Here is as Ronseal a title as you’re going to get. Werewolves is, indeed, a werewolf movie but there’s a little bit more to it than that. Steven C. Miller‘s low-budget throwback is more or less The Purge with a lycanthropic twist. It’s as silly as it sounds, and while not a great movie by any means, it’s not without its simple pleasures. It’s got rubbery suits, it’s got goofy humour, it’s got dreadful science, it’s got grizzled B-movie mainstay Frank Grillo. And it’s got just about enough self-awareness to fend off too many accusations of unintentional hilarity.

On the anniversary of a supermoon which spontaneously turned 1.6 billion people into werewolves for an evening, the bad moon is due to rise again but now people are prepared. Wesley (Grillo) is a molecular biologist (and former soldier) who’s part of a group testing out a new ‘moon screen’ (seriously) which it’s hoped may combat the transformation. However, when things go wrong and the streets are filled with howling chaos, Wesley and colleague Amy (Katrina Law) try to get home to save his widowed sister-in-law (Ilfanesh Hadera) and niece (Kamdynn Gary) who are hemmed in a siege situation.

Werewolves is a monumentally silly movie and it knows it is. As a B-movie slice of goofy action horror it would hit a sweet spot with a late-night cinema crowd. Its flaws are way more apparent on home viewing without the tribal atmosphere of like-minded lunatics. The dialogue is of the ‘If we stay here, we’ll die’ variety – so utilitarian it could have been written by Mr. Gradgrind. Not to say there’s no fun to be had with its schematic plotting and grab bag of tropes all mercilessly devoured, but it’s fairly rote stuff, with Grillo snarling his way through it all as much as the werewolves do.

The werewolves themselves are the things that will delight afficionados of practical effects. There is a loveably retro feel to the suits courtesy of long-standing effects duo Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. (Oscar winners for Death Becomes Her). There is a real, knowing artificiality to them but they still manage to seem a real threat, even if there’s a weird reptilian quality to their snouts. A few really nasty moments of gore show just what the pair can do with latex and corn syrup. They also have a lot of fun with the werewolf design when it’s necessary we recall the the human characters they once were. So we get a street punk with a septum piercing and hapless militia type Cody (James Michael Cummings) who spends most of the night terrorising Wesley’s family wearing a flak jacket with ‘Wolf Killer’ daubed on it.

It is difficult to recommend Werewolves but it doesn’t deserve an absolute panning either. It isn’t trying to be anything other than some good-natured, undemanding carnage. Still, with a bit more thought and attention to character, and a lot more to the lovely practical work, and this could have been one of the better low-budget creature features of recent years.

Available on streaming from Mon 13 & on DVD from Mon 20 Jan 2025