s a great marine all day long. I’m absolutely here for that. Give him a whole bunch of guns and knives and let him go wild. Add in a handful of lesser known actors to fill out a “team” that can get knocked off one by one and send him into the streets to take out werewolves. I think that movie works all day long. Or, since this movie definitely has a zombie sort of feel to it with werewolves subbed in, give it a Day of the Dead feel where he’s the unhinged military man who adds another layer of tension to the mix. There’s a number of ways to play this and do so according to Grillo’s strengths and maybe it works a little better. But this wasn’t it, despite Frank really reaching for the brass ring.

The other thing I really have to give this movie is spectacular practical effects. Bringing a werewolf to life seems like a considerable undertaking on screen. There’s definitely going to be some CGI but in the 2 pieces of trivia available for this movie on IMDb, it was noted that they strove to do as many thing without the assistance of green screens and computers. So transformations in real time were almost all that digital editors handled. And while they didn’t have an army of werewolves, there were a few different scenes that featured a number of them sharing the screen at a given time. This means several, well made “suits” were put together and they were fairly convincing. I can’t pretend I didn’t get a whiff of a Rahzar vibe ala TMNT 2. But that one was well done also. I’m not tossing the filmmakers a bone here. The practicality of what they pulled off was really nice. In the midst of a story that was struggling from the onset, it was nice to have some truly redeeming qualities to the film.

Ok, that’s about all I really can be generous about when it comes to this movie. It was not great. Like I said, I’m no werewolf afficionado or anything like that. Some people rave about Ginger Snaps and I thought it was alright. So I’m not the guy to come in and just critique this flick into oblivion. I think my problem was as much as I tried to temper my expectations, assuming they would be dashed in the end, I still couldn’t bring the bar down low enough to really credit this film as a success. For the things they did ok, there were so many other things that just didn’t work. The reason there is a werewolf outbreak is because the year before there was a supermoon and that caused people to transform. No reason. It just did that. We are on the eve of another supermoon and are anticipating the same to occur. Apparently transformation is relegated just to supermoons because it’s been a whole year and this hasn’t been a problem since. Additionally, we’re employing science to test out “Moonscreen” (think sunscreen but instead of potentially protecting you from cancer it’s being a werewolf. Yeah. I know). We’re doing that, live. Right now. First supermoon in a year and we’re just throwing a bunch of science via Frank Grillo called moonscreen at werewolves and calling that a plot. Spoiler alert: it sort of works but only for an hour-ish at a time. I don’t really know. They didn’t publish any of their research and gave us Lou Diamond Phillips and Frank Grillo to try and bring us up to speed and that was just a bad idea.

I’m tempted to just start burning through all the things I had against this movie now but I don’t really want to rant. There’s plenty of things that don’t make sense. I’d say spoiler alert again but I think the movie spoils itself by being a movie. However, at the end of the movie there’s a character who lives next door to Grillo’s sister in-law and niece who’s a turd and he transforms into a werewolf, shockingly. He’s prepped and ready to fight until a werewolf just shows up and ruins that. So he’s really well prepped, clearly. But as you may have predicted, the big showdown at the end is Grillo, who has made his way home to the people he intentionally left at the beginning of the movie to go do science for 3 minutes and everything fell apart. But he’s home just in time. It’s still pitch black out but it’s apparently 15 minutes until dawn. Couldn’t have timed that any better. And despite his family being almost entirely safe through the entire evening, save for the singular box of shotgun shells they employed to ward off the gigantic wolfen beasts, we made it to the finish line. Oh, and I mention that singular box of shotgun shells in their defense. They only had a year to purchase more ammunition. And despite all the outdoor preparation Grillo does in a montage at the beginning of the film, including a drum of pepper spray rigged up to a sprinkler system at werewolf eye level, the decided a solo box of shotgun shells would probably do the trick. Meanwhile, there is also a scene she sits at the kitchen table surrounded by canned goods. They are meant to survive 9 hours through the night and that’s it. These folks don’t turn into werewolves and stay like that forever and humanity is screwed. Its 9 hours from dusk til dawn. Much like the movie of that namesake. It’s survival for one night. A table full of canned goods. They don’t eat anything all night. But one box of shotgun shells. Whatever. The movie is almost over now so good.

