Wolf Man

The painstaking efforts of Whannell’s practical-effects team are commendably gooey.

The performances are as good as they can be given the thematic static — Garner and Abbott are both smart, sensitive performers.

It doesn’t quite marry up underlying themes with its hairy horror surface, but Wolf Man delivers strong performances, skin-crawling bodily changes and excellently scary sequences.

The results are equal parts marital crisis, sins-of-the-father psychodrama and visceral body horror.

“Wolf Man” has a kind of 1980s horror movie vibe in that Blake’s transformation is achieved primarily through prosthetics.

There’s so much interior creaking and panting, and so little dialogue or plot, that if you closed your eyes, the projectionist could have swapped reels with a different genre of doggy style.



There are no extended transformation sequences, which I'm fine with. Instead, there are bloody treats of body horror sprinkled throughout, from bear traps to pulsing open wounds, to the subtly changing landscape of the creature's body.

[I]t’s unclear what Whannell is trying to say about nature vs. civilization. He’s given us simply a family-under-siege movie where the dangerous creature may as well have been Cujo or Cocaine Bear.

With tame action and undercooked tension, Wolf Man is both a bore and a drag.

Taken as a statement on man in society, <i>Wolf Man</i> is not a kind portrait... It might not even be a horror film, but a modest slab of psychological terror: how much alone time will drive a man mad, or into the forest for good?