Background Information
This is an independent movie released in 2009.
It is both an homage to and an unofficial sequel to the Universal Monster movies of the 1930s and 40s. (I'm surprised that Universal Studios allowed this film to get made, given how clearly it infringes on their copyright. But I don't know anything about the legal situation.)
The film is an unofficial continuation of the "House of..." series.
You see, in 1944, Universal Studios released House of Frankenstein, which featured Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolf Man all together in one movie.
Then, in 1945, Universal Studios released House of Dracula, which also featured Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolf Man all together.
After 1945, Universal Studios decided the monster movies were no longer profitable, and stopped making them (W). But it is reasonable to assume that if the franchise had continued, the next film probably would have been called House of the Wolf Man, and would have featured Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolf Man.
This 2009 production, then, functions as the unofficial House of the Wolf Man that never got produced. It features all 3 monsters--albeit very briefly (more on that below). And it features Ron Chaney--the grandson of Lon Chaney Jr, who played Wolf Man in the original movies.
Why I Watched This Movie
I've already talked on this blog about my affection for the old Universal Monster movies--here, here , here and here. So I'm right in the target audience for a movie like this.
I stumbled upon this movie last Halloween.
You see, after watching House of Dracula for Halloween in 2021, I was thinking about trying to make watching old monster movies a yearly Halloween tradition. So I was searching Youtube to see if any class monster movies were freely available this year. And I found House of the Wolf Man instead. I had never heard of it before, so I researched it briefly (looked up the Wikipedia page, and the IMDB page) and it looked pretty interesting.
Plus, the comments on the video sounded encouraging:
...etc
"Okay," I thought to myself, "If I can't find any classic Universal monster movies on Youtube this year" (and I couldn't), "...it might be fun to watch this instead as the next best thing."
Although as it happened, I didn't watch anything on Halloween. It turned out that the idea of having 2 hours to myself to watch a movie was an absolute fantasy.
As I wrote in my 2022 Year End Movie Wrap Up: "120 minutes of peace and quite to watch a whole movie in the evening? Not this year!"
But, this week, I actually have some time to myself, since the wife and kids are spending an extra week at the in-laws for Tet holiday (as I mentioned here and here). So I actually have some time to watch movies this week. And so after watching Capricorn One on Sunday, this was my next choice to watch.
The Youtube link is HERE. I'm not sure if the video has been uploaded legally, so we'll see how long it stays up. (Let's play a game. If you happen to stumble across this post at some date in the future, click the link to see if it still works. We'll see if we can track how long it takes Youtube to remove the video.)
After I watched the movie, I then read and listened to some of the reviews online.
The Review (***SPOILERS***)
So, after reading and listening to a lot of the other reviews, I noticed some very consistent criticisms:
* People felt cheated that the monsters only appeared for the last 10 minutes
* People felt that the acting in this movie was really bad
* On the other hand, people generally liked the atmosphere of this movie--the sets, cinematography, style, etc, all seemed to almost perfectly recreate the atmosphere of the 1940s monster movies.
As for myself, I'm going to part company slightly from this consensus. I actually don't mind that the monsters didn't show up until the last 10 minutes.
The reason is because not showing the monsters until the last 10 minutes is totally the kind of thing Universal Studios itself would do back in the 1940s. Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula--they were all movies with incredibly long build ups, and then only a couple minutes of the monsters fighting at the end. So if this movie is going to function as a homage to the earlier monster movies, it's kind of appropriate that they pull this same trick.
Plus, I liked the long slow build up. I liked the fact that the movie established this creepy castle atmosphere very early on, and then just kept us in suspense for an hour as we waited for something to happen. It was a nice spooky atmosphere to just hang out in, and I was there for it. (Take my opinion with a grain of salt, because I haven't had time to watch movies recently, so maybe I was just starved for the immersive experience of a film, and thus easily entertained.)
That brings me to the next point: the atmosphere. And here I agree with everyone else. The atmosphere in this movie was fantastic. I agree that they did a great job of recreating the atmosphere of those old 1940s horror movies.
