Teen Wolf Still Reigns Supreme

There are some things in this world that just cannot be accomplished. We'll never fully do away with poverty or crime. The Coyote will never catch the Roadrunner, and the Cubs will never win a World Series. I could go on, but you get the idea. Apparently we have realized another truth that should be understood for the rest of time.

No one will ever make a good werewolf movie.

I grew up with Teen Wolf. It's a fun movie, with a principal who pees his pants, a really fat guy who plays basketball, and a girl named Boof. I loved it, but it was never intended to be taken seriously.

Unless I'm missing something, the newly-released Wolfman was supposed to be taken seriously. I have a personal policy that says I won't walk out of a movie, ever...probably because I'm cheap and movies are not. But about 20 minutes into this one, I was questioning my standards.

It was slow and over-dramatic, and those are the nice things I have to say about it. The plot was as flat and predictable as a game between the New York Yankees and the baseball team from Southwestern School for the Blind. I'm still giving compliments, by the way.

If those weren't enough things to make me hate the movie, the faces of the werewolves were the clinchers. It was like they borrowed the masks from Teen Wolf and called it good. They knew they could make anything scary and realistic, but they decided to just keep it simple. Nearly everyone in the theater either laughed or let out an audible groan the first time they saw a werewolf's face.

I remember watching the previews and noticing they never showed the Wolfman's face. Now I realize they didn't show the face because nobody would have gone to see the movie if they had. It would have been just like adding a screen shot that said, "This movie is really, really dumb. Don't go. Seriously, it's not just a waste of money, it's a huge waste of your time. Consider yourself warned".

If they had done that for us, we would have all been able to say something like, "Oh, this looks good, I'm going to have to go see...oh wow, never mind".

I've never trusted movie critics, and that backfired on me this time. But I still have a problem with the critics, who gave The Wolfman a C+. What kind of message does this send to students today? If I could have produced work that was such a miserable failure and still gotten a C+, I could have been a rocket scientist.

Maybe I'm just mad that I wasted my money on this movie. Maybe I'm just picky. But if I had to pick the best werewolf movie based on the two I've seen, I'd say Teen Wolf wins in the same way a snail would win a race against a chair.