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The FX Magic of Ray Harryhausen continues with ‘First Men in the Moon’ and ‘20 Million Miles to Earth’, this weekend at the Trylon Microcinema

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Take-Up Productions and The Trylon Microcinema’s month-long celebration of the career of one-man effects powerhouse Ray Harryhausen continues this weekend with two more science fiction  demi-classics: the fine 1964 adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon (Harryhausen’s only film in ’scope) and the monster-from-Venus mini-epic 20 Million Miles to Earth.  Both films were directed by Nathan Juran, who also helmed the fantasy classic The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.   Showtimes are as follows:

First Men in the Moon
Friday: 7:00pm, 9:00pm
Saturday: 7:00pm, 9:00pm

20 Million Miles to Earth (HD)
Sunday: 5:20pm, 7:00pm

Tickets are $8.00, and can be purchased (cash-only) at the door or in advance online.  For the complete schedule for this series and advance ticketing information, click here.

The Trylon Microcinema is located at 3258 Minnehaha Ave S in Wtf-Film’s own Minneapolis, MN, and is the home of Take-Up Productions.

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Night the World Exploded, The

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

company: Columbia Pictures
and Clover Productions
year: 1957
runtime: 64′
country: United States
director: Fred F. Sears
cast: Kathryn Grant, William Leslie,
Tristram Coffin, Raymond Greenleaf,
Charles Evans, Frank J. Scannell,
Marshall Reed, Fred Coby
writers: Jack Nutteford
and Luci Ward
cinematography: Benjamin H. Kline
music: Ross DiMaggio (musical director)
not on home video in the USA

Plot: A newly discovered mineral element that expands and explodes when it is exposed to nitrogen in the Earth’s atmosphere threatenes to destroy the world.

Prolific producer Sam Katzman’s excursion into the science fiction genre was limited, encompassing only a handful of the nearly 250 pictures he financed between 1933 and 1973.  His assembly-line approach to film production produced a few genre gems – the early Ray Harryhausen / Charles H. Schneer collaborations It Came From Beneath the Sea and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and the underrated sci-fi horror The Werewolf.  Most, however, were little more than lean programmers that relied more on memorable titles and fanciful ad art than content to draw in the necessary business.

1957’s The Night the World Exploded, half of a Columbia double bill featuring the Wtf-Film creature favorite The Giant Claw (another product of Kazman’s Clover Productions directed by Night’s own Fred F. Sears), will never be remembered as a classic.  But with no video release and only the rarest of representation on modern television, Night is probably lucky to be remembered at all.  Those who grew up on the television late shows of the 60s and 70s (perhaps even more recently, though I never chanced upon it as a kid myself) will recall Night as the picture in which Earth is threatened by exploding rocks pulled from Carlsbad Caverns.

The Night the World Exploded runs along standard contemporary genre lines:  Young scientist David Conway (William Leslie, Hellcats of the Navy) invents a new magical device (a quartz tube “pressurometer” in this case) just in time to predict a major earthquake in Los Angeles.  While the city pieces itself together Conway comes to a startling revelation – immense pressure is building in the Earth’s crust, and the first earthquake is only a warning of more severe disasters to come.  The cause of the pressure reveals itself to be the new Element 112, an explosive mineral that earthquakes worldwide are threatening to expose with cataclysmic results.  From the moment Element 112 is discovered the race is on to find a means of averting a seemingly inevitable apocalypse.

The story may be prototypical sci-fi hokum, but The Night the World Exploded at least manages to toss an interesting idea into its recipe for worldwide carnage.  Like Kronos the same year, Night makes something of an argument for the conservation of natural resources.  The incendiary Element 112 is an entirely natural phenomena, benign in its usual environment.  It’s the pesky meddling of mankind, gung-ho in their coal mining and oil drilling, that have weakened sections of the Earth’s crust enough to allow the Element to expose itself.  The film is careful to point out that it’s not all our fault (natural erosion at the Carlsbad Caverns has exposed the Element as well, for instance), but the message is clear all the same.  ”It’s almost as though the Earth were striking back at us for the way we’ve robbed her of her natural resources,” Laura ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson (Kathryn Grant, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad) says early on.  Erosion be damned, Mother Nature is pissed and all of her stock footage wrath is upon us.  It’s a sentiment that places Night among the very earliest of the ecological disaster films and, in that single sense, well ahead of its time.

