Writers: Joel Ferrari & Pete Wild
Director: Dominic Brunt
There aren’t many sub-genres in cinema that are as tricky to pull off successfully as horror-comedy. The delicate balance of juxtaposing real scares with genuine laughs is rarely achieved, particularly when both are so hard to get right by themselves to begin with. Among the few successful entries in the genre are Evil Dead 2 (1987) and The Cabin in the Woods (2011), but the benchmark for modern horror comedies remains John Landis’s 1981 masterpiece An American Werewolf in London.
All of the films mentioned so far in this review are highly recommended. Unfortunately, the film we are here to discuss is not.
Wolf Manor does start promisingly: opening with a vintage BBFC card and the then into a decent recreation of a ropey 1970s Hammer-style horror movie. However, instead of getting a nice spoof of those films, we find we are on the set of a vampire movie being shot on location in Talbot Manor (a reference to the original The Wolf Man). Here the problems with the film start. This film-within-the-film is being shot in present day – so why the vintage BBFC card and grainy film stock for the opening scenes? And who would be filming a hokey Dracula knock-off in this day and age? The answer is obvious: it costs a lot more money to make a period piece, and Wolf Manor is clearly working with a tiny budget. That’s fine, but then perhaps the filmmakers shouldn’t have set up something in the first minute, that they couldn’t afford to pay off.
Cut to some outsiders arriving at the nearby local village pub where they are met with a frosty reception. Sound familiar? If you are going to reference a film as seminal as An American Werewolf in London in your werewolf movie, it should either be very subtle, or not done at all. Instead the dialogue directly and clumsily references that better film, which only achieves in making one pine to be watching that instead.
As stated previously, Wolf Manor was made on the cheap and once we leave the pub, the rest of the film remains in the single location of the house and its surrounding grounds. Again, this would be acceptable if the werewolf trope was used as the basis of a mystery to work out the identity of the creature, or if the script and acting were good enough to sustain tension and get laughs from the trapped-in-an old-dark-house cliché. Instead the bored-looking cast make stupid decisions, double-cross one another for no reason, and generally make the viewer wish the beast would hurry up and polish them off. It isn’t clear if the script is trying to be funny, or is just ineptly written. It fails in the former, so it must be the latter.
The creature itself is decently designed, going for a newer, nastier spin on the traditional wolf man design, but the costume doesn’t stand close scrutiny. After some initial quite effective coyness about its appearance using POV shots and brief glimpses, the second half of the film sees the creature step in front of the camera where the low budget once again becomes obvious. Even more of a blunder is the complete lack of savagery in the creature’s performance. Sure, it kills people with its teeth and claws, but displays no bestial rage or any sort of animalistic characteristics. It calmly walks around, and stands and stares at people like it were a masked serial killer in a slasher film. Making this a Friday the 13th-style stalk-and-slash would have perhaps been an overall better choice for this film as the director and performer clearly don’t know how to give their monster any sort of personality. A slight effort is made to have it walk on all fours at one point, but this looks terrible and is only done to facilitate people being able to hide behind a half-height stable door.
There are a couple of positives to mention here. Despite the rest of the cast ranging from acceptable to atrocious by way of obviously-embarrassed-to-be-here, James Fleet (best known perhaps as Hugo in The Vicar of Dibley) is an absolute delight in the role of washed up actor Oliver Laurence – a joke name that is indicative of the quality of the rest of the gags in the script. Regardless of the material he has to work with, Fleet delivers a strong, amusing performance which manages to make this film almost watchable. He deserves better. Also, while the werewolf itself is a little Halloween-costume, the gore is nicely over the top in places, with geysers of blood, severed limbs and loose entrails scattered throughout.
This film wants to be An American Werewolf in London meets Shaun of the Dead. Instead it is a combination of the grossly inferior sequel An American Werewolf in Paris and an episode of Mrs Brown’s Boys: which still manages to sound a lot better than this film actually is.
And just when you thought it was all over, Wolf Manor offers what must be the longest post-credits stinger scene in the history of films: a pointless five minute long prequel/origin story that somehow manages to be even more cringe than the preceding 90 minutes.
Wolf Manor will be available on DVD & Digital Download from 9th January.
