Bad moon rising
You have to watch a bad remake like The Wolfman, directed by B-lister Joe Johnston, in the proper spirit to fully appreciate it. Perhaps “proper spirits” is more like it: I suggest a couple slugs of brandy, maybe a beer chaser or two. It won’t make the movie any better, but it helps pass the time.
Universal Pictures has now managed, it seems, to simultaneously resurrect and kill off every viable “monster” franchise in its lengthy portfolio. This franchise, you may recall, was first given life in 1930s classics like Frankenstein (director James Whale, starring Boris Karloff), Dracula (Todd Browning, starring Bela Lugosi) and The Mummy (director Karl Freund, starring Karloff). These monster movies may be painfully slow and creaky for modern audiences, but they still have an iconic visual appeal: the Europeans who directed them possessed a vivid gothic sense, even on a low budget. The moonlit castles, foggy bogs and eerily-lit laboratories of those films remain cultural touchstones.
Let’s see now: in the last decade or so we’ve had a bad Frankenstein reissue (with Kenneth Branagh and Robert De Niro), an overblown Mummy franchise (too much CGI) and far too many Dracula movies to count. Plus the abominable Van Helsing, a kind of three-in-one bad monster mix. It turns out it’s quite easy to kill off these monsters: bad remakes will do it every time.
When Universal ran out of monsters in the late 1930s, it invented a new one to keep the coffers filled: the Wolfman. They had B-lister George Waggner direct in 1941, and cast Lon Chaney Jr. as doom-stricken Larry Talbot, who returns from America to visit his dad’s estate in England, only to be bitten by a wolf one foggy night. Lycanthropy soon follows when the moon is full.
The original Wolfman was also a bit slow and creaky, but it featured cutting-edge special effects (an on-camera transformation from man to wolf by makeup wizard Jack Pierce) and a pathos-filled performance by Chaney, son of Lon Sr., the “man of a thousand faces” from silent films.
Nowadays, in the spirit of technology and modern times, Johnston resorts to CGI, rapid shock-cuts and buckets of gore. Really. Limbs and heads go flying whenever the Wolfman is on-camera. Gone is the inner turmoil of Chaney’s werewolf, clutching at trees, wrenching his features when he knows he’s about to rip someone’s throat out again. Instead, we get Benicio del Toro, apparently a huge fan of the original, who lobbied to play the character. (Someone asked the naturally hirsute Del Toro how he “located his character” for the role. No doubt he just looked in the mirror.)
The natural similarity between Chaney’s hangdog expression and Del Toro’s features is wasted, because Del Toro lumbers through much of the movie like a waxen figure, mumbling period dialogue (set in 1891) that never sounds natural coming out of his Method mouth.
Other wasted performances are phoned in by Sir Anthony Hopkins, playing patriarch Sir John Talbot (he mouths phrases like “Dear God, have mercy on our souls” as though he’s placing an order in a deli); Emily Blunt, trying in vain to locate a human pulse beating in her character, Talbot’s love interest Gwenn Conliffe; and Hugo Weaving, who musters slightly more energy as a Scotland Yard detective investigating the wolf attacks.
But, putting all the above aside, those who remember the original movie might find a few pleasures here. The gothic mood of Talbot castle is well-set (it should be, with a reported $85 million budget); the makeup, when shown in brief close-ups, is modeled on the original (though the graphic transformations of hands, feet and snout owe a lot more to Rick Baker’s An American Werewolf in London); and there’s a deepening of the themes in Curt Siodmak’s original script — the father figure is quite a bit more sharply drawn.
Some fun is had when Talbot is sent away to a London asylum, given some kind of diabolical waterboarding therapy, and made to recant his claims about his big, bad daddy. The patriarchal doctors try to “cure” Larry Talbot of his ailment by strapping him to a gurney and facing him toward the full moon. Big mistake. Del Toro mumbles something like “You morons… I’m going to kill each and every one of you!” before getting all hairy and fangy and doing just that.
There are some great shots of Talbot racing across London rooftops against a full moon, but his lightning pace and quick slaying skills only serve to dehumanize this Wolfman even more, never a great idea for a monster seeking a franchise. (Universal could learn a lot from the Spider-Man and Batman franchises: more human = more audience appeal.)
The look of the film has Tim Burton written all over it — foggy exteriors recalling Sleepy Hollow or Sweeney Todd’s London, say — so it’s no surprise that Danny Elfman did the score, though not to the studio’s satisfaction; extra material was added by another composer. Oh, and one other amusing touch: KISS bass player Gene Simmons provides the “voice” of the Wolfman — mainly snarls and grunts.
Interesting to note that the original themes of Siodmak’s script — with doggerel like “even a man who is pure at heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolf-bane blooms and the moon is full and bright” and the conceit that the beast must be slain by someone who loves him — are kept intact. The Victorian themes raised here — Freudian stuff about slaying the father, fears of women — remind us of Francis Coppola’s lurid, campy and highly entertaining Dracula, which more successfully tapped into the fin de siècle malaise of 19th-century England. In fact, a healthy dose of lurid camp might have helped raise this moribund remake from the dead.
