Werewolves (2024)

2 Stars (out of 4)

Throwing in the Howl

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

An action movie with monsters, Steven C. Miller's Werewolves gets credit for keeping itself small-scale — and with nifty practical werewolf effects — but it also feels unambitious, missing opportunities, and feeling rather empty.

A supermoon event a year prior somehow transformed over a billion humans into werewolves. Tonight, the supermoon returns, and people are preparing. Molecular biologist Wes (Frank Grillo) secures the home of his late brother's wife, Lucy (Ilfenesh Hadera), and his niece Emma (Kamdynn Gary), setting up cameras and traps and leaving Lucy with a shotgun. He heads to work, where scientists will be testing a new "moonscreen," to see if it can ward off the moon's dire effects.

Lupus biologist and behaviorist Amy (Katrina Law) is there, and her partner Myles (James Kyson), who previously transformed, has volunteered for an experiment. At first, things hold steady, but then everything goes awry, and Wes and Amy must go on the run. Worse, Lucy's gun-toting neighbor Cody (James Michael Cummings) has unexpectedly turned and is specifically targeting Lucy's house.

Werewolves also misses a chance to embrace its inherent silliness, such as the fact that the Wes character is both a molecular biologist, and a ripped, muscular badass who is great at setting traps, using weapons, and plotting escapes. And the whole idea of "moonscreen" is kind of silly as well.

Additionally, like The Purge series — star Grillo is a veteran of The Purge: Anarchy and The Purge: Election Year — this movie teeters on the verge of interesting social commentary, especially in a post-COVID world, and avoids any of it. The heavily-armed neighbor Cody could have made a great metaphor, but is merely an inconvenient villain. And the behaviors of humans — some of whom want to turn back into werewolves — is never explored.

That aside, Werewolves is clearly intended as a "turn off your brain" movie, so these quibbles are mostly meaningless. The filmmaking tends to be rudimentary, sometimes clumsy, and sometimes derivative, but if it could have broken out of its genre movie comfort zone and tried something truly interesting, then it might have been worth howling about.