Werewolves Within starts very strong – including an opening ominous quote that cracked me up – that I’m sad to say it loses so much steam around the halfway mark. It became a chore to finish it. It’s sad too since I think they had something here.

The film is about a new forest ranger who arrives in a too-quirky small town in the Pacific Northwest. Everyone is a character, everyone is wacky, everyone is quirky. But soon they are in the middle of a blizzard and something with long sharp claws has destroyed their generators… and now they have to figure out who the secret werewolf is before its too late.

This is a horror comedy whodunit combo… and based on an UbiSoft video game that I’d never heard of. Not sure how accurate it is to that VR game. Not sure it matters.

The film stars Sam Richardson as the ranger who also just a co-starred in The Tomorrow War which opened the same day. He’s joined by the very appealing, very charismatic Milana Vayntrub who I wasn’t familiar but I’m now a fan of. Checking her IMDB, I’m not at all surprised to see she voices Squirrel Girl in various DC animated films. She has a couple scenes early on that gave me the same “who is THIS?” that I got from Sandra Bullock way back in Demolition Man. She’s so good… that it’s distressing when she basically vanishes from the middle of the movie.

And that middle is where the movie just goes south for me. When it turns into a whodunit and the townsfolk are stuck in a hotel accusing each other, it just got shrill. It wore on my nerves and I wanted them all to just shut up. There’s a way to do this kind of thing that worked in Clue (which I recently re-watched) and Knives Out but was just aggravating here. And the longer we go with these characters, the more its obvious they’ve been designed too much to be wacky and quirky and weird. It doesn’t feel organic…

And I just stopped caring. There were still some occasional laughs but mostly it just got repetitive, loud, and annoying. It really is disappointing since it started so well.

Score: 66