Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!
I’ve seen an interview with Joe Dante talking about The Howling specifically as a film that he had to more or less hide the subject matter from the public on. If people knew it was about werewolves, he said, they would think it was hokey. Of course, The Howling is actually a pretty great werewolf movie. We’ve gotten past that “It would be hokey” mentality, because Werewolves Within is clearly not hiding the fact that it is indeed a werewolf movie. It’s also a comedy, and it manages to walk the line between the two genres pretty well.
In the small town of Beaverton, VT, Finn Wheeler (Sam Richardson) is appointed the new ranger. He shows up to his new position and is soon introduced to pretty much the whole town. Not unlike the town of Perfection in Tremors, Beaverton has about a dozen or so residents, each of them nuttier than the last. Finn is walked around town by Cecily (Milana Vayntrub), the new mail carrier. The biggest news in the town isn’t the arrival of the new forest ranger, but the controversy over a new pipeline set to run through the town. Some of the townsfolk are desperate for the pipeline to go through because they’ll make a good deal of money from it. Others want to preserve the town as it is. This is a tension that will continue throughout the film.
One of the pieces of hot gossip is that the husband of Jeanine (Catherine Curtain), who runs the local lodge, has run off. Hower, this is not actually the case. As will surprise no one who has heart the name of the film, there’s actually a werewolf in town. When one resident loses a dog, Finn investigates and finds the body of Jeanine’s late husband crammed under the porch. Tensions start to run high, and naturally people start getting picked off and turn on each other, because no one is able to avoid being considered a werewolf by someone else. Things are made worse when the environmentalist (Rebecca Henderson) who is in town to explore the idea of the pipeline, tells the assembled townspeople that they have a werewolf among them. And then, she winds up dead, allegedly a suicide according to Sam Parker (Wayne Duvall), the man building the pipeline and the man most likely to want the environmentalist dead.
As the number of townspeople dwindles, Finn finds himself in a position of needing to determine who could be the werewolf…troubling since there’s a good amount of information that it might actually be him, and the most obvious candidate, the trapper (Glenn Fleshler) who lives out of town and seems to hate everyone, can’t be guilty.
At its heart, Werewolves Within is a movie version of the old party game Werewolf, or, if you are unfamiliar with that, a werewolf-ified version of Among Us. That’s really it, and we are more or less in the role of Finn as the main character. We (and Finn) are trying to figure out which person (or potentially people) is/are the werewolf(ves) before it becomes too late.
There are a few things that work very well in Werewolves Within. For starters, this is clearly a horror/comedy film and it manages the blend of horror and comedy extremely well. It’s not an incredibly scary movie for what it is, but it’s definitely horror, and there’s a little bit of gore here. For someone not used to horror movies, this will be scary enough, even though it’s honestly pretty tame. It’s also not laugh-out-loud funny, but it is funny. The characters are wacky, but on the edge of realistic, which works well. So, there are extreme characters, but just believable extreme characters. The dialog is snappy and fun. It’s entertaining and amusing, if not an absolute laugh riot, but it’s clearly an effective comedy.
It also works well to make Finn an incredibly likable character. Finn has the manly job of forest ranger, but he is far from what we expect in a character like this. He is not what anyone would call an “alpha,” or at least not anything that the wankers who take that alpha/beta stuff seriously would make him an alpha. He carries a gun, but he’s far more prone to try to talk himself out of situation, and he makes a point of being decent to everyone. It’s honestly refreshing to see a male character in a position of authority who doesn’t spend the entire movie acting like it’s a dick measuring contest.
The biggest issue with Werewolves Within is that it’s eventually pretty predictable. There are only a couple of places it can go, and for the shock value it wants this to have, it’s pretty unshocking. Additionally, the reveal of the central fact of the movie is fun, but it’s handled very quietly, and without fanfare. I don’t mind that, but in a horror/comedy with some clear influence from other places—there’s a bit of The Thing in this as well, it’s not hard to see where we’re going.
Why to watch Werewolves Within: It’s live-action Among Us.
Why not to watch: Once the big culling happens, the end is obvious.