Actually, dare I say it, I think the atmosphere in this movie was better than the old 1940s movies. Rewatching House of Dracula last year, it struck me the atmosphere in these old movies isn't quite as great as we remember it. The gothic castles, the foggy roads, the cloudy night skies--these are all much better in our memories than in the actual movies.
But House of the Wolf Man really does it right. They set up a wonderfully chilling dark castle on dark and stormy night. I loved it.
Now, on to the final point: the acting.
Yeah, the acting quality is noticeably lower than it would be in a mainstream Hollywood movie.
I don't want to say that the actors are bad necessarily. They're all doing their bit, and doing it passably well.
You see, each character is a certain archetype. There's the mad doctor, the sexy femme fatal, the quirky eccentric, the great white hunter, the jock and the intellectual. The actors all play into their respective schtick's reasonably well, but they never seamlessly blend into their role the way an A-level Hollywood star would. You can never forget that they're actors doing a bit, and consequently never fully immerse yourself in the movie.
This is not an amateur production. All the people involved in this movie are working professionals, but it strikes me that we are so spoiled by big-budget movies nowadays that we probably don't realize just how good the top Hollywood stars actually are. Being a real Hollywood actor is probably like being an NBA basketball star--there are only a handful of people who can do it at that level, and that's why they get paid the big bucks. The actors from House of the Wolf Man, on the other hand, are in the minor leagues.
They reminded me of the type of actors that you might see at a theatre-troupe in your hometown--professionals, but not superstars.
I was okay with their performances. It wasn't great, but it was passable. I thought each of them had just enough charm to make their characters slightly likable and interesting.
In other words, I enjoyed the 60 minutes I spent with them as they talked to each other and tried to work out the castle mysteries. And I was sorry to see them go when they got killed off by the monsters at the very end.
But, my investment in them could have been a lot higher, if the screenplay had been just a little bit smarter. And here we come to, in my opinion, the biggest flaws in the film.
The characters had no story arc or motivation to make me care about them.
The motivation for each character was the same: they each received an invitation to come to the castle, and possibly be selected to be the heir. There's no indication that any of the characters needed the castle or the money. They have no indication of any problems in their life or things that they needed or wanted. They each simply appear to be thinking: "Free castle? Yeah, why not?" And that's as much character motivation as we get.
The old 1940s monster movies, for all their many faults, at least understood that you have to give the audience a hook to get involved with the character's storyline. So, for example, in House of Frankenstein, the characters have needs and angst--Lawrence Talbot is desperately seeking a cure, the hunchback Daniel is passionately in love with the gypsy Ilonka, but is tormented because she doesn't love him back. Ilonka is in love with Lawrence Talbot, and wants to help him find a cure so they can be together.
You see, each character has something they need or want, so the audience is invested in their arc.
Same with House of Dracula--there's the hunchback woman who needs the surgery, and the doctor who wants to help her, and also wants to help Dracula. And Lawrence Talbot again desperately seeking a cure, etc.
I mean, those old 1940s monster movies had a lot of problems--they could really be cheesy and often have nonsensical logic. But they at least understood the need for character motivation and arcs. It's really screenwriting 101.
Now by contrast, the characters in House of the Wolf Man each have a personality (more of a broad archetype really, but we'll let it pass as a personality), and they each have a mysterious backstory which gradually gets revealed. But they don't have any thing that they need or want--no character arc.
The other big problem with the script is another screenwriting 101 problem: set-up and pay-off.
During the first hour of the film, so much is made about the mysterious eyes behind the pictures (a.k.a the famous Portrait Painting Peephole trope).
When this first got introduced, I thought to myself, "Ah, classic! Good. This is a mysterious castle movie, so we're hitting all the classic tropes. I love the sense of atmosphere here."
But as the movie progressed, it became clear that it wasn't just a touch of atmosphere. The characters talked endlessly about the eyes behind the pictures, and it became clear that this was being set-up as a major plot point. Who was watching them and why?
