I grew up watching the old black and white Universal horror films. Every Saturday on TMC they’d play one of the classics starring Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, or Boris Karloff. Of all of them Lon Chaney Jr’s depiction of the Wolfman is still one of my favorite films of all time. So of course when I heard a remake of The Wolfman was in the works I marked my calendar. The prerelease hype al looked good, they’d put together a great cast, the special effects looked great, and the early trailers really had my enthusiasm up. Of course then the movie’s release got delayed again and again for reasons unexplained. Thus I entered the theater excited but with a bit of trepidation.
Story wise this new Wolfman takes the original plot and characters and mixes in several elements from another classic “The Werewolf of London”. Lawrence Talbot has still returned to his ancestral estate following his brother’s death, though this time at the behest of the brothers fiancé. And he still gets attacked by the wolf after visiting the gypsy camp. From that point forward however the story takes some dramatic turns away from the original’s script. A great deal of new back story has also been added as well as a trip to London and a few new characters.
The film has a great cast, Benicio Del Toro does an excellent job as the brooding and cursed Lawrence Talbot and Anthony Hopkins plays his father with a quirky mix of insanity and barely concealed menace that was a joy to watch. Maleva the gypsy fortune teller was played to a tee by Geraldine Chaplin. While Emily Blunt played Gwen, the fiancé of Larry’s dead brother and his love interest, a role greatly increased over the original film. And then you have Hugo Weaving playing Detective Abilene of Scotland Yard, a new addition to the story that helps tie in some of the new plot lines and locals. However for all the great casting a fair amount of the dialogue seemed a bit heavy handed and really forced, add in some strange transitions and cuts and the overall flow of the film was very choppy.
The special effects are impressive as is the make-up work. I’d heard some people complain about the transformation going CGI but I think it was done very well, the change and the werewolf end looking more real and far more bestial then the original, which I think works and makes it a far more frightening creature. However there were a few places where the CGI had a tendency to look a bit fake, especially during some of the faster paced chases and fight scenes where things tended to blur and textures seemed muddied. The addition of far more gore to this version is a result of changing times and may not have been so necessary, but then the film still has less than many other modern horror films.
Overall the movie was enjoyable to me simply because of what it was. As an homage to the originals it grabbed that nostalgic part of my childhood. But on its own it’s not a great film, it felt as if there were too many people involved in the final cut and they couldn’t quite decide what they were trying to make. It a good movie perhaps, and I would recommend it to people, but unless you’re a fan of the original or werewolves in general I’d wait a few months and pick it up as a rental. Just not sure that the average movie goer would get their ticket’s price in enjoyment out of it.