By Jonathan Cowie: Wolf Man is currently in cinemas and, given its mediocre IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes ratings (5.9 and 57% respectively), you may be wondering if it is any good?

Well, before we get to that, it is perhaps worthwhile taking a bite into this offering’s history. Jump back the best part of a decade and Hollywood’s Universal studios were casting an envious eye over the success of one of their rivals and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films. Universal then realized that they owned the rights to Frankenstein, Dracula and Wolfman and so established their own “Universal Monster” films. However, since then it has been a rocky ride. For example, Tom Cruise’s The Mummy (2017 trailer here) reboot was only a so-so success but had a big star and loads of effects hence was expensive and not a commercial success despite a not-too-bad box office showing. So profit-wise, it was a flop. Universal must have had déjà vu as this is exactly what previously happened with The Wolfman (2010, trailer here). Perhaps it was with this last in mind that Universal were a tad wary of venturing back into werewolf land. However, in 2020 The Invisible Man did surprisingly well (budget £5.7 million / US$7m and revenue £118million/US$145m) despite it only having a few weeks in the cinema before CoVID-19 lockdowns, but commercially it was successful as it was streamed online for a fee. It is best said that it perhaps “inspired” by the H. G. Wells story rather than “based” on it (trailer here). This success buoyed the studio but, alas, fortune was not with them, the Dracula spoof horror Renfield (2023, trailer here) flopped (it made a substantive loss having accrued less than half its budget) though for my money it deserved to do a little better at the box office, but its sizeable and big-name cast (hence expense £53 million /US$64m) did not make it profitable.

Taking all this together, you can see that Universal was by now very wary of another werewolf re-boot. Indeed, saying that they were nervous is arguably something of a British understatement. And so it was only at the start of last year that Wolf Man, which was well into pre-production but not actual production, saw Universal falter. Originally, the best part of a decade ago(!) Universal hired Aaron Guzikowski to write the screenstory. Apparently, that did not go down well with Universal’s powers-that-be as in 2021 Derek Cianfrance was set to direct and Ryan Gosling to star, but that would not last. Around Christmas, as 2023 came to a close, Derek Cianfrance was replaced by director Leigh Whannell and Christopher Abbott replaced Ryan Gosling to star (though Gosling would stay on as an executive producer).

Which brings us up to the present offering. The cast was kept minimal: just six actors playing five characters having more than three lines and I am told filming was done in New Zealand (scenic glacial valley), which has plenty of tax breaks for film makers. And the film was made quickly: under a year (not much time to fritter away cash!) Its budget was £20 million (US$25) and apparently it broke even within a fortnight of its release. So, is it any good?

Well, to my mind, it is not bad, but frustratingly not good either: I can see why it gets middling IMDB and Tomatoes scores.

It opens with a few lines of screen text info-dumping in very annoyingly small font size which means that, if you are not watching it at the cinema, you are going to need a large, flat screen TV to have half a chance of reading it unless they release a special for TV version. Anyway, we are told that apparently, US Indians were long aware of a disease they called wolf face, and then in the modern era a hiker went missing. Finally, the locals say that there’s a terrible creature lurking in the woods… So, within the first two minutes you have the set-up explained prior to a 15 minute opening act… Then we get a jump forward in time and the former child, to which we were initially introduced, is now grown up and living in a city with his wife and daughter. He gets a letter informing him of his father… And from that moment on, barely 15 minutes into the film, this offering’s plot arc is plain for the cinematically literate to see… In short, there are no plot surprises and – for the benefit of the cinematically illiterate – at the beginning of the final scenes, in a few sentences from the mother, there is an explanation given to the daughter (and the film’s viewers)…

Plus points, the acting is not bad, some of the effects, while not spectacular, are fine and there are also a couple of interesting point-of-view scenes. In short, Wolf Man is perfectly watchable, but I can’t see this one getting any fantastic film awards or even be short-listed for a Hugo. But I can see it turning a profit, though not big bucks, for Universal.

This last, if it comes to pass, may be enough to keep ‘Universal Monster’ films on track.

OK, so this is a perfectly serviceable horror, but is it a good werewolf film? Here we might reflect that the success of The Invisible Man (2020) was that though very different to H. G. Wells’ original, it stuck to the core of what made the story great: power corrupts and great power greatly corrupts with invisibility being a great power. That that film turned on itself, with the point of view being the victim who then used that power against the villain, subverted the form making it a post-modern take on the original. With werewolf films we do not necessarily know from the off who is the werewolf as for non-full Moon nights they appear as normal humans. Secondly, the person who is the werewolf is struggling with the animal within: the metaphor being that we civilised humans are at heart biological animals. However, with Wolf Man we know within the first few minutes that were are not dealing with a traditional werewolf as we see it in daylight. Second there is not transformation back to human form: in this film the wolf is a sickness; it could easily have been a variation of a zombie. This is not a werewolf film! If Universal Studios really wants to make a go of Universal Monsters, it needs to understand why its original intellectual property was so successful: it did not do this with this film!

So, what’s next for “Universal Monsters”. Well, looking a fair way down the line Universal recently let it be known that it was considering re-booting The Creature from the Black Lagoon (the original’s trailer here). But, for my money, if you want a really good, fairly recent (actually a quarter of a century old which shows my age), were-wolf film, then you could do no worse than Neil (The Descent, Doomsday) Marshall’s Dog Soldiers (2002).

Meanwhile, the trailer for Wolf Man is below.