Werewolf: The Beast Among Us Blu-ray
Movie: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Featuring a hodgepodge of accents and idioms, and vague
in its setup, Werewolf: The Beast Among Us takes a while to find its feet. Taking
place in what appears to be a 19th century eastern European village,
yet populated largely by Americans, it offers a curdled mythology of a beast
that feeds for three nights around the time of the full moon. Having ripped
apart a village, a hunter and his gang are hired to destroy it, shamelessly
riffing on Jaws. Stephen Rea is ripe as the town doctor, whose young apprentice
longs to join up with the hunters. Werewolf: Etc trades in care and coherence for
fine looking sets, grim humour and no qualms about buckets of blood and gore, while
also chucking in some passable plot developments. The makers have sourced some
terrific locations that with just a bit more budget and richness to the
cinematography could really have raised it another notch. Still, it’s a couple
of rungs above the kind of similar guff you’ll regularly stumble across on the
SyFy channel. It isn’t doused in unnecessary CGI, with many of the shots of the
fairly decent looking beast done with animatronics, and although there is a
fairly shoddy transformation sequence, as straight to home market Halloween
fare goes, this is perfectly presentable stuff.
A/V: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Picture quality is as clear and detailed as you like, and
backed up by a robust audio track that’s well distributed around the channels.
Extras: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
A couple of brief featurettes go behind the scenes and
are largely EPK affairs, while there’s also a very quick look at Universal’s
long tradition of monster movies. There are also some deleted scenes and a commentary
from the director and producer.
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