Werewolves

 If nothing else, give credit to Werewolves for trying: director Steven C. Miller apes a very specific type of action B-movie with a modicum of success - he's perfectly capable of making a film that looks at least professional (as he demonstrated on his Silent Night reimagining). Unfortunately, that, a fully committed Frank Grillo performance, and a bonkers premise is just about everything this turkey has going for it.

This sort of idiocy deserves a much more fun movie around it.

 As for that bonkers premise: One year ago, a massive "supermoon" event caused millions of people across the globe to turn into werewolves for one night and cause a global bloodbath. The world's somewhat recovered, but now a new supermoon looms close. How will survivors prepare for the second coming of the wolfpocalypse?

 Well, by doing a whole lot of stupid things, it looks like. But first we have to wade through a whole lot of poorly written melodrama where a Wesley, a former marine played by Grillo, helps prepare the house of his widowed sister-in-law (Ifenesh Hadera) and her cutesy little girl (Kamdynn Gary) for the wolves' night out.

 Why can't he stay there and protect them? Well, because besides being former a globally recognized military hero and a DIY genius who can turn a house into a fortress in a single afternoon, Wesley is also the lead molecular biologist in the government's attempt to find something that can counteract the lycanthropy-inducing supermoon.

 That... hell, that is some truly Buckaroo Banzai-level madness right there. But with none of that movie's charm, panache or sense of fun, it's just a one more misstep in a film that's already made too many to get to this point - and we're less than fifteen minutes in. Oh hell.

 Anyhow - the government's last-ditch effort*, is testing a "moonscreen", a nanite-infused lunar block that can hopefully stop the moon from turning anyone, which sounds like a poor venue of investigation to me since a tarp can achieve the same result... but I'm already giving this movie more thought than anyone involved did.
 In any case, the moonscreen works... temporarily. Thanks to a spectacularly poorly planned and implemented plan to secure the test subjects -and the abject, hilarious failure of the sole failback precaution- the werewolves soon massacre nearly everyone in the facility, leaving Wesley and a fellow survivor scientist (Katrina Law) to trek across the werewolf-infested city to get to his surrogate family.

 Just about nothing in this movie works. The script offers a collection of poorly strung-together clichés, the action is embarrassingly bad, and everyone acts like a complete idiot. I can sympathise to certain extent - the film is trying to do a lot with very obvious budget limitations; I realize that they would cause nightmare-level complications when something doesn't work as expected. But none of the building blocks the movie is handling work, and no one involved seems to have a clear idea of how to put them together.
 This becomes clear as early as the first few scenes of the movie, where an info-dump brings us up to date with the global werewolf crisis, then suddenly switches to some trite, maudlin family melodrama, then smash-cuts  to the title credits. It gets worse.

 The monsters are cartoony - I kind of like the goofy things, especially when they go through the trouble of leaving some of their normal day clothes to give them personality. They're stiff as hell, look a bit tacky and can't handle any big movements (just one reason why the action sucks so bad), but this is precisely the sort of problem the movie could have gotten over if there was anything else around them to like. There are a few good gore shots, at least.
 As mentioned, Miller makes things look decent; Pretty slick, save for a cheesy over-reliance on light flares. The acting is... I mean, a script this bad makes even Grillo, the ever-reliable action workhorse, look terrible. Others fare a lot worse.

 As much as it pains me to say it, this is a near-complete waste of time. It comes close to being so bad it's good a few times, what with its abundance of non-sequiturs and laughably stupid ideas like the lupine expert deciding getting up close to a werewolf and screaming in its face (dominance, you see!) is a good way to buy time. Or its quaint adherence to the belief that intensity somehow supplants drama and bypasses the need for things to make sense.

 But there's an odd dourness to everything, an epic misjudgement of how much we're going to be invested in its completely artificial characters and their fates; It feels like we're meant to take it seriously. That, coupled with an uninspired run of botched direct lifts from a myriad obvious sources (the main one of which also featured Grillo prominently) prevent even a glimmer of joy. 
 I didn't hate it, at least. There's not enough here to work myself up over.

*: For a project so important, they sure were nice to give its top scientist / first responder action hero  leave to spend the whole day off instead of doing whatever it is he was meant to do.