Wolfman

Andrew Kevin Walker has written above-average horror movies, notably Se7en and Sleepy Hollow, less notably 8MM. David Self is a younger screenplay writer and adaptor, notably for The Road to Perdition. Working together they re-worked Curt Siodmak's screenplay for the 1941 Lon Chaney classic, The Wolf Man.

The tale of a rich 19th-Century English lycanthrope, his two sons and the woman who loved them both is an inevitable downer. The second son, bitten by his father, is fated (by gypsy lore and Scotland Yard police) to die. The supposedly happy ending is that a woman's love will enable him to die as a man and not in the guise of a beast with brutal strength and gory fur.

Naturally, the key ingredient for such a blood-drenched horror movie

is its special effects, and they are good. The CGI of misty, muddy old London are credible too, akin to created so effectively for Sherlock Holmes. The mostly British cast is also commendable, doing what they usually do, emoting calmly: Anthony Hopkins (Wolfman Sr), Art Malik (his loyal Indian servant), Emily Blunt (Wolfman Jr's love interest) and Anthony Sher (the splendidly supercilious mental asylum doctor attempting to cure Wolfman's delusions).

Australian Hugo Weaving is as dependable as always, as the mostly dead-pan Scotland Yard detective leading the hunt for the beastly killer, who's played the even more dead-pan Puerto Rican Benicio Del Toro. Hollywood's SFX doyen, Rick Baker, joined the production team led by director Joe Johnston, whose slow-paced track record (only one movie every few years) began with Honey, I Shrank the Kids and included Jumanji and the third Jurassic Park.

Put all the promising ingredients together and you end up, sadly, with a dead-pan slow-paced movie that looked and felt old and uninspired. Bodies are decapitated brightly, claws flash nicely, Hopkins smirks, Del Toro dies manfully, and one character is left with a bite, of course.