When the most interesting thing about your werewolf movie is that its a mini-reunion of Game of Thrones actors, you’ve done something wrong. But, yeah, we get Kit Harrington (complete with pelts) and James Cosmo (who played Lord Commander Mormont) together again for a rather plodding, directionless horror film.

Harrington plays a husband and father with a bad case of lycanthropy. His daughter is suspicious so she followers her parents to the place they chain him up at night. Will the beast within go on a rampage or will the father and daughter bond despite his beastliness?

Or will we basically wait for a whole gear-grinding hour and then plod through a final act that should have been harrowing but was really just kind of a tease? Yeah, this movie tries hard to elevate itself with moody character-driven plot and semi-complex characters… but really just winds up feeling very familiar as it plods along, making me think this could have been a very cool short film.

My main issue is that I’m not sure why we’re even watching this film. I get what it’s doing with the father/daughter relationship, but so little happens for so long that I just couldn’t figure out where the movie was bothering. I was gonna also quip that it’d sure be nice to have a werewolf in a werewolf movie… but then we get a werewolf, I had to rescind my joke.

The final act does have some theoretically suspenseful sequences but, by that time, I was over it. You gotta do more than plod and mull and ponder and fret for an hour before remembering what you are. I just stopped caring enough, figuring the movie was going to have a hokey fake-out and not really redeem itself in its genre. I was largely correct.

The Beast Within tries very hard for that moody mood bit but it goes too far with it. I get it, you’re a mood. Can we move along now? That’s the feeling I wound up with… that and wondering if there were any new uploads on YouTube I could check out and then switch back to this flick. I wasn’t exactly engaged.

Score: 69