After a long week of waiting, the miserable half of the audience that were forced to make Dear John the movie to finally, inexplicably knock Avatar off the #1 spot now have an avenue for cinematic payback. Hopefully after being browbeaten by your wives/girlfriends into seeing Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried express their virginal love as only a PG-13 movie can, you got rimmed or at least a handjob. You deserve that much, at least.

As an alternative, The Wolfman is no great furry shakes as a movie as it’s barely a couple of paws up from Jason Bateman’s Teen Wolf Too, but some decently graphic shots of gore should expunge some of the truly disgusting stuff you saw last week while Tatum and Seyfried were doing some hardcore nuzzling. Congratulations, Amanda Seyfried, something you’re in that’s actually worse than the $20 sets and Pierce Brosnan’s eerily accurate portrayal of a braying donkey in Mamma Mia!

The Wolfman is opening after an almost year and a half delay. You’ve waited this long, surely you can wait a few more months before it’s released on video. It’s not a terrible movie (nowhere near Blood and Chocolate bad and the wolves themselves vicious instead of New Moon vaginal) as most of the time you’re distractedly entertained. But you walk out of feeling it’s less than and considering the talent involved, you deserve a lot more than a mere “meh”…

If you really want to see a werewolf movie, you’d be better off watching Ginger Snaps again.

If you really want to see something in the theater, you’d be better off delaying gratification for a week and waiting for Shutter Island.

But if you’re dead set on Wolfman, set your expectation levels to Barely Above Mediocre and let the fur and fangs fly.

It’s 1891 in Blackmoor, England, a hundred years before Kevin Costner’s Surfer Boy Robin Hood and that ‘I Touch Myself’ song by the Divynils. We open on a man running for dear life. What’s he running from, and in such a bloody hurry? We can’t quite see it but we can hear that it’s rather large. After a couple of frames, some fleeting glimpses are revealed.

The man running probably got a good look at it, right before he got eviscerated. From what little we’ve seen it looks to be a previously unclassified being resembling a man/wolf hybrid. Possibly a manwolf of some kind, but we can’t be sure because we haven’t seen the opening title card.

After a couple of moments, we hear a female in voice-over as she’s dictating a letter. The voice belongs to a woman named Gwen (Emily “Fat Chronic” Blunt) Conliffe and she’s fiancé to a man named Ben Talbot. Or…was, since we saw Ben mutilated in the opening scene. She’s worried because Ben has gone missing and is writing to his brother Lawrence (Benicio Del Toro). Little does she know that her betrothed is in little bite-sized pieces all over the pretty English countryside, probably being gnawed on by random wildlife, grateful for the snack. That pointless letter was a waste of perfectly good stamp, and what with stamps cost these days…
And she’ll probably be bummed that her fiancé has no torso. Or arms. Or genitals. But she could have used that stamp for so many things, like bills or to finally write to her ex-boyfriend Chet “Whitey” McWhiterton to stop bothering her because she’s really going to marry Ben Talbot once and for all. Of course the irony being that once Chet got the letter Gwen would have known that the remains of her husband could probably fit inside the envelope she mailed. What we can all agree on is that it’s been an overall fucked-up day for Gwennie and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better.

Wait a moment. Gwen and…Ben. Maybe it’s good that one of them is dead.

Lawrence gets to England and begins to look for his dear estranged brother. He hasn’t seen his father Sir John (Anthony Hopkins) in years and there’s really no love lost between them. You see, Larry found his mother dead in his father’s arms, and he’s been really emo about it ever since. And later, John put Larry in an insane asylum because he questioned the need for male circumcision as it seems to be more of a cosmetic thing than a hygienic issue as previously believed. Needless to say, they both have issues and we’re not even 15 minutes into the movie.
John tells Larry he needn’t bother looking for Ben any more because his corpse been found. Maybe should have waited till after breakfast to spring that kind of news as the crackling bacon and ketchuped eggs don’t look all that appetizing anymore. Neither does that plate on the side with Ben’s spleen.

Also might have helped to tell Larry that Ben was dead that before he made the trip, but no matter. Actually, Gwen was going to write to Lawrence telling him that his brother was dead as she found out almost immediately after she wrote the previous letter…but she had run out of stamps.

Larry meets Gwen to give his condolences. After seeing Gwen, Larry realizes he’d like to give her something else, but it’s much too soon for that sort of thing. Wait another 3 hours for the 17 remaining pieces of Ben’s body to get cold. In the meantime, he’ll search around Blackmoor to find out what might have happened, because there’s some kind of wild animal or lunatic running around killing people related to the main characters, and if he/it is not stopped, more characters without names will be killed. But it’ll happen in a cool gory fashion so the audience won’t feel so bad for them. Larry still feels duty-bound to stop the killings, because it will get him into Gwen’s pants so much quicker. Gwen…so bereaved, so vulnerable, you might want to take off that corset to ease your constricted chest…

Larry discovers that Ben was in possession of a peculiar gold medallion. The kind that the Gypsies wear. Maybe it was a crazed Gypsy that killed Ben because you know how those Gypsies are…

Larry surmises that the local Gypsy camp may know what Ben was up to, or even what kind of beast befouls the night around them, killing folks willy-nilly with no fear of repercussion.

John warns to hold off the inquiry until after the full moon, in case there really is a lunatic on the loose.

Larry ignores John’s warning, because what does a full moon have to do with anything concerning a man-killing werebeast? And what kind of supercilious prat uses the word “befoul” in a movie review?