Predictably, a solution to the Element 112 crisis is reached before the situation become too catastrophic.  Conway discovers that the Element is reverted to a harmless inert state when submerged in water, leading to a poverty row public works project in which library footage from World War II works to flood the areas where the mineral menace has been exposed.  The special effects are of the usual Katzman quality, and new shots are commissioned only when vast libraries of stock shots or earlier bits from old serials were deemed insufficient.  The most impressive moment occurs rather early, when the opening title explodes off the screen – there must have been a few dollars of the budget to spare come time for the titles to be printed.

Dramatically The Night the World Exploded fluctuates between being boringly typical and unintentionally hilarious.  Romantic triangles are normal for pictures of all genres, but I’ve never seen one handled in quite the way it is here.  Scientists Conway and Hutchinson are obviously fond of each other, but Hutchinson intends to marry another man as Conway is too involved in his work.  Night leaves little doubt of which man will get the girl, as Hutch’s intended husband never appears in the film!  We learn his name (Bryant) and of Hutch’s involvement with him, but the character himself never once materializes.  By the time the sun rises over a newly-salvaged world he has been forgotten all together.  Otherwise things are pretty standard issue, with lots of meetings between scientific types and government officials to pad the brief running time.

At just under 64 minutes in length, The Night the World Exploded doesn’t overstay its welcome, and underrated director Fred F. Sears keeps things moving at a reasonable clip while providing narration as well.  Writers Jack Natteford and Luci Ward were seasoned professionals approaching the end of their lengthy careers, just the kind of people Katzman was fond of hiring.  Their work is never as lively as that of the blacklisted Bernard Gordon (who worked for Katzman credited by the name Raymond T. Marcus), but it gets the job done.  Cinematographer Benjamin H. Kline (Before I Hang) keeps everything nicely framed, not that the open matte video masters floating around show it, while music director Ross DiMaggio fills the soundtrack with familiar library cues.

No one will ever mistake The Night the World Exploded for good film making, but there’s a comfort food appeal to it for those of us who grew up on old Columbia programmers.  I certainly enjoyed it.  The studio got more than their money’s worth out of these Katzman productions, re-issuing them in double and triple bill weekend matinees well into the 60s.  It’s a pity more aren’t readily available on DVD, though Sony’s recent collections of deep catalog titles are promising to say the least.  For now Night is a rarity, though it is out there (even without resorting to bootleggers).  I say see it.

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In The Loop

Monday, March 8th, 2010

companies: BBC Films,
UK Film Council and Aramid
Entertainment Fund
year: 2009
runtime: 106′
country: United Kingdom
director: Armando Iannucci
cast: Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander,
Gina McKee, James Gandolfini,
Chris Addison, Anna Chlumsky,
Enzo Cilenti, Paul Higgins,
Mimi Kennedy, Alex Macqueen,
Johnny Pemberton, Olivia Poulet,
David Rasche, Joanna Scanlan,
James Smith, Steve Coogan
writers: Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell,
Armando Iannucci, Ian Martin
and Tony Roche
cinematography: Jamie Cairney
music: Adam Ilhan
order this film from Amazon.com:
SD DVD | Blu-ray

“Twelve thousand troops . . . but that’s not enough.  That’s the amount that are going to die, and at the end of a war you need some soldiers left, really, or else it looks like you’ve lost.”

~ Lt. General George Miller

I missed this one when it (briefly) ran in theaters.  It certainly wasn’t a difficult film to miss, seeing as it played on a single screen for a week to two with nothing in the way of local advertising.  The closest I had to a theatrical experience was with regard to the trailer, which played before one of the handful of screenings of The Hurt Locker I attended.  That trailer, a manic flurry of editing backed by Rossinni’s William Tell Overture as re-interpreted by someone in the midst of a cocaine bender, killed with the audience, promising a smart, witty, imminently quotable piece of political satire the likes of which hasn’t been seen in some time.  In The Loop went on to become one of the best-reviewed films of the past year (93 and 83 percentile out of 100 at Rottetomatoes and Metacritic respectively for those who need numbers to chew on), and certainly delivers on all of the trailer’s promises.

