Werewolves (2024) - Movie Review

One year after a super moon event turned anyone and everyone exposed to moonlight into a blood-thirsty werewolf, another super moon is about to rise in the night sky. As people across the globe race to fortify their homes, a group of scientists prepare to test a potential cure...

This, I am sad to report, is an Idiot Plot Movie. A movie wherein every single thing that happens is predicated on each and every character being an absolute dolt. It got so bad that, towards the end, I began rooting for the werewolves.

Not that my expectations were all that high to begin with, I knew what kind of movie I was going to see. The problem, I think, was that the people who made Werewolves did not know what kind of movie they were making, or had made.

While the film staggered and splashed across the big screen, my mind drifted back to the Werewolves panel at this year's Son of Monsterpalooza. That is where I watched star Katrina Law, director Steven C. Miller, suit actor Dane DiLiegro, and effects legend Alec Gillis engage in an entertaining conversation about the making of the film. 

A great deal of lip service was paid to the supposed human element of the film. Werewolves, they said, featured characters who were wracked with guilt over having become monsters that murdered or maimed family members, friends, and neighbors. There were also characters that enjoyed and embraced the change. Who yearned to return and revel in yet another bloody night of chaos and carnage.

Which is what I went in expecting to see. There was just one problem, though. Matthew Kennedy's scattershot script does not have people in it. There is no human element to it, at all. What the panel had described and discussed did not resemble what I was watching. 

While it was clear that the actors had been directed as if there was a human element to what they were doing, the script gives them nothing. There is little to no backstory, no motivation beyond what is needed to get somebody to move from Point A to Point B, and no sense of menace, scope, or urgency.

For a movie whose elevator pitch might have been "Think The Purge, but with werewolves," I was disappointed by how antsy and impatient the movie made me. Despite all the talk and preparation for the chaos and carnage to come, little to none of it is heard or glimpsed. 

Couple that with the primary characters never seeming to be put in any kind of life-threatening danger and what do you have? A 90-minute disappointing nothing burger of a supposed monster movie.