Werewolf: The Beast Among Us (2012)

Resemble[s] a second-tier badass action flick from the mid-1980s.

Avoids being a complete b-movie misfire, but you'll have to slog through some tiresome stuff to find the few morsels of amusing weirdness.

Not as horrifically terrible as I was expecting once I started watching it. It's not a good film, in fact, it's actually pretty bad. But it's bad in a way that's kinda charming in a B-movie way. It's cheap, it's poorly acted and it's got some terrible CG effects and it makes no bones about it. I like Stephen Rea, but I'm genuinely curious what he saw in this script. Maybe he desperately needed the paycheck. This movie is weird in the sense that I spent a lot of the time thinking to myself of who the people in the cast reminded me of, that were already famous. Clearly the lead is Bradley Cooper. The British guy reminds me of what a child between Robert Downey Jr. and Alan Cummings would look like. And David, the young apprentice, his voice reminded me of a Elijah Wood. Why the fuck did I spend so much time on that? I literally have no idea, but that's what I spent the movie doing. I wasn't exactly distracted since I was pretty much following the film from beginning to end, but my mind wanders sometimes. Plus I don't think I have much to write about this, so think of this as filler. Anyway, at least this is something that's easy to watch. It does not require a lot of brainpower to sit through. There's a lot of goofiness involved here, as was to be expected, and the film did make me laugh with its badness. Well, really, there was one really bad actor, the guy who plays Jaeger, who definitely made me laugh more than my fair share with how bad he was. It's not like the film is chock full of award-worthy performances, unless it's the Razzies, but Jaeger did stand out above everyone else in terms of how bad he was. He was definitely hamming it up. A lot of the story, to me, doesn't really make a whole lot of sense because it's hard to come up with a timeline for these things to have happened. Maybe it all lines up perfectly and I just didn't care to piece two and two together, but it just didn't work to me. And there's some strange character development here in that the British guy, who had been portrayed as an arrogant asshole, all of a sudden goes full-on evil. It was definitely out of left field. It was very poorly set-up and not particularly satisfying. I guess it was just something they had to do, but considering he had been travelling with the hunters, does that mean they had to deal with his bullshit once the solstice came? It just seems silly. And not to mention that, at the climax, which should be the most important part of the film since you're wrapping up your story, all of the hunters, minus the British guy, just absolutely vanish. They reappear, of course, but it's just odd that they would disappear during the climactic moments of the film. It is what it is. With that said, some of the practical gore effects are actually really good. Maybe not outstanding or anything, but better than the budget implied. I don't really have much else to add. This is a bad movie that you can laugh at with a group of friends. If you can gather up a group, then I say go for it. If not, well, there's probably better films to watch than this. Dead Snow 2, perhaps.