Several years after creating the hugely successful Scream franchise writer Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven teamed up to make a werewolf film starring Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, and Judy Greer. If that sounds like a good time at the movies you should know that the studio, specifically the Weinsteins, had their perverted, gnarled hands all over it.
They demanded numerous reshoots, edited down Craven’s original R-Rating down to a PG-13, and exchanged Award Winning special effects artist Rick Baker’s physically-made Werewolf designs for lousy-looking CGI ones.
The end results aren’t terrible, but they aren’t great either.
Ricci and Eisenberg play siblings Ellie and Jimmy. On a drive home one evening something jumps in front of them causing their car to crash. Let’s not be coy here with the plot, that something was a werewolf and it bites them. Slowly they will start turning into the beast as well.
But not too much because we like these guys and we can’t have them turning so bad they wind up having a bunch of mutilated corpses on their hands. Jimmy will find himself lying naked in the garden at one point, and Ellie keeps getting little bodily changes from time to time.
In this story, they can keep from becoming full-on werewolves if they can find and kill the werewolf that bit them. A lot of time is spent with them trying to figure that out (and the audience guessing it might be one of the assortment of semi-famous actors who keep showing up.)
You can see hints of what could have been an interesting film tucked into the corners of what we actually get. Looking online and it seems a lot of folks absolutely hate this movie. I didn’t hate it, but it doesn’t do anything original or all that interesting. If Craven and Williamson’s names weren’t on it and if we didn’t know the Weinstein’s mucked with it I suspect the general consensus would be, well not great, but not hated. It is very, as the kids like to say, “Mid.”
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