The Reel Review
A man’s family trip to his estranged father’s home in a remote, heavily wooded part of Oregon turns into horror when he is attacked by a mysterious creature and starts transforming into something resembling a wolf. Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner star in this re-imagining of the 1941 film The Wolf Man.
There are only three good things about this dull creature feature that director Leigh Whannell (writer of the Saw and Insidious films) wrote with his wife Corbett Tuck: a spooky setting, well-done creature prosthetics and some groovy “Wolf-vision,” illustrating trippy sights and sounds as experienced by our wolf in the making. But looking past the solid production and visual effects, the story itself is boring with a very predictable, yawn-inducing twist.
The pacing is exceptionally slow, the characters are one dimensional and the dialogue is so stiff and tedious that even three-time Emmy winner Garner (Ozark) is left with little to do other than run, hide and look bored in this disappointing and completely unnecessary remake.
REEL FACTS
• Chrstopher Abbott signed onto the main role after Ryan Gosling dropped out, with Gosling remaining as an executive producer.
• Wolf Man is the third film in the Blumhouse ‘Universal Monsterverse’ following 2017’s The Mummy and 2020’s The Invisible Man, which Leigh Whannell also directed. After the commercial and critical failure of The Mummy, future projects about Dracula, the Bride of Frankenstein and the Creature from the Black Lagoon were canceled.
• Although set in Oregon, Wolf Man was filmed near the southern tip of New Zealand’s North Island in the town of Mangaroa.
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