The Wolfman

I'm a big fan of the Universal monster films of yore. Well, not really of the films themselves, but in the idea of them. Watching them one has a permanent sense of forgiving the cheap and shoddy way they were made, but an admiration for the sincerity involved in the writing and acting.

These films have been resurrected time and again, mostly in ways that are a disgrace to their memory. I had hopes for The Wolfman, released last February, but was scared away by bristlingly bad reviews. But when I watched the film on DVD a few nights ago I found I didn't hate it. It wasn't very good, true, but in a certain sense I have a fondness for it.

The film is based on Curt Siodmak's screenplay for the original 1940 film, in which he basically created from whole cloth the werewolf legends which exist today, such as they turn into wolves at a full moon, can only be stopped by silver bullets, etc. It is set on the moors of England, and has an American actor playing Lawrence Talbot, exiled from his homeland. Here is played by Benicio Del Toro, perhaps not the first person you'd think of as a typical Englishman, but maybe the first one you'd think of as a man who turns into a wolf.

Instead of Claude Rains, his father is played by Anthony Hopkins. Del Toro returns because his brother's fiancee (Emily Blunt) has written to him, explaining that the brother is missing. When Del Toro returns it's too late--the brother is dead, torn to pieces by either a wild animal or a lunatic. Unlike the dapper Rains, Hopkins is buggy from the outset, and since there is no Bela Lugosi as a gypsy here, we can pretty much figure out where this is heading.

This edition of The Wolfman, directed by the hackish Joe Johnston, is mostly attitude, but it's an attitude I appreciated. There is none of the winking jokiness of the execrable Van Helsing, which took the big three of Universal horror and turned them into a circus. There isn't one light moment here, and the performances range from Hopkins' hammy weirdness to Del Toro and Blunt in full despair.

Some of this works, particularly the photography by Shelly Johnson, which is stunning. It also works in a sequence in which Del Toro, committed to an asylum, is strapped to a chair in an operating theater, his psychiatrist seeking to prove that his lycanthropy is delusional. Needless to say he does not prove his point, and the result carnage is effective antiscience.

But the film does lack a spark. Perhaps it's the choice of Del Toro, who as I say already looks lupine, or finally the silliness of the climactic battle between two werewolves, lupo a lupo, looking as if they are both wearing the most hideous sweaters ever knitted.

I can understand the brickbats The Wolfman received, and perhaps my kindness to it stems from the film I wanted to see rather than what actually exists, the film that the 1940 version could have been, but isn't.