It's a bit of a boring mystery to spend so much time on, but okay. The movie is clearly telling me that I need to care about this, so I guess I'll care about this.
But then, the whole thing just gets abruptly dropped with no resolution.
There's a bit of dialogue at the end that indicates that a random guy behind a locked door was the one peeping through the pictures, but this dialogue was hard to catch because it was happening when a bunch of characters were yelling things at the same time. I actually had to replay that scene a few times to decipher the dialogue. And then, even if you do decipher it, so what? We still don't know who this random guy is, and why he is peeping through the pictures.
[Actually, I just watched that scene again, and I take it back. I think I do know who that random guy behind the locked door was. Based on the family relation words he uses ("grandfather", "father"), I think it was actually supposed to be Peter Frankenstein. But it was not an obvious reveal at all. You had to really be paying close attention, and know your monster movie history. And we still don't know why he was looking through the holes.]
And there's a whole lot of stuff in the movie like that which is not explained at all.
Why is Elmira's character supposed to be more sensitive to the magic than her siblings?
Why did Dracula show up when he did, and why did he want to fight Frankenstein and the Wolf Man?
Etc.
Other Notes
* I think the characters got killed off just a little bit too quickly at the end. A few of those deaths happened so quickly it was difficult to tell what had happened. (Did the werewolf merely stun with that blow? Or was that supposed to be a deadly blow?) It was great that the end of the movie was so fast-paced, but we should have had the camera linger just a bit more to let the deaths sink in a bit. After all, we had just spent an hour with these characters. We had gotten to know them. The movie had earned the right to make their deaths a bit more meaningful at this point.
* On the positive side, however, I did think that final scene around the dinner table, when Ron Chaney was just sitting their menacingly waiting, was suitably chilling. Although his final plan, when he finally explained it, didn't really seem to make a lot of sense to me. (Ron Chaney's character is yet another character who's lacking a good motivation in this script.)
Connections to the Old Universal Movies (the Easter Eggs)
So, it turns out that the mad doctor is the nephew of Bela (the old fortune teller from The Wolf Man Movie). The silver cane from The Wolf Man movie also makes an appearance. The famous Wolf Man poem ("Even a man who is pure in heart...") is alluded to, although not completed.
The mad doctor is also the son of Peter Frankenstein from the movie Son of Frankenstein. Although I have to confess, I didn't catch this reference myself. I had to have this pointed out by another reviewer on the Internet.
Another thing I didn't catch myself, but later read on the Internet, is that the song lyrics at the end "Life is short, but death is long" is from the song in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.
There's also a brief shot of a jar with a tiny skeleton inside--the remains of one of the homunculi from Bride of Frankenstein.
(The Internet has also noted Easter Eggs referencing the mummy and the creature from black lagoon, but I don't really care about those so much--I never considered those monsters were never part of the same universe as Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man. At any rate, they never crossed over in the original movies.)
And I suspect there might be even more Easter eggs in this movie that I'm unaware of. It has been, after all, many years since I've watched the old original movies, so I've probably forgotten a lot of stuff.
If you know of any extra Easter eggs, let me know in the comments.
As I mentioned above, this film is obviously setting itself up as an unofficial sequel to the Universal Monster movies. Which makes me curious as to why Universal let it go ahead. But I really have no idea what the legality of all this is, or what kind of deals (if any) were worked out.
Links
* Some reviews of this movie on Youtube that I watched are here, here and here. They're all worth checking out.
* Author Kim Newman (whose Anno Dracula books I've reviewed here and here) reviews this movie on his website here.
I really wanted to like this film. It's frustrating, because the atmosphere was so great, but the script just didn't come though. And it's especially frustrating because with just a few tweaks in the script, it could have been a lot better. (Because it's a low-budget independent movie, I'm going to say that the acting quality is beyond their control. But the script problems could easily have been fixed without costing any extra money.)
As it is, though, I don't think I can give it more than a 3 out of 10 stars. I mean, I enjoyed this movie when I was watching it. But looking back on it after it is finished, there were just too many script problems to justify giving it a higher score than a 3.
