Film File - The Wolfman

In the teenage days of our dads and grandads, the horror staples of Saturday night cinema revolved around Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, The Mummy and The Invisible Man, all played by legends of the screen like Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff and Claude Rains. One of the biggest shock-jocks of that Golden Age was The Wolfman, the haunting creation introduced by Lon Chaney in 1941. A man forced to give in to the most primal side of his spirit when the moon was at its fullest, he unleashed a primal rage born from the darkest shadow of his psyche. Given countless names by scores of cultures over thousands of years, the mythological creature known as the lycanthrope was a human cursed with the ability to transform into a wolf-like creature when the moon is full. The original film, with its tagline of 'His hideous howl was a dirge of death!' became an instant classic. Inspired by the original that launched a legacy of horror, the 2010 version of 'The Wolfman' brings the myth of a cursed man back to its legendary origins. Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro) is a nobleman who left the family estate many years ago - a childhood he said ended the night his mother died. Having departed the sleepy Victorian hamlet of Blackmoor vowing never to return, his life changes when his brother's fiancée, Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt), implores him to join the search for his missing sibling. Talbot returns home to be once again reunited with his estranged father, Sir John (Anthony Hopkins), and to discover a strange condition afflicting his family. Something with brute strength and insatiable bloodlust has been killing the villagers of Blackmoor through a series of grisly murders which has attracted the suspicious Scotland Yard inspector, Francis Aberline (Hugo Weaving), and as Talbot pieces together the gory puzzle, he learns the full impact of an ancient curse that turns the afflicted into werewolves when the moon is full. Now, if he has any chance of ending the slaughter and protecting the woman he has grown to love, Talbot must destroy the vicious creature in the woods surrounding the ancient village. In the process, however, he faces his own demons after he is bitten by the beast, and sets in motion the final chapter of his family's horrifying story. As an actor who has excelled at playing criminals, conmen and cops, Benicio Del Toro leads a stellar cast in this muscular adaptation where all the cast - Hopkins, Blunt and Weaving - deliver fine performances. With a screenplay from Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self that explores in greater depth the relationships, particularly of Sir John Talbot and his son, the characters have more dramatic appeal than the shallow personas that often populate horror movies. Hopkins, as usual, brings his tortured emotions into full play and acts as the centre of a plot around which the action revolves. Director Joe Johnson invests the film with an effective and pervasive atmosphere of dread throughout, and the special effects, as expected, are definitely of the eye-popping variety. The music score by Danny Elfman adds greatly, too, to the horrific tone of the movie. While the film does follow the expected plot line - a supernatural creature whose killing appears unstoppable - the writers have injected a number of extra shock moments that work very effectively. On the minus side, the film does plod at times, with certain events taking too long to unfold at the expense of good pacing. After a thrilling killing sequence, the story often flatlines into predictable dialogue rendering the forward momentum a bit like the new 30km/h speed limit on the Dublin quays. Overall, though, this is a robust modern update of a venerable horror classic, and should definitely prove a hit with a younger generation looking for the ideal date movie.