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The Wolfman’ is One Ruff Film


wolfman1.JPGHalfway through The Wolfman, I began wondering, “would the werewolf be quite so murderous if someone just gave him some Milk Bones?” I know Milk Bones always cheer my dog up. Really, you’d think someone would’ve tried to formulate a better strategy for dealing with the film’s rampaging werewolves. Perhaps if they’d brought in Cesar Chavez, most of Blackmoor’s populace would still be alive. And it might’ve made for a more interesting film, too.

As it was, The Wolfman turned out to be a pretty icky mess—which, for me, was disappointing. I’ve always had an appreciation for old-school movie monsters: You know, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the original 1941 Wolf Man. Granted, these classic Universal uglies were always primarily designed to scare the shoelaces off moviegoers, but they had a couple of interesting points going for them, I think.

wolfman2.JPGFor one, their power to scare was rooted in a pretty traditional moral framework. The Wolf Man is a great example: The werewolf in some ways resembles, as I said in my review, the beast lurking inside us all—our rage and lust and more animalistic instincts that we manage to keep kenneled most of the time. For Christians, these werewolves might serve as metaphors for our hardcore fallen natures—what humanity would look like without the saving grace of God.

Also, old-school horror flicks were almost devoid of gore. Sure, we understood the 1941 Wolf Man was probably eating people left and right, too, but did we actually see it? No. These movies, if made frame-for-frame today, would’ve garnered a PG rating, if that—perhaps downgraded from a G for “menace and excessive facial hair.”

The new Wolfman, to its credit, carries forward some of the old Wolf Man‘s philosophical underpinnings, for what they’re worth. But it ramps up the gore something terrible and thus becomes something monstrous itself. And frankly, it’s not like the film demanded all that extra blood: The Wolfman felt like a film that really wanted to be a gothic, PG-13 creepfest—but someone had other ideas and turned it into Saw with whiskers.

The result was, as I said, pretty disappointing—and pretty confusing, really. I mean, if your presumed core audience consists of teens looking for a little scare, why ratchet up the blood and potentially keep some of them out? Lots of studies have shown that PG-13 flicks are far more profitable than R-rated films. It just doesn’t make sense—like hiring Hugh Grant to star in the next Rambo movie.