Funereal Plots

Horror Cinema Double-Feature

Reviews

Matthew M. Bartlett

The Wolf Man

Director: Leigh Wannell

Writers: Leigh Wannell, Corbett Tuck

The plot of the Wolf Man is simplicity itself. A boy’s dad warns him about a creature in the woods. The dad goes missing. The boy grows up, turns into the fretful Blake (Christopher Abbott), has a wife named Charlotte (Julia Garner, who can’t save this one) and daughter (Matilda Firth, 11 years old but her character talks like 7-year-old). They go back to Oregon from San Francisco when boy receives father’s death certificate in the mail.

Cue the creature in the woods. Mixed in there is the theme of a father must protect his child. Ho hum.

Lycanthropy in the 2025 werewolf movie doesn’t mean a man turns into a wolf, or into a man-wolf hybrid. Rather, the man turns ugly and sort of strong, like Jeff Goldblum a third of the way toward Brundlefly, his teeth get weird, he can’t talk (metaphor for the taciturn father!), he sees things through a SciFi filter, and he runs like a Cocaine Ape.

So, at the old homestead, a werewolf wastes no time and immediately attacks the family. Blake is bitten and immediately gets sweaty and wheezy. His transformation is as slow as the movie. Eventually claws push his fingernails off and his teeth fall out, replaced by…grosser teeth.

Mid-transformation, the werewolf attacks again, chasing the family on top of a greenhouse. Hilarity ensues. Eventually, maybe 2/3 through the transformation, the werewolf and the two-thirds-werewolf fight not like animals, but like strong, really ugly men. It’s basically a movie fistfight that looks like a bar fight with two really ugly guys with bad colds, and it’s unintentionally hilarious.

Oh, spoiler alert, I guess, but the werewolf is Blake’s missing father.

The only good moment in The Wolf Man comes when Charlotte stares down her werewolf husband and he briefly shows a moment of brute understanding. The rest is predictable, plodding, and disappointing. Ultimately, it’s a blessing that, like a lot of horror movies now, much of it is too dark to see.

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The Monkey

Writer/ Director: Osgood Perkins

Mixing horror with humor is a delicate operation. Few movies seem to get the mix just right. Shawn of the Dead is one. Going back to the black & white days, Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein is another.

Osgood Perkins is not the writer/director you’d think could pull it off. His movies are mostly deliberately paced, atmospheric, and quiet—sometimes to a fault. So, he’s probably not anyone’s first choice to adapt one of Stephen King’s darker short story offerings. But here we are nonetheless.

The movie opens strongly, with a man in a military uniform trying to return a toy monkey to a pawn shop, only to have a Rube Goldberg chain of mishaps end in the grisly death of the owner, and the man taking a flamethrower to the toy monkey. This puts us firmly in the familiar territory claimed by the Final Destination.

We jump forward. Hal and Bill, the soldier’s twin sons, find the monkey. Turn its key, it bangs its little drum-sticks, and people die. Not so random—it’s usually people close to the key-turner. One is their mother, who has a spectacular aneurysm at a hibachi restaurant. “Close” in this case can even mean proximity, mind you. So, them’s the rules. We jump ahead a bunch of years. Hal (Theo James), now an adult, is traumatized by his past. Bill (also Theo James, naturally), his brother, blames him for his mother’s death, and lives in betterment with dark dreams of revenge. More people die from wasp attacks, falling shotguns, what have you.

The comically grotesque deaths are entertaining in their over-the-topness. And if it had stopped there as far as humor goes, it might have worked. But Perkins inexplicably throws in absurd characters—a young, tongue-tied judge, a whacky real-estate agent, Elijah Wood in an bizarre, what-was-anyone-thinking turn as the husband of Hal’s ex-wife and a bunch of non-sequiturs, which dampen the horror rather than enhance or effectively offset it.

There are redeeming qualities found throughout (A giant version of the monkey made me laugh out loud, pause, and rewind) and the ending is hilarious in its grand guignol silliness. What I was left with after watching The Monkey was regret—the good parts, and there are not nearly enough of them, show what a truly great horror movie this might have been.