At the end of Walter Hill’s seminal classic THE WARRIORS, Swan, played by Michael Beck, looks out into the surf and wonders aloud if it has all been worth it. I imagine that millions asked themselves the same thing when emerging from their homes after COVID lockdowns. Loved ones lost to the disease, a world more insular and selfish in its values, and a wide rejection of science in the name of stock value. Was it all worth it?
COVID cinema has thus far fallen into two categories: First, smaller-scale productions that don’t have anything directly to do with COVID, but those where the script was hatched at a time when people were focusing on getting as few people into a room together as possible for safety. Second, films that deal with COVID directly, or through metaphor, that approach the fear of lockdown at a personal level. 2020’s HOST was a group of friends trying to while away the hours in boredom. It wasn’t grappling with how immeasurably big it all felt.
Steven Miller’s WEREWOLVES contends with the scale that we experienced and the fear we felt before the vaccines. In the film, the previous year’s Supermoon triggered a transformation of one billion people into werewolves. If the scale of this werewolf epidemic seems bigger than COVID, remember that, to date, there are 776 million reported cases, with countless more unreported, because the infected had inadequate access to medical care. Suddenly, something that transforms one in eight people into a giant wolf seems less preposterous.
The audience experiences the individual human cost of the Supermoon transformation event through Dr. Wes Marshall (Frank Grillo) and Lucy (Ilfenesh Hadera). Wes’s brother, Lucy’s husband, a first responder, died during the previous year’s Supermoon. Images played through my mind of how in addition to the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions, the early COVID death totals were stacked with first responders, and those with “essential” jobs.
Wes is part of the team working on developing a medical response to the Supermoon, but he finds himself torn. Tonight is the Supermoon, and instead of all of Lucy’s neighbors selecting passive protection measures that focus survivability for both uninfected humans and wolves, some have embraced preparation that seems fundamentally confrontational and counterproductive. A neighbor, Cody (Johnathan Schaech), has decked himself out in a tactical vest that reads “Wolf Killer” and a matching painted skull mask. He sits, waiting, with a shotgun in his lap, seemingly inviting confrontation with the werewolves.
Lucy’s house, in contrast, prioritizes deterrents that keeps the wolves at the furthest perimeter and are less lethal. There are bottles of capsaicin that can be remotely triggered to spray in a wolf’s face. There’s an electrified fence that delivers a meaningful but not lethal charge. Lucy and Wes have bricked over one of the doors leading into her home, and in the run-up to this year’s Supermoon, all windows are reinforced and boarded-up.
While Cody’s preparation feels like people intentionally coughing in someone’s face and refusing to mask in a Costco, Lucy’s feels like masking, careful handwashing, and bottles of liberally-applied disinfectant.
So despite feeling the tug of family and obligation, Wes heads to the lab, where they are working on a full body spray and eyedrops that will hopefully act as an inhibiting agent for change brought on by the Supermoon. The work is remarkably personal for his peer, Amy (Katrina Law). One of the volunteers for the test of the inhibiting agent is her husband, Miles (James Kyson.) Both Amy and Miles are Asian-American, and I couldn’t help but think of the open hostility ginned up against Asian-Americans during lockdown, where they were met often met with hostility and violence. It feels like by making these characters Asian-American, WEREWOLVES is in conversation with the hostility experienced by this community. So results are initially hopeful; the inhibiting agent lasts for an hour. Then all hell breaks loose. This is an action movie, after all.
After escaping the transformed test subjects, Wes and Amy begin their trek toward Lucy’s house. The trip to Lucy’s is less Anabasis, and more The Odyssey. I won’t go into every stop on the way, because WEREWOLVES‘ surprises are many and worthwhile, but this odyssey feels critical of American modernity, where we’ve landed. At one point, Wes and Amy flee into a building to escape a pursuing wolf, and only once they are inside and a rolling steel gate lowered behind them does the nature of the building become clear. They’re in a dead shopping mall, gates lowered on all the abandoned store fronts, protecting people inside from possible wolf incursion. The boom period of muscular, large-scale American action pictures often set pivotal scenes in thriving malls. Ask people about COMMANDO, TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY, and INVASION USA, and the mall will likely be part of the response. Even horror of the period found its way to the mall with CHOPPING MALL and PHANTOM OF THE MALL. These were thriving meccas, monuments to America’s “me”-centric capitalist priorities. Bursting into a dead shopping mall, which is now being used to protect people, feels right. Since 2020, the American economy has felt the tightening grip of private equity and endless consolidation. People were forced out of the relative safety of their homes to serve the husk of an economy that likely no longer had use for them.