In The Loop plays a bit like an episode of NBC’s The West Wing (not surprising given that it’s an off-shoot of the British TV series The Thick of it), only scrubbed clean of any trace of systemic respect and filtered through a ludicrously obscene lens .  There are no appearances by the President, Prime Minister, Secretary of Defense or what have you.  The focus is firmly on the underlings, the mass of supporting players who make things happen through shear determination and hefty doses of luck, good or otherwise.  And if all else fails, there are always plenty of facts to manipulate for the cause.

In fact, the entire narrative for In The Loop is about manipulation, most notably on the person-to-person level.  The plot, such as there is one, concerns the confused cooperation of the United Kingdom and the United States in the build-up to an unspecified conflict in the Middle East and the unlikely Cabinet Minister Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) propelled into the center of things by his awful media appearances.  Directing him into a host of disparate directions is Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi, The Lair of the White Worm), a vulgar enforcer from Downing Street whose job it is to keep bumbling ministers straddling the constantly shifting party line.  Complicating matters on the other side of the pond are anti-war Asst. Sec’y of State Karen Clark (Mimi Kennedy) and Lt. General George Miller (James Gandolfini) and her enemy, conservative war-mongering Asst. Sec’y of State Linton Barwick (David Rasche).

Simon Foster is as close as the film comes to having a central identifiable character, a well-intentioned Minister turned political pawn (he doesn’t even have control of the blinds in his own office) who stumbles through all manner of positions on the issue of the war before being forced into resignation and, ultimately, fired.  He is frequently equated with meat, room filler for meetings and photo-ops, and is tossed about from agenda to agenda before being fed to the dogs (rather, the press) and returned to his rural constituents, forgotten by the world at large.  Through Foster we are witness to the monstrosity of the modern political machine and its ability to destroy those unlucky enough to become trapped in its quickly-moving parts.

Countering Foster’s political naivety is the seasoned Malcolm Tucker, the Downing Street attack dog tasked with keeping Foster in his place – wherever that might happen to be.  Prone to outlandish threats of physical violence (“Stay detached, or that’s what I’ll do to your retinas!”) and vein-popping fits of rage, Tucker is adept at bullying those he sees as beneath him (everyone, in other words) into whatever corner the situation calls for, but is ultimately as worried about his personal stake in events as everyone else.  Capaldi is exceptional, lending credulity to ludicrous phrases like “ass-spraying mayhem” in ways that I think few actors could.  He is responsible for what is, arguably, the film’s finest moment, when Tucker, alone in the mediation room of the United Nations building, has a moment of silent existential panic.

There’s a lot of seriousness to In The Loop, not the least of which being the subject it tackles (obviously inspired by the build-up to the Iraq War in 2003).  The country the United States and the United Kingdom are joining forces against goes unnamed throughout, re-enforcing one of the important points of the film: The governments don’t want a war against any nation in particular, they just want a war.  There’s no escaping the fact that the decision the film’s mountain of supporting characters are awkwardly racing towards is going to cost real lives (per the quote at the head of this article).

The screenplay (by director Armando Iannucci, with Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Ian Martin and Tony Roche, the crew behind The Thick of It) blends comedy seamlessly with a manic pacing and the serious elements of the narrative.  The jokes are non-stop from the start, the sense of humor bleakly sardonic throughout.  Every other line is a jab at something or someone and I found myself, for perhaps the first time ever, watching an English-language film with subtitles enabled just to be sure I wasn’t missing anything (a big thanks to MPI Home Video for including them on their DVD).  In The Loop is, in a word, vicious, an outright condemnation of a system that sends young men to die for little more than the personal political gain of those at the top.  It’s also uproariously funny, and I haven’t laughed so much during a film in a long, long time.

Iannucci’s direction is a bit too television for my taste, and all-handheld HD camera work is starting to lose some of its effective immediacy after all the other feature films (particularly in the horror genre) and television series (The Office, et al) that have utilized the technique.  His sense of pacing is spot-on, however, and In The Loop roars forward at full-tilt from the first frames.  Exceptional casting rules the day, the long list of performers taking the swift-footed screenwriting in the appropriate stride.  Capaldi and Paul Haggins reprise their enforcer roles from the television series, while Mimi Kennedy and David Rasche make for memorable dueling Assistant Secretaries of State.  Steve Coogan (Hamlet 2) makes an important bit appearance as a constituent disgruntled about a collapsing wall, and Tom Hollander brings pathos to the dim-witted and quickly fading political star Simon Foster.

