Parents' Guide to Werewolves

This action monster movie gets credit for staying small-scale—and using nifty practical werewolf effects—but it also feels unambitious, missing opportunities and ultimately feeling rather empty. Werewolves also misses the chance to embrace its inherent silliness, such as the fact that Wes is both a molecular biologist and a badass warrior who's great at setting traps, using weapons, and plotting escapes. And the whole idea of "moonscreen" is kind of silly, too. Additionally, like The Purge series—star Grillo is a veteran of The Purge: Anarchy and The Purge: Election Year—this movie teeters on the verge of interesting social commentary, especially in a post-COVID world, but it avoids any of it. Heavily armed neighbor Cody could have made a great metaphor but instead is merely an inconvenient villain. And the behavior of humans—some of whom want to turn back into werewolves—is never explored.

That aside, Werewolves is clearly intended as a "turn off your brain" movie, so these quibbles are mostly meaningless. The filmmaking leans toward rudimentary, sometimes clumsy, and sometimes derivative, but if it could have broken out of its genre movie comfort zone and tried something truly interesting, then it might have been worth howling about.