Larry goes to the Gypsy camp. Sure enough, it’s a full moon, but that probably doesn’t mean anything.

And completely having nothing to do with the full moon, the were-monster Beast creature begins attacking Gypsies. After a couple of minutes it’s Gypsy stew as arms and legs and brains and nuts and pants and laundry from various clotheslines and other body parts are strewn all over camp. It’s mayhem, but Larry has armed himself. But he sees a stray kid wandering off and it’s up to Larry to save him. He’s up to the task because he’s a trained actor!!!

Larry can’t find the kid, but the beast finds Larry and bites him on the neck. For the amount of time that the wolf-like creature was attached to his throat, you’d think Larry’d be dead, but he’s not. He’s only got severe wounds that if not treated properly will lead to infection.
John gets the best doctors in Blackmoor to help Larry and against all odds he gets better.

Unusually better. His hearing’s a lot more sensitive than before, and his shoulder feels stronger than ever. He checks out Gwen a little more closely, but alas, no see-through vision. The family dog growls at him, but that probably doesn’t mean anything.

Out of some sense of duty, or maybe she’s just on the rebound because her fiancé was butchered, Gwen has stayed to see that Larry has recovered.

Larry and Gwen chastely flirt by skipping rocks. Sure, he knows he’s hitting on his dead brother’s fiancé, but Larry can’t help himself and busts out such Black Dynamite lines like “make sure you swing your hips” as he’s showing Gwen his sure-to-get-the-ladies-panties-wet rock-skipping technique, Gwen is sufficiently impressed, meaning Gwen is really easy.

Meanwhile, Blackmoor is in frenzy, so they call in Inspector Francis Abberline (Hugo Weaving) from Scotland Yard. You may remember Francis Abberline as the character Johnny Depp played in From Hell and has been Jack the Ripper’s main protagonist in many other movies. You may also remember that Abberline DIED at the end of From Hell…but that’s okay, because he’s back from the dead to solve the grisly werewolf killings. And he heard Ben Talbot’s fiancé is really easy.

Things are going well…until the next full moon. Apparently, Larry wasn’t completely cured, and the wolf-creature bite has infected his blood so that every full moon he turns into a wolf-being and goes on a killing spree. I’m no moonologist but I didn’t realize that a full moon occurs every 48 hours or whenever it’s convenient to the plot. Must be a Blackmoor thing.

The next morning, Larry wakes up with his clothes all torn and bloodied. His father is staring at him telling him he’s done terrible things. Soon enough, a mob of villagers (along with their full complement of torches and rakes) have captured him and are ready to string him up. Stereotypically, the villagers are right and proper Palinesque hayseeds. By comparison, some werewolf blood mixed into the gene pool isn’t so bad when tempered with the multiple generations of inbreeding that’s been going on. So much so that if the number of non-rotted teeth on an adolescent is slightly more than the number of working eyes, then the offspring is considered a “success”…and used to mass breed the next wave of future plague victims.

Those dumb villagers, thinking they’ve got Larry cornered. But these Brit hicks don’t know what they’re in for, because tomorrow night (again, so soon?)…is the full moon.

What works with The Wolfman 2010-

1) The assault on the Gypsy camp is by far the best sequence in the movie. It’s the only time in the movie where you’re caught completely off guard as director Joe Johnston (Gremlins) stages it so you have no idea when and from what angle the Wolfman will strike next. You get a generous helping of body parts strewn along the screen to aid in your digestion. Sucks that when the sequence is over, you have another hour of film to go.

2) Anthony Hopkins- He’s the only one enjoying himself in this movie as he chomps down bogfuls of scenery as every character except his is a friggin’ mope. Aren’t monster movies supposed to be fun? If you think about it, Hopkins is playing a fuzzier and more grizzled version of the van Helsing character he played in Dracula. Except Wolfman isn’t as boring as that crappy Dracula and (thankfully) doesn’t have Keanu Reeves and his limp British “accent”.

3) Make sure there are enough bullets in your gun…in case you have to use one on yourself. Oops, too late. Got the biggest cheer from the crowd.

What doesn’t work-

1) The stop-and-start nature gets grating after about half an hour. You get excited whenever the Wolfman appears…and then begin looking at your watch whenever the frame fades in to daylight and you’re forced to watch “human” interaction. Benicio Del Toro’s a charismatic enough actor, but there’s so little in his character that engages the audience so that you’re looking out the windows in hopes of a full moon.

2) Though she stole scenes in the Devil Wears Prada and proved her acting chops exploring lesbianism tastefully topless in the excellent My Summer of Love, Emily Blunt plays barely a device of a character and when she’s asked to do some real acting, she’s uncharacteristically awful. Her final scene in the movie had a handful of audience members laughing…and when you see it, you’ll know why.

3) The climactic battle in the mansion is way too short and it’s wasn’t all that great to begin with. It’s perfectly set up, and you’re hoping for as much or more excitement and gore as the Gypsy Assault…and then it fizzles. This was going to be a more positive than negative review…until the final 10 minutes.

Overall. Skip The Wolfman and wait for video because it’s way too consistently erratic to be worth a price of a ticket. Much better suited for home viewing because you can stop when the movie flags and just plain skip the dull parts for all the gooey money shots. If you have to, go into The Wolfman just to avoid seeing Taylor Lautner and Taylor Swift in Valentine’s Day and be grateful to whatever god you believe in that it’s not Dear John…