“I feel like I’m in one of those dinner theater murder things and I’m having a horrible time and I can’t go home.”
This is how one of the characters describes the situation in the horror comedy Werewolves Within and they couldn’t be more on-point. The first werewolf film to be based on a video game (you snooze, you lose, Altered Beast), Werewolves Within follows U.S. Forest Service Ranger Finn Wheeler (Sam Richardson) as he takes a new post in the sleepy mountain town of Beaverfield, Vermont, which is so small it only has a dozen residents — Finn included. For this reason, it doesn’t take long for local mail carrier Cecily (Milana Vayntrub) to introduce him to the rest of the cast. “Everyone here is a little… questionable,” she tells him as part of the flirty banter the two of them share.
One of the things Cecily fills Finn in on is the tension in town over a gas pipeline proposed by Sam Parker (Wayne Duvall), who’s frustrated by a handful of holdouts refusing to play ball, including widowed innkeeper Jeanine (Catherine Curtis) and gay couple Joaquim and Devon (Harvey Guillén and Cheyenne Jackson), who just so happen to be tech millionaires. And that’s not to forget environmentalist Dr. Ellis (Rebecca Henderson), whose testing equipment comes in handy when pets and people alike start being attacked by some hairy creature that turns to be unclassifiable. (Suffice it to say, once the “w” word is spoken, it isn’t far from anyone’s mind.)
As in Amicus’s The Beast Must Die, it quickly becomes apparent that the murderer is one of Beaverfield’s eccentric residents, especially when the power is knocked out and the roads are rendered impassible by a snowstorm. There’s even a healthy amount of debate about whether there really is a werewolf afoot, but this site’s readers should have no concerns that the story’s going to have a Wolf of Snow Hollow-like cop out. My main beef with director Josh Ruben and screenwriter Mishna Wolff (love that surname), then, is that they wait until their film is just about over to unleash their monster. Which is a pity because the werewolf design by Constantine Sekeris and special effects makeup by Louie Zakarian are excellent. If I could include a screenshot of it without spoiling who it turns out to be, I totally would.