The Wolfman: Lon Chaney Jr. where are you?
Movie Reviews February 22nd. 2010, 11:40pmPart costume drama and part horror flick, this movie is entertaining and pays homage to those great horror films of the 1930’s and 40’s. The first shot we see of Benicio del Toro resembles Lon Chaney Jr. to a remarkable degree. The story is vaguely similar to the 1941 original in that there is a gypsy camp (but no Bela Lugosi or Maria Ouspenskaya) and Larry (or Lawrence) Talbot gets bitten by a werewolf. The real homage is to the makeup. The original Wolfman is so distinct to those of us who were terrified by it as kids in late night reruns that anything too different would spoil it for us. Benicio’s wolfman is updated, but in the vein of the original. The transformation scenes parallel the classic, and add some new technology to make it somewhat more realistic. Why Sir Anthony Hopkins is in this I can’t explain. As the father, he takes the plot wildly out to left field and it fails for me in that sense. If you have no knowledge of the original, then this may make no difference to you. The gore and violence of modern movies do not make them scarier. What they did 70 years ago with lighting, sound, and camera angles created more tension than we see today. I liked this Wolfman, but there really is only one and that will always be Lon Chaney Jr.
October 17th, 2015 at 4:13 pm
Interesting note about the setting of the Universal mseotnr films. I found it odd that the Wolfman remake from Joe Johnston took place in the Victorian or Edwardian era, instead of the 1940 s, as the original find. Regarding The Mummy, the Imhotep Mummy remake from 1999 took place in roughly the original period of the 1932 film, and it sequels progressed in time. The three prequels took place in ancient times.Regarding Kharis, Hammer’s version of Kharis took place in the Victorian era, as I recall. Incidentally, the 1999 Mummy remake started the most prolific remake effort from Universal, given the various sequels and prequels I alluded to. The 1979 Dracula remake produced no sequels (unless one counts Van Helsing from 2004) nor so far has the aforementioned Wolfman remake. (For that matter, Universal’s 1980 remake of Flash Gordon produced no sequels; the 2003 Hulk film had a reboot co-produced from another studio. I mention these as Universal released Buster Crabbe’s Flash Gordon serials and Universal TV produced the Bixby version of the Hulk.) Universal’s stumbling with its mseotnrs and previously prominent properties seems similar to Warner Bros.’ recembt fumbling. .