Universal's Wolf Man Has Only 52% on RT, but Is It Really That Bad?

The new movie from Universal Studios' Monsters universe, Wolf Man, has been released.

The task of modernizing its most brutal character, the Wolf Man, was entrusted to Leigh Whannell, a master of horror who began his career as an actor and screenwriter for the Saw franchise.

What Is Wolf Man About?

A boy named Blake lives in the Oregon wilderness with his father, a hunter, and suffers from the fact that his father is too hard on him. There is no tenderness in this small family, only the rules of survival that the father tries to teach his son.

One day in the forest they meet a strange animal that walks on two legs. It nearly kills them both and then mysteriously disappears. Many years later, Blake, an unemployed writer living in San Francisco, receives a letter from Oregon: his missing father has been officially declared dead.

Now he must sort out the affairs of the house he inherited. Blake puts his journalist wife and young daughter in the car and drives to the family home.

Wolf Man Is a Part of the Universal Monsters Franchise

The Wolf Man is one of the characters in Universal's classic horror film series. It began in the 1930s with Tod Browning's Dracula and lasted for almost 20 years.

After the 1950s, Universal monsters appeared on screen from time to time: whenever the studio had a crisis of ideas, its bosses would pull their favorite monsters out of their sleeves.

Another reboot of the series was planned as recently as ten years ago. It was assumed that the monsters would have to compete with the Marvel and DC films, so the studio wanted to see big stars in the lead roles.

However, immediately after the failure of The Mummy with Tom Cruise, the idea was buried, and it was announced that the monsters would return, but in a different format: instead of multimillion-dollar blockbusters, the bet would be on low-budget auteur horror.

Wolf Man Transformed into a Family Drama, But It's Messages Are Too Obvious

Leigh Whannell strips the werewolf plot of all unnecessary elements. No Victorian Gothic, no fairy-tale romance, no spectacular transformations.

Wolf Man is an intimate family drama that unfolds over the course of a day in the setting of one house. The frame is dark most of the time, leaving only the characters' eyes to sparkle with horror.

The problem with the movie is that all the ideas in the picture are obvious. Blake, who distanced himself from his own insensitive and strict father, metaphorically becomes him.

The danger he wanted to protect his wife and daughter from, as the plot progresses, begins to come from himself: the movie presents the simple idea that a threat to a woman is often a man living under the same roof as her.