In my last review I prematurely exclaimed that “the movies are back!” And while I wasn’t wrong per se, something that rhymes with “smelt a hairy ant” is also “back,” making me question the decision of many studios eagerly returning to the “only in theaters” model of film releases. While Scarlett Johansson is suing Disney for releasing Black Widow simultaneously in theaters and on their streaming app, this reviewer is wishing more studios would do just that (without screwing over their stars, of course) so I could write about The Green Knight or Old without a stranger’s cough in the dark sending chills down my spine.
Which brings me to yet another “hidden gem” in the Amazon early access queue. Werewolves Within is a horror comedy overflowing with familiar faces whose names will hopefully become commonplace sooner than later, but for now are best known as “What’re they from again?” That guy from Veep and I Think You Should Leave (Sam Richardson) plays forest ranger Finn Wheeler, freshly moved to the town of Beaverfield. He meets postal worker Cecily (Milana Vayntrub), that woman from the AT&T commercials and This Is Us, who is living at the mansion bed and breakfast where Finn is staying. There’s the hippie guy from that comedian’s show on HBO, the woman that starred in that Hulu show, Guillermo from What We Do In the Shadows, and many, many more, each a thinly drawn caricature of a different “type” of American.
Every actor in Werewolves Within has done standout work before, but for the first half of the film, it feels like they were all given free rein to be as big and as loud as possible, often all at once. See, a snowstorm has blown in, and there appears to be a large beast on the prowl that killed the dog of Hulu show woman (Michaela Watkins, who is usually very good). With the backup generators down, everyone is holed up in the lovely B&B, where the body of the owner’s husband has just been found buried under the porch, so the histrionics are understandable. But the high tension of this werewolf-infused mansion murder mystery (a cozy genre if ever there was one) is often played for laughs that miss their mark.
It’s not until the second half of the film, when all of the paranoia and personal differences come to a head, that the movie grows into its tone (and its title), with the townsfolk of Beaverfield going gonzo cuckoo bananas on each other through sheer craven self-preservation. Meanwhile, the fun of guessing who the werewolf is, or if there even is one, keeps all the insanity from going off the rails. It’s a good time.
Strangely enough, Werewolves Within is an adaptation of a multiplayer VR videogame from 2016, and, according to Wikipedia, surpassed The Angry Birds Movie 2 as “the highest-praised film based on a video game” with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 86%. If that endorsement and this review can’t convince you to check it out, then I don’t know what will.
