When it comes to the golden age of cinema, I haven’t seen nearly as many films as I probably need to. If I’m being honest, I’ve probably seen ten or twenty films made prior to 1950, and Lon Chaney Jr.’s 1941 The Wolf Man is not among those. So my frame of reference as far as this remake is limited. I would like to be able to compare not only the story, but the style as well, as it seems that some of the most striking visuals found in the first few generations of film-making came in the horror genre. But alas, I’m a film buff charlatan and my top five movies were made in the last twenty years. Still, it’s not impossible to glean something from the general style of the times, and Joe Johnston‘s 2010 The Wolfman remake does seem relatively beholden to its roots. There’s a struggle here in trying to update while simultaneously trying not to, and it’s in this struggle that the film staggers. It’s like watching a graphic designer put together the Mona Lisa in Adobe Illustrator. The pieces are there, but the final product feels inexplicably wrong.
Peter Wertz
Wertz of Wisdom 
