Hallo-Watch: Werewolves (2024)

Watched:  10/25/2025

Format:  Hulu

Viewing:  First

Director:  Steven C. Miller

On paper, I totally get what Werewolves (2024) was doing.  We're going to do The Warriors' run across a city plagued by monsters.  And the monster that makes the most sense to run from, without spending a lot of time worrying about the set-up, is werewolves.  We all get werewolves.  Moon.  Roar.  Kill kill.

It's basically an excuse to have a straight hour of nothing but action sequences as Frank Grillo and Katrina Law shoot their way across the city.  What's interesting is that it's a movie completely devoid of character moments, themes or story.  It is just a series of things happening.  Which is really a weird way to do things, because it *looks* like a movie in many ways.  It just functions more like...  a horror action screen saver.

Initially I was like "huh, this is like a SyFy movie but with good actors and a budget", but it's actually a Bizarro SyFy movie.  SyFy movies are mostly people standing around talking because they can't afford to do their bad FX.  Or driving from place to place looking mildly cross.  And then you get a giant CGI shark and snake at the end.  SyFy movies pull from the Banal Character Development Playbook and run through the motions of how this giant shark attacking people ties to their personal struggle.  But in the case of Werewolves, ain't no one got time for that.  What we do have are several practical werewolf suits, one detailed werewolf head we'll see in profile about 55 times during the movie, and Frank Grillo.  And shooting up sets, fighting and explosions.  And no real character beats.

The plot, as given to us by Lou Diamond Phillips and newscasts, is that a month prior during a Supermoon, 1 billion people became werewolves.  You can imagine this was quite a problem.  Frank Grillo plays the brother of a guy who died as a firefighter or something in the prior incident.  As the next full moon approaches, science has rushed to find a solution, and in what I'd argue is a hideously uncontrolled experiment, applies the "Moonscreen" to some subjects.  Chat, it does not work.

What's weird is this is the start and end of the character stuff.  Katrina Law, who I know from Hallmark Christmas movies and DC Comics TV, is a scientist married to one of the subjects.  So she's upset that it doesn't work as much as the high chance of getting got. But they seem to want for all four subjects to have a personality, which... why?  We never see them again or their personalities come out as a werewolf.

Anyway, Frank has to make his way across the city to his brother's wife and her adorable daughter.  So that means shooting a lot, ducking and weaving.  And many things occur, but nothing happens.  

At the end, Frank becomes a werewolf and fights his neighbor, who is also a werewolf.  But the world is so totally fucked by the fact everyone will now be a werewolf once a month, the implications are staggering.  But, nope, we just end with Frank making it back to his smoke show of a sister-in-law and being Man.

In it's way, this movie is deeply boring.  The action isn't well directed, and because it's just action, nothing really matters any more than watching someone play Mortal Kombat for an hour.  

And the werewolf design looks oddly like Fangface than I think is reasonable.

Like, the people who made the werewolf faces had no basic understanding of anatomy or had never seen an actual wolf or dog and what their faces look like.

I'm gonna get me some kibbles n' bits

Like, that jaw is all off and looks ready to snap clean off.  I think if they just had less in the way of floppy lower jaw, it would be good!  I assume there's some mechanical reason that they went so hard for the scooped lower jaw.

So I have a different model for them:

proper wolf anatomy

Here's a real wolf, and you can see how the jaw works, and why the teeth are scarier when not all the same length.

And I get that the monster is a cartoon movie animal-monster, but also...  what are we doing here?  The upper-lip of a wolf pulls back to show the fangs, and it's not like saw teeth in a real wolf.  There's a reason we call those pointy fangs "canines".  And while the muzzle goes back, it isn't like an alligator mouth (and it doesn't close into a smile to handle the jaw hinge).

It's maybe informative I had time to think about all this while watching the movie.

Due to budget, there are transformation sequences, and they seem terrified of competing with Rick Baker, which is understandable.  But that's kind of your bread and butter in one of these movies, and I can't say the changes were very impressive.  

Once in motion, the werewolves, which are largely practical, look okay.  It's not The Howling, but I so appreciate that they did this with real get-ups.  

Frank Grillo and Katrina Law *can* act, but the movie doesn't really allow for any of that.  It's fine, but...  like I said, this movie is weirdly boring.