MPI Home Video released In The Loop to both DVD and Blu-ray on the 12th of January, and I highly recommend that those who, like myself, missed it in its limited theatrical run take the opportunity to catch up to it now.  Both do the job of capturing the HD-cam photography, the Blu-ray being noticeably clearer and sharper if not much else.  Extras are limited – a trailer, a tv spot, a nice collection of deleted scenes (28 minutes worth), and an extremely short (3 minutes, 17 seconds) look behind-the-scenes – but the film itself is more than enough to make the discs worthwhile and the price is certainly right (under $20 retail for the Blu-ray and considerably less for the SD DVD).  Both English SDH and Spanish subtitles are available for the feature, the former of which I found very useful in preparing for this review.

This is a wonderful piece of acid political satire with surprising depth lurking beneath all the cock jokes (and believe me, there are a lot of them).  I’ll stop short of calling it brilliant for my own petty reasons, but don’t let that dissuade you.  In The Loop comes very highly recommended.

order this film from Amazon.com:
SD DVD | Blu-ray

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Crazies, The (remake)

Monday, March 1st, 2010

companies: Overture Films, Participant
Media, Imagenation Abu Dhabi FZ,
Penn Station and Road Rebel
year: 2010
runtime: 101′
country: United States
director: Breck Eisner
cast: Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell,
Joe Anderson, Danielle Panabaker,
Christie Lynn Smith, Brett Rickaby,
Preston Bailey, John Aylward,
Joe Reegan, Glenn Morshower
writers: Scott Kosar
and Ray Wright
cinematographer: Maxime Alexandre
music: Mark Isham
out in wide release

A germ warfare experiment crash-lands in the water supply for the sleepy community of Ogden Marsh in this modestly budgeted redux of George Romero’s sardonic 1973 thriller.  The new The Crazies wisely avoids rehashing the events of the original outright, though a few moments of slick horror aren’t enough to cover for the fact that the Scott Kosar and Ray Wright screenplay has precious little on its mind.

The story this go around focuses squarely on sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant, Live Free or Die Hard) and his wife Judy (Radha Mitchell, Pitch Black, Surrogates), who are expecting their first child.  The intrusion of a shotgun-toting maniac into a high school baseball game announces the arrival of Trixie, a destructive virus engineered by those maniacal masterminds working for the big-G Government.  It isn’t long before other townspeople are showing signs of infection, glassy stares and questionable behavior (some reminiscent of the M. Night Shyamalan misfire The Happening).  Just as sheriff David and deputy Russell (Joe Anderson, Amelia, The Ruins) start to put the pieces of the Trixie puzzle together the town is cast into darkness, an all-encompassing communications blackout announcing the arrival of the film’s second villain: the big-M Military.

Soon David, his wife and his faithful deputy are on the road, doing their best (and failing) to avoid the likes of crazed gun-toting hillbillies and the anonymous forces of the gas-masked Military on their way to Cedar Rapids.  They meet others along the way of course – one of Judy’s patients, her boyfriend, and the less-than-friendly new management of a rural car wash – none of whom are terribly important.  The film wastes no time in dispensing with them by means of pitchfork-armed high school staff or squads of Army-issue goons.

Breck Eisner’s The Crazies hits upon several of the high points of the 1973 film, updating the house-fire opener of that picture to good effect, but eschews the military perspective entirely (a huge part of the original, which focused on the inefficacy of government bureaucracy at the time of the Vietnam War), a perspective that could have added some prescience to this by-the-books horror programmer in the wake of hurricane Katrina and in the midst of two wars in the Middle East.  Instead we get an anonymous Military machine that, in obvious allusion to the Nazis, rounds the towns population into cattle trucks and concentration camps in preparation for mass extermination.  Yikes.  A soldier momentarily captured by David and his cohorts even enlists the Nuremberg defense after helping to gun down a teen-aged boy and his mother: “We were just following orders.”  There can be little doubt as to who is supposed to be perceived as more dangerous – the Military or the crazies – with a fuel-air bomb hanging over our protagonists’ heads.

