I’ve been really into Universal Monsters off and on since I was a kid. My parents would rent 8 mm shorts of the monsters films when I was a young (We rented movies for projectors; every joint in my body creaked as I typed that), and I had countless monster toys. I still have some of them.

I’ve been going through a monster phase again lately, and a few months back I went and saw the newest “Wolf Man” man film. It wasn’t great, but it reminded me that I still hadn’t seen the 2010 version of the character.

Film 16: “The Wolfman” (2010)

Side note: the 1941 version is “The Wolf Man,” 2010 is “The Wolfman” and 2025 is “Wolf Man.” The inconsistency in naming is not going to drive me crazy at all, I swear.

My excuse for not seeing it: I have a good excuse this time, I swear! “The Wolfman” came out on Feb. 12, 2010. I got tickets for a Valentine’s Day date, but there was a blizzard and we decided to stay home. Then reviews weren’t great, and I just never got around to watching it.

I was wrong, though I did watch the directors cut for this, not the theatrical cut. I wish I had watched this years ago. Universal has made various attempts at Monster reboots, with varying degrees of success. “The Mummy” (1999) worked well, but the same director doing “Van Helsing” five years later did not. “The Invisible Man” (2020) was a great twist on the original, but the same director doing “Wolf Man” five years later was unable to modernize the character in the same way. And then there was the quickly disposed of attempt as a “Dark Universe” with 2017’s “The Mummy” (and maybe 2014’s “Dracula Untold” was a part of it. Who cares).

But Joe Johnston’s “The Wolfman” felt like it found the right version of classic and modern horror. The classic monster films had a way of blurring the lines between then modern day and an old world feel. People from the 1930s/40s would end up in a more backwards feeling and superstitious older Europe, full of Roma and small villages where dark secrets are hidden. “The Wolfman” is set in the past, 1891 to be exact, but Benicio del Toro’s more modern city dweller Larry Talbot is forced to return to his father’s rural estate after his brother’s gruesome murder.

Why “The Wolfman” works for me is they don’t try to make Larry Talbot into a hero. When the full moon rises, he’s an out-of-control werewolf, ripping off the limbs of the good and bad alike. It’s impressive that Universal didn’t try to confine Johnston to a PG-13 rating, because this film really goes for it with the gore.

My favorite sequence is when Talbot’s Wolfman breaks free from an asylum and rampages through London. The metropolitan setting makes it feel more like something out of “King Kong” than the 1930s/40s films.

Rick Baker did the make-up, and it was a mostly inspired choice. His Wolfman makeup looks amazing. But it’s frustrating that Universal hired the man who created the best werewolf transformation film of all time in An American Werewolf in London, and chose to use CGI, rather than practical effects to achieve it.

This was one of Baker’s last big movies before officially retiring in 2015, saying “”First of all, the CG stuff definitely took away the animatronics part of what I do. It’s also starting to take away the makeup part. The time is right, I am 64 years old, and the business is crazy right now. I like to do things right, and they wanted cheap and fast. That is not what I want to do, so I just decided it is basically time to get out.”

Random thoughts: I enjoyed the film flipping the typecasting of Hugo Weaving as a heroic antagonist, rather than making him a mustache-twirling villain. His Inspector Aberline is enough of a dick that we never really want him to succeed, but he is right about pretty much everything. The film leaves the mustache-twirling to Anthony Hopkins. Spoiler alert for a 15-year-old film that has Anthony Hopkins in the cast: Anthony Hopkins is the real villain (and also a werewolf).

Movies it inspired me to check out: As mentioned above, I already saw the new “Wolf Man,” so that’s out. I know I saw a “The Howling” movie as a teen, but I can’t remember which one, so I feel like I should watch the first one. I saw Jack Nicholson’s “Wolf” back in the 90s, but have forgotten everything about it. I found it streaming on a weird Roku channel, but it was dubbed in Spanish, so I’ll hold off on a rewatch of that for now.

I have been meaning to dip by toe into the Hammer Films pool of horror. They only did one werewolf film, “Curse of the Werewolf.” I’ll watch that eventually, but I’ll probably start with the Christopher Lee Dracula films.

EDIT: Local musician-turned teacher Elliot Imes has also been writing about films he hasn’t seen, and on a much more consistent basis than me. You should check out his series Elliot Catches Up.