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.

Silent Night (2012)

 1984's Silent Night, Deadly Night isn't a great slasher movie, but it must have done something right: it beat out bona-fide classic Nightmare on Elm Street at the box office when they released on the same date, got four sequels (I only got to the second film, and that was bad enough to turn me off the franchise), provided the internet with an early meme (Garbage day!)... and eighteen years later, it got a cheap Canadian 'remake' of sorts.

 Although calling it even a loose remake might be pushing it - the only scene I recognized from the original is a kill by antlers (the victim of which was OG scream queen Linnea Quigley). I haven't watched the original in more than twenty years, but looking it up they only share a very basic premise (Killer Santa rampages through town) and a couple other scenes that function more as nods than anything else. And yes, the garbage day line from part two also gets referenced.

 This 2012 edition focuses more on the cops - mainly deputy Aubrey Bradmoore (Jaime King), an insecure but earnest second-generation police deputy - as they try and track down a mysterious, murderous psycho in a Santa suit who's going around punishing anyone who breaches his personal ethics code.

 This all happens during the anual Santa parade, in which people from all around come over donning their best jolly Coca-Cola-inspired getup. The heavy emphasis on the police side of things is slightly distinctive, but both the cop drama and the investigation is murky and uninspired - basically, it's a bunch of red herrings passing for plot development until the mystery basically solves itself.

 As for the slasher side of things, it's not very good either; Most of the victims are either portrayed as spectacular douchebags or sleazy sex workers - the only sympathetic one (at least until very late in the game) is a stripper who gets the cruelest and closest to inspired kill in the movie. She's also chased across half of the town topless. It's pretty tasteless, but I have to say it's about the only time the movie shows a pulse.

 What does that leave us with, then? Well, not much. Director Steven C. Miller (whose new werewolf movie I'm looking forwards to, giving me an excuse to watch this) does well by the material - it's a slick, slightly impersonal movie, and a little too reliant on the du jour desaturated '10s horror palette - but it looks a lot better than most VoD horror, and the production allows for a few expansive scenes with a lot of extras. The kills, as alluded to before, are pretty mediocre, but there's at least a couple good gore effects.

 The veneer of competence on the visuals pushes to the fore the ugly emptiness in Jayson Rothwell's script, which keeps bringing up the 'dark side of Christmas' without really saying anything about it; Repeatedly mentioning a theme doesn't make it relevant to your story. The killer is a cypher until the very end, his code for killing very suspect - the only thing he's got going is a pretty cool mask and a couple of scenes with a flamethrower (including one pretty impressive stunt where he fires it very close to an extra).

 The Santa parade element is also underused; it provides a scene that's almost indistinguishable from any other there's-a-killer-at-a-parade bit (there's quite a few of those) without indulging in the sort of madness that could make this movie memorable - say, getting a few innocent Santas gunned down by panicked cops, or Christmas-sweatered families trampled to death in the ensuing panic.

 There's a little humour thrown in, mostly taken on by a tough-talking sheriff (played by Malcolm McDowell in full ham mode - his slumming goes a lot further back than I realised) acting like he's the hero in a Clint Eastwood movie. It's marginally amusing. Other than that, I don't know what to tell you; It's a slightly off-putting but well-crafted nothing of a slasher movie. Better than the original, I think -it's been a while- but that's not a high ba to clear, and it's not enough to make this one worthwhile unless you're a franchise completist.

 Except: this is another one of those movies Amazon's subtitled with their high-tech AI thingamajig, and there were a couple of misfires which were funnier than the film's actual jokes. Case in point: When a person gets killed off-screen, his unintelligible last word is subtitled as "Triforce!"

 Zelda fans represent.

Hey, turns out AI is good for a laugh, at least!