Miller processes this all through a lens that remembers to prioritize making things look fuckin’ cool. Large blooms of blue and deep, rich shadows carve out the shapes of Miller’s cityscape. The city is illuminated by the Supermoon and just enough splashes of fire and neon to call to mind classics like I COME IN PEACE and NIGHT OF THE COMET and avoid plunging into reductive self-parody, like some films, trying to light for that ’80s feel. I’m looking at you, Joe Begos.
Equally impressive is the phenomenal work on sound design in the film. It would have been easy to cut corners and create a similar sound to the film’s three major locations: lab, city, and suburbia. The ambient sound of the labs sound as if they are ringing off naked concrete walls and have a mechanical quality evocative of James Cameron’s sci-fi landscapes. The city is very spare in its design, letting every wolf growl really land, and leaving more room for the unobtrusive score. The suburban home setting is pure horror in its construction, with every creak or scratch at the door calibrated to elicit fear.
The lead, Frank Grillo, is at this point a figure of familiar trust for both horror fans and DTV action buffs. Grillo figured prominently in multiple entries of THE PURGE series, which like WEREWOLVES, shared an interest in American class and decline. Earlier this year, he starred in action auteur Isaac Florentine’s HOUNDS OF WAR and John Swab’s LONG GONE HEROES, with Oscar winner Melissa Leo. He’s developed bonafides that put him in the top echelon of actors working in the action space. Whether a fan is approaching WEREWOLVES from a place of horror or action fandom, they’ll likely see Grillo and think, “That makes sense,” and Grillo absolutely delivers. One of the key hooks of this film is that come sunrise, all these wolves are going to be human again, until the next year’s Supermoon. Grillo bakes a hesitance for direct violence into almost every confrontation in the film. He seems fidgety and unwilling as he holds as a pistol, and that helps sell the idea that this is a film about a pandemic. The wolves never stopped being people for Wes, and Grillo sells that admirably.
Horror digs into the human desire to flee, to escape. Horror knows that sometimes the only available victory is survival, and WEREWOLVES’ COVID-inflected story honors that, but action digs into the human desire to confront, to drive back that which threatens us. Some of the best moments in genre filmmaking are when these desires comingle, whether it’s Dutch caked in mud, hiding from the Predator, or Nancy intentionally going to sleep to initiate her final confrontation with Freddy Krueger. “I’m going to win.” “I’m going to live” is the mantra of action-horror. It’s rarefied difficult alchemy to blend these genres well, and that’s why I can’t recommend WEREWOLVES enough. It’s the best action-horror film in a long, long time.
FOR FURTHER READING…
Brett Gallman on A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984)!
Jon Abrams on PREDATOR (1987)!
Jon Abrams on DOG SOLDIERS (2002)! More tough guys versus werewolves!
Jon Abrams on THE GREY (2012)! More of Frank Grillo versus mean canines!
them, not even once. When he’s not disappointing his cats he’s watching and writing about film.
His interests run toward naturalism, SOV and forgotten thrillers. Against his better judgment he
has hosted a podcast, Impossible Coin, for six years.
Tags: Action Film, Betzaida Landín, Brandon Cox, Briarcliff Entertainment, Dane DiLiegro, Frank Grillo, Greg MacLennan, Horror, Ilfenesh Hadera, James Burkholder, James Kyson, James Michael Cummings, Johnathan Schaech, Katrina Law, Lou Diamond Phillips, Matthew Kennedy, Steven C. Miller, The Newton Brothers, Werewolves
No Comments