The continual rape of my childhood

Ok, I understand: Hollywood is, by and large, out of ideas. And remaking or otherwise exploiting old ideas is a quick fix for cash. I get it, I really do. And hey, sometimes it works out pretty well. The remakes of The Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the Left weren’t that bad. The remake of House on Haunted Hill was actually pretty good. Then you have the maddening failures: I would like a personal apology from everyone involved in making any movie released after 1985 with the word “Transformers” in the title. But there is a special pit of hell reserved for eternally skullfucking people who take a beautiful thing and shit all over it. I expect to see the producers and director of The Wolfman in that pit.

In the interest of full disclosure, I feel it necessary to say that the 1941 version of The Wolfman is hands-down my favorite of the old Universal monster movies, even beating out the logical choice, Dracula. Why? Partly because the monster is the hero. I love that rather than cheering on some fresh-faced ingenue while he hunts down and purges the world of the monster, you are forced to watch the monster destroy him little by little, until he must inevitably be ruined by fate.  Add to that delightfully gothic cinematography, good acting and the most interesting makeup design of any of the Universal movies, and The Wolfman is the easy choice. So I understandably went into this modern remake with some trepidation. The trailers were great. I had hope that it would be an earnest update of a classic, and not whatever you’d call the abortion that was the remake of The Haunting. And to be fair, not all of my hopes were dashed. It does seem to try to be earnest, and there are some lovely homages to the original, including a fairly faithful reproduction of the original monster design. The movie doesn’t fail as a remake, it fails as a movie.

Let’s start with the acting. Anthony Hopkins is a great actor, right? Fucking right he is. And I’ve seen some praise for his work as Sir John, the patriarch of the cursed Talbot family. This praise is utterly misplaced. Hopkins could not seem less interested in what’s going on. He delivers every line in a casual, detached tone that completely sucks any bit of urgency or worth from his words. Imagine the creepy detachment of Hannibal Lecter, but without any of the creepiness. He just seems bored, and with every syllable you can hear “paycheck”. Benicio del Toro, whom I generally love, takes all of the intensity that’s lacking from Hopkins’ performance and doubles it up, so that every moment he’s on screen is a festival of scrunched eyebrows and pained-looking expressions. You’re haunted, I get it. He really doesn’t have much in the way of dialogue, but what he does have is alternately growled and grunted, to the point that he’s practically a wolf already before he ever gets bitten. It’s the kind of incredibly nuanced overacting that only a truly great actor given a lousy script and terrible direction can achieve. Emily Blunt chose the disinterested path as well, and even her dramatic turn at the end of the movie is about as impassioned as a tax form. Hugo Weaving continues to act with his eyebrows, but hey, you gotta do what you’re good at.

The general level of apathy from good actors led me to wonder if this was some sort of misguided directoral decision. Joe Johnston’s handling of the wonky script is, to be as favorable as I can, awful. First, the movie runs at the pace of a drag race: as soon as it starts it revs immediately up to maximum speed and doesn’t slow down until the end credits deploy a parachute to stop it. There is literally not a moment’s pause in the entire film, no time to catch your breath, no time to get to know or like the characters. It is utilitarian in the extreme, getting from plot point to plot point with the kind of efficiency that would give a German engineer a hardon. The net effect of all of this speed and efficiency is to kill any identification with the characters and to eliminate any suspense. There are no scares in this movie, only the cheap jump that comes from a very loud, very sudden noise paired with a flash-cut of something with fangs. And believe me, there are a lot of those.  Cheap scares are only fun when they come at the end of a slow buildup of genuine suspense, and throwing one at the audience every five minutes like clockwork completely destroys their effectiveness.

I feel like Johnston’s major failing is that he appears to not understand the nature of horror at all, especially gothic horror. This is a genre that requires slow burn and needs you to identify with the characters. It is based on dread and an almost existential realization of the horror of the situation that real humans have been put into. Johnston (and the scriptwriters) have deprived us of all of these, leaving us with nothing but the husk of a horror movie. Sure, it hits all the bases: dark woods, gypsies, brutal medieval medical treatment, family secrets and a Sikh guy for some reason, but it doesn’t use any of these conventions. It just parades them past as though checking them off on a list.

Another major gripe of mine, and further proof of Johnston’s lack of understanding of horror, is the gore. This is a gory movie, to be sure, but the gore is handled in a very awkward way. It’s explicit, with flesh being torn and extremities flying (even a brief shot of the werewolf tearing what looks like the liver out of some poor sumbitch), but it’s neither realistic enough to be legitimately disturbing nor over-the-top enough to be joyful. It straddles a strange line that leaves it just a matter-of-fact part of the fantasy. I think this sums up nicely my feeling about the direction of the movie – it’s just there. Johnston’s pedigree (mainly childrens’ movies like Jumanji and The Rocketeer) seems to leak into this movie more than is appropriate. I don’t want to say this is a kiddie version, but it’s not a mature product. Imagine a table with sharp corners. Johnston hasn’t gone so far as to make the whole thing out of Nerf foam, but he’s rounded off the corners enough to make it more or less harmless.

There is much to be said about logic flaws in the script, and some truly awful dialogue (“Do you hunt monsters often?” “Sometimes you hunt mosters…and sometimes they hunt you!”. Thanks, Nietzshce.), but I won’t waste your time with it. It’s just bad, you get my drift? I will take a moment, though, to mention an homage to a far better film that goes terribly wrong. Three-quarters of the way through the movie there’s a scene of a rampage through the streets of London that is clearly a ripoff of the famous climactic scene in An American Werewolf in London, right down to the tipping over of an historically-questionable bus and being cornered in a dead-end alleyway by gun-wielding police. But as if to remind us of his misunderstanding of what makes for a good horror movie, this sequence is all of about two minutes long. What made that scene so striking in An American Werewolf in London was its sheer, monstrous length, the fact that it goes on and on and on, and more and more people get killed. In Johnston’s version of the scene there’s a quick run around the town, then it’s off to an implausible escape.

So what’s good about it? Well, the design is, by and large, pretty nice. The woods are appropriately spooky, the manor house (aside from the questionable use of some, as my friend Gordie put it, “Walgreens spider webs”) is big and dingy, the streets of London are nicely Victorian. As I mentioned before, the design of the monster makeup is great, and a lovely updating of the original makeup. The movie has all of the visual trappings of gothic horror, which leads me to believe that the production designer had a much better grasp on what they were doing than the director.

And, uh…yeah, that’s pretty much all the good I have to say. Honestly, it was a pile of shit.