The “military = bad” trope has been repeated in films ad-nauseum for as long as this reviewer can remember, and while it probably still works for plenty of people it’s my biggest complaint against the picture.  One thing we can be thankful for, however, is the exclusion of a scheming uniformed baddie behind it all.  Whoever is behind the quarantine operation in Ogden Marsh is left graciously unexplored, and one irksome genre pratfall avoided.

The other villains of the piece, those poor souls unfortunate enough to have become infected with the Trixie bug, are utterly unremarkable in design, with Eisner choosing to take his cues from the overflowing cornucopia of blandness that is modern zombie cinema.  The crazies sprout sores, puffy veins and discolored eyes, an aesthetic far too familiar to be in the least big frightening on its own.  Crafty implementation could have solved that particular issue, but no dice.  Eisner telegraphs his scares far in advance and allows too many of the horrific setups to devolve into outright silliness, leaving The Crazies sorely lacking in real visceral thrills.  Gore is actually quite limited here, and those expecting buckets of exposed inner organs may be disheartened.  Here I find myself giving Eisner considerable credit, for depending on the horror of the situation over graphic visuals.  A pitchfork to the gut is no less terrible a prospect without the sight of intestines flailing about.

Eisner seems more adept at action than horror here, with the slow-motion tumbling of an SUV proving one of the highlights of the picture.  His handling of the dramatics is adept if not particularly brilliant, and it’s the believability of the small-town characters that ultimately lifts The Crazies above merely average.  The cast do well in their respective roles even if no one (as is the case with much of the picture) stands out.  The fictitious Ogden Marsh may be no substitute for the real Evans City of the original, but it’s Mayberry-esque main street appeal is not to be underestimated.  The intrusion of HAZMAT-suited military men upon Rockwellian America is still a vision both surreal and effective, though it is a pity more wasn’t done with it.

I feel it important to note that I did enjoy The Crazies by and large, even if I have no desire to see it again.  Neither memorable or really effective, it’s still better than most horror programmers these days.  The crowd I was with was certainly entertained (admittedly much more-so than myself), even with a baby cooing and giggling  throughout.  The best thing about the picture may be Romero’s place as its executive producer – he’ll undoubtedly see a decent payday for his troubles.  This new The Crazies may be entirely forgettable, but those on the lookout for a matinee’s worth of entertainment could certainly do worse.

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Ganjasaurus Rex

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

companies: Prehistoric Productions
and Reel People Media
year: 1987
runtime: 88′
country: United States
director: Ursi Reynolds
cast: Paul Bassis, Dave Fresh,
Rosie Jones, Howard Phun,
Rich Abernathy, John Ivar,
Andy Barnett, Alex,
Stephen Brown, Diana Hahn
writers: Paul Bassis, Dan Gilweit,
Rosie Jones, Rick Cooper, Al Ceraulo,
Andy Barnett, Alex, Stephen Brown,
Jon Akselsen and Diana Hahn
videographer: Russel Dobson
music: Step One Studios, David Penalosa,
Rob Sadler, Andy Barnett, Mark John,
Rod Deal, Larry “Lazer” Murphy, Tree Spirit,
Tyce, Mike, Sean, Rich, Dan and Paul Bassis
special effects: marty Smitty
order the OOP Rhino Video
release from Amazon.com

Plot: A prehistoric monster terrorizes the California coast and the marijuana growers there, who have developed a new strain of cannabis the grows to be as large as a redwood tree.

Aside from an extensive selection of Sandy Frank-imported Japanese science fiction features and an Ed Wood Jr. skin flick, Rhino Video’s 1988 release of Ganjasaurus Rex is the only other VHS I clearly remember dwelling on Blockbuster’s paltry “Other” shelf.  Even to my young eyes it looked just too . . . well . . . bad . . . to be worth bothering with, so I never did.  Not, at least, until now.

The story, such as there is one, follows a handful of pot farmers looking to make it big with a new sequoia-sized strain of cannabis and the subsequent (farcical) attempts by the DEA to suppress their efforts.  Intruding upon things is the gargantuan Tyrannosaurus Herbivorous Ganjasaurus Rex, a misunderstood beast from the sea who seeks only to munch peacefully on the towering marijuana plants that dominated its prehistoric environment.  Compulsory scenes of monster mayhem ensue, with Ganjasaurus Rex sending the local California populace fleeing and the DEA rushing to an expert on the beast (one Professor Sprog) for help.