Back to the big showdown. 15 minutes to dawn. It’s still pitch black out. Not a hint of sunlight. One, nasty werewolf out front who has spent most of the movie trying to get into his neighbor’s house to no avail. Grillo and his sister in-law are inside with no ammo. He decides it’s time to play the hero. So he makes a medium sized emotional speech and gives his sister in-law his watch since there’s an alarm set on it for dawn and that’s going to be important to conclude this scene. Then he goes outside and transforms into a werewolf. But he does this to fight the other werewolf. Even though all the other werewolves throughout the rest of the film have either left each other alone or worked in tandem, like pack animals often do, this instance there’s enough Grillo left in the wolf to deliberately fight the neighbor wolf. So they fight for like 45 seconds similarly to the pacing of a 90’s episode of Power Rangers. It comes together in Grillo’s wolf (we know it’s him because his wolf has dog tags, pun probably intended) slowly pulling the head off the turd neighbor wolf while he just sort of lets him in a quiet, stunned manner. Think of a Mortal Kombat fatality but with muppets and from about 30 feet away. It’s very moving. Triumph for wolf version of Grillo! It should be a fitting end to the film, right? Nope. He turns and goes back inside to murder his family. The Grillo part of the wolf must be tired and gone now. From all the wolf fighting. So instead of staying inside and coming up with a plan to have the two adult human people trap and kill a dumb wolf from next door (which we do definitely know from other dumb things the wolf has done during the movie), Grillo goes and turns himself into a wolf voluntarily to kill the other wolf himself in what is proposed as a sacrificial gesture that at no point ever seems like he’s going to die. Maybe it’s because he knows he’s going to try and kill his family and she’s going to have to kill him? That’s the big final confrontation. Just as his sister-in law (I’m sorry, I didn’t really learn anyone’s name but can you blame me?) is about to shoot him, the alarm (remember, I told you it was important) goes off which means it’s dawn. So she uses her very last shotgun shell she found, which wasn’t super convenient at all. She shoots out a small portion of one of the boarded up windows. Because it’s technically dawn now, sunlight pours in through the whole a shotgun made from across the room. Clearly that’s enough sunlight, at dawn, to pour through a single hole in a boarded up window to cascade in and wash over Grillo and turn him back into a person, right? Oh, it actually is. I built it up like it wasn’t because it didn’t seem like it would be. Thankfully at dawn the sun shoots up into the sky so the whole sun is easily seen, just like in all the cartoons…I mean science films…I’ve ever seen. Anyways, at this point the movie is over so that’s a good thing.

If you love werewolf movies you can watch this one and it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever seen. It’s not good. If you know that going in and try and have fun with it, you could probably enjoy it differently. But as a straight up movie, it really is unfortunately bad. I wish it wasn’t. I wanted it to be good. But it’s just not. No matter how you try and spin it, it’s not good. I know you can nit pick any movie to death. This isn’t nit picking. It’s the bulk of the main story. It’s either never explained or it just doesn’t make sense. On top of that, the acting is never good enough to be meaningful. So it’s all the classic bad parts of a bad movie. But I watched it so that’s something. It kicked off this whole affair. I’ve been wanting to watch it for some time now and I can cross it off my list. I’ll count that as a win. I think it’s got a 4.4 rating on IMDb and that still feels a little high for my liking. I think it could potentially sport something in the upper 3 range but anywhere north of 4 out of 10 seems like too much generosity. So I’ll leave it at that. If you watch this, it’s on you. I’ve tried to be nice. At least as much as I can. I didn’t just go straight to “It’s dogshit”, pun definitely intended this time. But 2025’s 31 Days of Horror is officially underway now. So buckle up because we’re just getting started. And on that note, I’ll catch you on the flip side.