Werewolves, the Frank Grillo Vehicle About a Supermoon That Turns People Into Lycanthropes, Is Arguably the Greatest Movie Ever Made

Mank ain't got nothing on this masterpiece of cinema!

There’s one werewolf and one Frank Grillo inside everyone.

I like to give the paid subscribers who decide what new movie I write about each week at least two strong candidates, but when Y2K opened two weeks ago, the only competition I could find was the Netflix Yuletide offering Dear Santa.

A Farrelly Brothers movie co-written and starring Jack Black should have been a formidable contender, but my readers found it easy to resist. I watched just enough of Dear Santa with my son to determine that it wasn’t worth his or my time.

I did not mind. As a superfan of Kyle Mooney’s Brigsby Bear and Saturday Morning All-Star Hits and a Gen-Xer with a powerful nostalgia for the late nineteen nineties, I would see Y2K even if I was not professionally obligated to do so.

I didn’t learn of the existence of a little movie called Werewolves until after the poll had finished.

I suspect Werewolves would have beaten Y2K and Dear Santa in the weekly poll because it has the greatest premise in film history. It’s about a Supermoon that transforms a BILLION people into werewolves.

A million werewolves aren’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion werewolves.

Werewolves is like The Purge but with lycanthropes. One of the many wonderful things about what I can confidently say is the best film of 2024, this decade, and all time is that it takes itself very seriously.

Director Steven C. Miller’s magnum opus doesn’t find the concept of a billion wolfmen, wolf women, and non-binary lycanthropes silly.

There’s nothing “funny” about an army of out-of-control werewolves coming for you and your family.

The “Woke” mob would love to take away our guns and our silver bullets so that when the werewolves come for us, we will be defenseless. Also, I’m pretty sure that they’re developing a super-virus that will turn illegal immigrants into werewolves because lycanthropes can be counted upon to vote for Democrats. Werewolves aren’t satisfied with human flesh. They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets.

Werewolves was initially titled Year 2 before changing its name was changed to something more generic but less confusing. Naming a movie Year 2 makes it seem like a very off-brand sequel to Harold Ramis’ poorly received final film Year One, whereas Werewolves accurately, if unimaginatively, conveys the film’s subject matter.

Society was not prepared for the werewolfpocalypse. They did not know how to deal with an unexpected wolfmanado. The bloodshed and loss of life were incalculable.

One year later, a second Supermoon promises to transform millions, if not BILLIONs, of unlucky souls into crazed monsters with an insatiable hunger for human flesh.

Arrogant scientists think that they can prevent another massacre on a global scale with a “moon screen” that can keep humans from turning into wolves when exposed to moonlight.

Humanity is adorable in its naivety and gullibility, particularly where werewolves are concerned. They’re hoping for a cure. At the very least, they want to contain the uncontainable.

A bearded Lou Diamond Phillips lends gravitas to the role of Dr. Aranda. Phillips helps establish a tone of straight-faced earnestness that makes everything funnier in an opening exposition dump, laying out all of the wildly inadequate measures to ensure that this year’s Supermoon WereWolfathon is less deadly and destructive than the last one.

Frank Grillo stars as Wesley Marshall, the world’s hunkiest and most badass molecular biologist. He’s part of the government’s efforts to cure and contain the lycanthropy outbreak, but he’s also intent on helping his dead brother’s family survive the deadliest night of the year.

Things quickly go sideways. Wesley’s surviving family lives next door to Cody Walker (James Michael Cummings), a gung-ho veteran with a screw loose who welcomes The Night of the Werewolves because it allows him to kill indiscriminately with total legal impunity.

The violent sociopath has a hard-on for killing shape-shifters, but his firepower and macho aggression don’t keep him from getting turned into a wolf almost instantly.

At that point, the meaning of the “Wolf Killer” scrawled defiantly on his vest changes dramatically. He goes from being a psycho out to kill werewolves to being a werewolf out to kill anyone he can get his claws on, most notably Wesley.

Wesley didn’t like the veteran in human form. He HATES him as a half-human/half-wolf.

This development reminded me of one of my favorite and most overlooked Jack Black performances. In Mars Attacks!, Black is cast against type as a soldier who is similarly itching to fight an inhuman, unholy enemy, only to turn coward in the face of danger and die almost instantly.

The Wolf Killer follows a similar arc. He’s a mean-spirited caricature of an unhinged veteran in a film that otherwise leans into cornball patriotism.

Werewolves has a bit of a Michael Bay vibe, only instead of focussing on a cartoonish conception of American masculinity standing up to the dangers posed by earth-destroying asteroids or the Japanese military, the film depicts our nation as brave and heroic enough to face any challenge, even the ones involving millions of werewolves threatening the populace.

Miller’s masterpiece requires massive cognitive dissonance. Individually and as a pack, the werewolves are so big, mean, and powerful that it’s doubtful that anyone could survive prolonged exposure to them, even someone like Grillo, typecast here as a charismatic man of action who is also a scientific super-genius.

Grillo’s veteran must survive the Werewolf pandemic and get to his sister-in-law and niece’s home before the big bad wolf next door can get to them.

Director Steven C. Miller has a background in action and horror. He directed the underwhelming Silent Night, Deadly Night 2012 reboot Silent Night, and 2017’s Arsenal, which inexplicably but delightfully found Nicolas Cage reprising a character he had previously exuberantly over-played in the 1993 obscurity Deadfall.

That makes Miller an ideal director for a movie that combines horror and action in a way that suggests an American, less artful, and considerably cheesier version of the British cult classic Dog Soldiers.

Deliberately choosing to eschew humor, levity, and self-awareness is certainly a bold choice for a movie about a Supermoon that turns people into werewolves but one that pays surprising dividends.

Since Werewolves plays everything completely straight, the laughs are bountiful and unintended. Werewolves is an enjoyable bad movie with genuinely good elements, like Grillo’s committed lead performance and impressive make-up and practical effects for the titular beasts.

Werewolves gave me exactly what I wanted. In a possibly related development, I am really getting edibles since I can’t smoke pot and stopped drinking. They’re the perfect accompaniment for the film, along with bad-movie-loving friends who have a deep understanding and appreciation for ridiculous movies.

Werewolves beat Kraven the Hunter in the poll to determine this week’s new movie. I was pleasantly surprised that it won. I’m glad it did because I thoroughly enjoyed this ridiculous movie.

So, if you like art, movies, or storytelling, I cannot recommend Werewolves highly enough. At the risk of hyperbole, it may be the greatest movie ever made, or at least the greatest motion picture about a Supermoon that turns people into werewolves.

Six Stars out of Five