The box art for this one pretty much sums it up – cheap is the operative word.  Low-fi and low-tech, the project seems to be the confused brainchild of a few stoner musicians looking to sound off against the Reagan-era War on Drugs in the doofiest way possible, by having a pissed-off prehistoric monster rise up in reaction to Federal drug raids.  Some archival footage from a 1985 raid on a California pot grower is even used to beef up the creature’s first appearance.  The dinosaur menace (implicitly linked with Godzilla, which makes for a copyright joke at the end of things) is primarily accomplished through stop motion, at least in the argumentative sense of the term.  Mostly it looks like what it is: either a toy being jerked around in front of a blue screen or a larger head mock-up with a light bulb inside of it.  Impressive it certainly isn’t, though it is amusing from time to time.


Surprisingly enough, the writing here (credited to no fewer than ten people, including much of the cast) isn’t all that bad, and some is even funny as intended.  It’s obvious where the sympathies of the creators lie.  The DEA, local law enforcement, and anti-pot community activists (operating under the banner of “Operation C.A.M.P” . . . har har har) are presented as little more than buffoons, their dialogue full of Freudian slips (confusing “propaganda” and “press packets”, for instance).  The good-guys are peaceful and well-intentioned hippies with names like Cloud and Moss, who spend their days watching T.V., eating lentils, and being generally unproductive members of society.  The scientists are goofy, especially Professor Sprog, though we know they’re good too – they drink all-natural carrot juice while their DEA agent guest opts for Folger’s Crystals and Sweet ‘n Low.

There is some seriousness afoot when DEA agents descend on Moss and his girlfriend’s pad, confiscating their gargantuan potted pets (named Zelda and Wilma) at gunpoint.  Any comment on the use of extreme force is quickly lost in the farce, with the DEA agents, their supporters, and a gaggle of press representatives finding themselves quite taken with the smoking remnants of Moss’ pet trees.  The display also attracts one Ganjasaurus Rex, who goes on a brief rampage behind still photos of local buildings before settling down and taking a few tokes off the still smoldering pot-pyre.

Performances are expectedly mixed but, as was the case with the writing, not as bad as one might anticipate.  Much of the on-screen talent were local musicians, and at least they have something in the way of personality on their side.  The less said about the more technical aspects of the production the better.  The videography is mostly flat and static, and the live audio recording is ample for understanding dialogue but not much else.  One big positive is the music, which is quite good throughout.  I’d frankly be more interested in owning a copy of the soundtrack than the film itself.

I can’t bring myself to be too hard on this one, though I honestly don’t have that much to say about it either.  For a no-budget shot-on-video monster comedy it could certainly have been worse, even if some of it did leave me feeling rather sleepy-eyed.  Long OOP, Ganjasaurus Rex currently goes for anywhere between $50 and $1000 at online retailers, which seems excessive at both ends.  If you can find it cheap it may well be worth a watch, though those who skip on it certainly aren’t missing out on much.  Does ambivalence count as a recommendation?


order the OOP Rhino Video
release from Amazon.com

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Wolfman, The

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

company: Universal Pictures
year: 2010
runtime: 102′
country: United States
director: Joe Johnston
cast: Benecio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins,
Hugo Weaving, Emily Blunt,
Art Malick, Roger Frost,
Geraldine Chaplin, Jordan Michael Coulson
writers: Andrew Kevin Walker
and David Self (based on the original
screenplay by Curt Siodmak)
cinematography: Shelly Johnston
music: Danny Elfman
special effects: Rick Baker
and a few hundred others
out in theaters in wide release

Plot: A man is bitten by a werewolf and becomes a wolf man.

Warning: Spoilers lie ahead.  Proceed at your own peril!

“It had to be this way,” the dying Lawrence Talbot whispers in the closing reel of Universal’s The Wolfman, the needless big-budget reboot of the ’40s franchise, and perhaps he’s right.  Slick and soulless and propelled by little more than a mountain of time-lapsed lunar photography, Joe Johnston’s Valentine to the Lon Chaney Jr. classic ranks as nothing short of $150 million in wasted opportunity.

