Film Review: Night Wolf (2010)

It appears we're going through a werewolf phase, as after Werewolves of the Third Reich and before the upcoming Lycanthia review, we've watched Night Wolf (2010). Warning: SPOILERS.

Sarah returns home after spending some time in the US only to find her family in shambles. In addition to money issues, her stepfather, Duncan, believes her mother is cheating on him, while her eldest stepbrother, Stephen, is dating her friend Emily, and is mad she spent so much time away. However, things get significantly worse when a wolf-like creature attacks the house, killing whomever it catches.

There are some good moments as the group, which also includes Sarah's 2 other brothers, Charlie and Luke, and 2 more friends, Doug and Gary, sneak around the house, trying to avoid the creature, but some of the attacks were shot in a confusing way. We also don't see nearly enough, which isn't necessarily a problem, though it's an odd choice for a movie featuring a brutal creature that tears its victims to pieces. The most we see is what's left of Duncan's corpse; everything else is more blood trails and people being pulled away. A good example is Emily's death - confusing attack that sees the creature break through the attic floor + offscreen body that we're told looks awful. There's one nasty wound when Sarah is bitten that's quickly covered up, but that's an exception and serves to set a predictable twist near the end.

The characters are an unlikeable bunch, sniping at each other over minor grievances while there's a deadly threat in the house. They and their interactions all come across as fake. The dialogue is just bad and the acting average. Having Stephen suddenly try to make out with Emily after they left the relative safety of the attic to get the gun was just bizarre. The least annoying was Doug, and that was because he basically had zero personality. Oh, and Luke, who spent most of the movie sleeping in the barn. The trailer, which is both spoilery and deceitful, makes it look as if Tom Felton, who plays Gary, has a big role - he doesn't. He's also every bit as terrible as the others and is one of the first to die (or did he?), though we don't get to see it. How desperate could he possibly have been for money to do this?

The identity of the titular wolf isn't hard to guess, though the movie tries to create some suspense by having Officer May and animal catcher McRae, who answer Charlie's call for help, find an abandoned car and be unnecessarily cryptic about its missing driver; this leads Sarah to presume her mother is dead, even if the truth is already pretty obvious. We also find out that Stephen messed with her car to stop her from meeting her lover and they all laughed as she struggled to fix it. Except she wasn't meeting a lover, she was going to her safe house so she wouldn't hurt anyone after she turned into her hairless, sharp-toothed wolf form. Sarah understands this in the end after she completes her transformation and they fight to the death. This final reveal raises way too many questions - when did it start? Is it hereditary? - that really should’ve been answered. Also, we weren't crazy about the lack of hair; Sarah even becomes bald after returning to her human form. In the very end, we see dead Gary move, so maybe the filmmakers were hoping for a sequel where everything would be explained?

VERDICT

Night Wolf is much better than Werewolves of the Third Reich, though that's a pretty low bar. Some good, suspenseful sequences aren't enough to compensate for annoying characters, bad dialogue, and poorly shot monster action.