Werewolves 2024 Film Review

2024 has not been a record year for werewolves movies. Aside from a few small, little-known indie films and some Z-grade duds, the genre's major releases have been limited to this summer's "The Beast Within," a thinly veiled domestic violence fable that constantly forgets it's a werewolves movie. And then there's "werewolves," a new action-horror movie starring Frank Grillo, which hits theaters next weekend. Stream action werewolves movie on Flixhd movie.

"The werewolves" is the better of the two, as it wisely avoids deeper meanings and instead is enjoyable as a pure B-movie. But B-movies are not without reason to be entertaining. They still have to offer something, whether it's by presenting colorful characters, an exciting plot, or simply a world that feels uniquely weird. Unfortunately, Werewolves fails to deliver on that promise, ultimately offering little more than a great premise.

At least Steven C. Miller's film has a great logline: The Purge, but the characters are werewolves. Seriously! In werewolves, the last supermoon (a full moon as far away from Earth as possible) awakens a gene dormant in humans that turns anyone touched by the moonlight into a snarling, fanged monster. Anarchy is the result. Cut to a little later, as the next supermoon is about to rise in the night sky and humanity prepares for a second werewolves outbreak. Grillo plays Wesley Marshall, the most powerful CDC scientist of all time, who is part of a team led by Lou Diamond Phillips that searches for a cure for humanity's sudden werewolves problem. They invent "Moon Protection," a spray treatment that aims to protect anyone who uses it from the effects of the supermoon, and plan to test it on some of the caged volunteers in a government research facility. Naturally, not everything goes according to plan. The setting could have had better security measures in place, as Moon Protection only works for about an hour. After the film's first bloodbath, Wes and fellow scientist Amy (Katrina Law) try to cross the werewolf-infested city to contact their widowed sister-in-law (Ilfenesh Hadera) and her niece (Camdyn Gary), who were attacked at home. Everyone has to be alive by sunrise.

This is a cool setup for a werewolves movie, but Matthew Kennedy's script doesn't give it much use, and that's exactly what makes werewolves so disappointing. First of all, the scope of this movie is very narrow. Well, this may be more a budget issue than anything else, but when I say "Wes and Amy are trying to cross a werewolves-infested city," what I really mean is "Wes and Amy are trying to cross a few abandoned blocks" and one or two werewolves show up. The setup calls for an aerial view of the pack of werewolves roaming the city, and the movie never delivers on that.

It also doesn't delve too deeply into what's going on with society in this new world. How hard is it for people to avoid the moonlight on a supermoon night? Where do the homeless go? Is there anyone who wants to become a werewolves and wreak havoc until the sun comes up? Regarding this last question, the film hints that these people exist... but that's just the way it is. The werewolves would have had to expand his brilliant concept in every direction. Instead, it focuses solely on Wesley's unimaginative journey back to his stepsister and her child in a town that seems nearly deserted.

Even the werewolves' motivations remain unclear, as their actions are often driven by the needs of the field. Sometimes they are just killing machines, and sometimes they retain some of their humanity. Their intelligence levels fluctuate wildly. They may swarm in groups if necessary, but are just as dangerous to each other as they are to untransformed people nearby. There is very little consistency in how the wolves interact with the world around them.

Werewolves isn't particularly interesting on a technical level either; the wolves themselves are mostly practical effects, with heavy use of CG help for their transformations. Their design, with large wolf heads on furry stuntman-sized bodies, looks way too clunky. Some of them are designed to stand out, such as a "punk rock" werewolves with a nose ring and an avid gun fanatic whose red, white and blue face paint remains even after transformation.

But even they don't stray from the pack as much as they should, and the wolves' movements look awkward and unthreatening, likely because they're limited by practical special effects. At the beginning, Werewolves has the feel of a local amusement park, with flashing strobe lights during the first major action sequence. But that gives way to nonstop lens flares that litter the rest of the film. There are a few seconds of decent bloodshed, which earns the film its R rating.

Grillo, who also appeared in some of the real Purge movies, is your usual reliable guy, but werewolves doesn't have any interesting or interesting characters to base himself off of. Other characters in the film seem completely disposable, and those who seem important are quickly taken off the board in ways that aren't emotionally or vividly clear enough to resonate. Werewolves is loaded with over-the-top motivational speeches that read like the mantras you see on the walls of police and fire stations. This all leads up to a final battle that should feel epic, but ends up being pretty disappointing.