The Wolfman roots itself firmly in the territory of classic Gothic horror tales, with the dusty ghost of a once-great English manor serving as the primary location.  Visiting the manor after the untimely mutilation of his younger brother, Shakespearean actor Lawrence (Benecio Del Toro) ignores his sinister father’s (Anthony Hopkins) simple warning about the full moon and promptly finds himself in the middle of the resident lycanthrope’s gypsy buffet, receiving a nasty shoulder wound while chasing a blur of fur and muscle through a slurry of dismembered limbs and entrails.  Lawrence survives of course, and when the next full moon rises he enacts his own bloody massacre.  No sooner has he awakened than the police mob of Inspector Abberline (Hugo Weaving) arrives, convinced of his lunacy but not of his monstrous alter-ego.

A brief stint in a London asylum goes as well as one might expect, and is punctuated with a visit by Lawrence’s father, there to remove a particularly nasty skeleton from the family’s closet.  In no time at all our cursed anti-hero is howling through the streets of London and lunging across its rooftops, dodging bullets and slicing through all who stand in his way.  The conclusion sees Lawrence’s return to the family home, to confront his father (it seems claws and fangs run in the family) and meet his inevitable end.

The biggest thrill of The Wolfman was seeing Curt Siodmak receive a solo credit for his original screenplay, small consolation indeed for a film more troubled than its cursed protagonist.  The great cast does their best to breathe life into the foul writing of Andrew Kevin Walker (Sleepy Hollow) and David Self (1999’s The Haunting, Road to Perdition), so lacking in dramatics that it precludes them from being characters at all.  Del Toro’s Wolfman is sadly forgettable, a failing of a script that shuffles him about like a pawn – a massacre here, a father-son brawl there, and a bit of cliche romantic monster pathos to tidy up the ending.  It’s not nearly enough to cover up the fact that this Wolfman’s heart was ripped out well before the cameras began to roll.

Hopkins does what Hopkins does best, lending weight and credibility to his role as the woefully underwritten villain of the piece, whose malediction is obvious from the moment he first appears on screen.  Hugo Weaving plays the part of the obligatory law man, one of the more memorable caricatures of the picture and the vessel through which the inevitable franchise’s sequel baiting is delivered.  Emily Blunt is pretty but perfunctory, and the audience knows even without the silly gypsy gibberish (delivered by a fine Geraldine Chaplin) that it will be her hand and not Abberline’s that delivers the Wolfman’s death blow.

It’s obvious from the ugly CGI title card that the over-produced effects are to be the star of the show, with Rick Baker’s capable (and faithful) Wolfman make-up designs taking center stage.  While the frequent violent outbursts make for a bit of much-needed fun in this otherwise dull seat-filler, highlighted with torn limbs, gnawed fingers, and a decapitation or two, none of it is anything we haven’t seen before.  More importantly, it’s nothing we’re going to remember.  Some extensive CGI is as obvious as ever, particularly in Lawrence’s night time prowl through the London skyline.  The animated stand-in for Del Toro’s flesh-and-blood creature suffers from the same lack of weight and presence that dooms so many of its ilk.  The transformations, heavily inspired by Baker’s earlier work on the vastly superior An American Werewolf in London, are quite good at least, though they have little impact given the muck that surrounds them.

The less said about Joe Johnston’s (Jumanji, Hidalgo, Jurassic Park III) pedestrian direction the better.  Suffice it to say that it wastes Rick Heinrichs’ reasonable Gothic production design almost entirely.  Pacing is a problem throughout, The Wolfman’s sparse narrative not so much flowing as stuttering from point to point.  Perhaps the worst thing about this thoroughly mediocre outing is the lack of thrills or suspense – the sporadic splashing of blood and gore does not a scary film make.  Cinematography by Shelly Johnson (The House Bunny, Jurassic Park III) is as uninspired as the rest and composer Danny Elfman seems at a loss entirely, crafting a meandering score that’s fitting for the production in its lack of excitement.

The best thing about this unnecessary retread is its trailer, which covers all the same narrative ground in considerably less time and at no expense to the viewer.  Go to Youtube, check it out, and ponder what could have been – you’ll be happier and your wallet slightly fatter for the trouble.  Skip it.

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