Werewolves review – post-apocalyptic lupine horror makes an enemy of the moonlight
Intermittently effective but grindingly repetitive, this lupine-themed horror posits a world where nearly a billion people have died after a supermoon turned anyone exposed to its light into a werewolf. A full year has passed, and in an unnamed city (San Juan, Puerto Rico and Los Angeles, California are listed as the locations used) folks are preparing for yet another supermoon-werewolf apocalypse by securing their homes with booby traps and arming themselves to the teeth.
Sensitive yet studly former soldier turned scientist Wesley (Frank Grillo) takes leave of his widowed sister-in-law Lucy (Ilfenesh Hadera) and her daughter Emma (Kamdynn Gary, a strikingly good child performer) as he heads off to help out in a special experiment. At a facility nearby, a team of boffins have developed a kind of “moonblock” that is designed to stop the reflected rays from Earth’s largest satellite from turning people into snarling, uncontrollable werefolk. The science-y bits are insultingly ill conceived, but that’s not really the point here; it’s all about those moments of transformation, the money shots common to all werewolf films, coups de cinema overseen by make-up and prosthetic designers and various effects (both special and visual) teams. Here the actual transitions are quite nifty, featuring lots of bulging veins and grisly-looking in-between stages as people turn into different kinds of snarling mammalian creatures. However, once they are done transforming, the masks or make-up or whatever the actors are clad in are so ineffectual they end up looking like a bunch of underlit extras in Halloween costumes recreating The Purge while howling.
Indeed, there is a little bit of Purge-style political anxiety at play here, with Wesley the good American contrasted with his crazed (one might say rabid) neighbour Cody (James Michael Cummings), who is dangerously gun-happy and spends all his time watching what sounds like Fox News in its most alarmist mode. But these nuances seem less important to director Steven C Miller than setting up action sequences where heads are pulled off bodies and women quiver with fear and terror. Cinematographer Brandon Cox at least deserves a bit of credit for playing with light flares and colour schemes in such a way as to always make us aware of the deadliness of moonlight in this imaginary world.
