The Wolfman: You Damn Kids, Get Off My Lon!

David Naughton’s transformation into a wolfman in An American Werewolf in London is still widely regarded as the greatest man-to-beast metamorphosis in movie history, a landmark makeup achievement, and one of the triumphs of the pre-CGI era of organic special effects. It was great, and horrifying in a fresh and groundbreaking way. Now, nearly 30 years later, we can watch Benicio Del Toro in The Wolfman turning into a werewolf in a similarly agonizing way, screaming as his feet stretch into paws, the tendons in his calves rearrange themselves, his nose grows into a snout, every vertebra emitting a loud Dolby pop as he falls onto all fours. And I have to be honest: I really don’t understand why directors still feel the need to show werewolf transformations in such painstaking anatomical detail — especially not in The Wolfman, in which werewolves are clearly magical, not scientific in nature. It’s a curse triggered by moonlight, for crying out loud. Do the filmmakers think we won’t buy into the premise unless we can clearly see every step of the process?

What makes all this effort seem especially ridiculous is the fact that when it’s over, Del Toro doesn’t look all that different from Lon Chaney Jr. in the original The Wolf Man — a hairy man with a furry face and a wet, black nose holding up his claws and trying to look menacing. I wish director Joe Johnston had used the suggestion Mark Kermode proposed in his review of the film and allowed Del Toro to play the role without makeup — maybe just a tiny bit of additional hair here and there. But I suppose that idea would run contrary to the film’s aesthetic, which is to take a familiar, old-fashioned horror story and soup it up with the gore and the high-tech special effects that weren’t available back in 1941.

Lon Chaney Jr.’s acting abilities have often been derided, but there’s something very affecting about his performance in the original Wolf Man — he looks so heartbreakingly ordinary and graceless that his plight, as an man “pure in heart, who says his prayers by night” who’s forced to become a killer beast, seems especially tragic. The remake pours on the atmosphere — the production design is by Rick Heinrichs, whose credits include Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Sleepy Hollow, and the last two Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and who specializes in a certain kind of expensive-looking glossy creepiness — but all that fog and all those spiderwebs can’t disguise the fact that Del Toro’s character barely registers. He’s an actor, we’re told, who’s currently starring in a traveling production of Hamlet, and the film tries to pretend there’s something grandly tragic and Shakespearean about his unfriendly relationship with his father (Anthony Hopkins), but it’s not convincing for a second — if this relationship reminds you of an earlier story, it’s probably not Hamlet but Teen Wolf.

I mentioned the gore earlier, and I should probably mention it again, because The Wolfman is surprisingly bloody — be prepared to witness a lot of lopped-off heads and ripped-out throats and slit-open bellies. It’s all pretty gruesome, but it’s not like Johnston brings any particular zest or style to it, the kind that you get from, say, Sam Raimi — or John Landis or Joe Dante, back when they were really on their game, in the early ’80s, making movies like, well, An American Werewolf in London and The Howling. There’s a scene in The Wolfman where Del Toro has been captured by a doctor (Antony Sher), who straps him to a chair and presents him to his colleagues at a special midnight lecture. Sher’s idea is to prove that Del Toro’s belief that he’s a werewolf is all in his head — and of course, as he speaks pompously and dismissively about gypsy curses and lycanthropy and all that nonsense, he fails to notice Del Toro behind him sprouting fur and fangs. In a different movie, or with a different director, this could have been an all-time classic sequence, but somehow Johnston bungles it, focusing so much on the effects that the heart of the scene — the foolish skeptic getting his deservedly gory comeuppance as this orderly academic setting turns into chaos — gets muted.

“The beast will out,” Hopkins promises Del Toro in one scene, his eyes twinkling merrily at the thought, but The Wolfman never manages to get in touch with its wild side. Maybe it got lost somewhere during the film’s troubled production history. A shot from a silver bullet is fatal to a werewolf; perhaps reshoots were enough to fell The Wolfman.