By AJ TAYSOM, UPP Contributor—

AJ is a student at Provo High School.

It seems as though the classic monsters such as the werewolf and especially the vampire are making quite a comeback and are popular with a younger generation of fans. Universal Studios has accommodated this interest with the release of The Wolfman, Staring Benicio Del Toro, Emily Blunt and Anthony Hopkins. Is this remake of the classic monster movie a hit or a miss? Read on to find out.

The story takes place in the 19th century with Lawrence Talbot (Del Toro) returning to his old home after hearing the news that his brother has been found dead. There he meets up with his brother’s fiancé (Blunt) and his father played by Anthony Hopkins. They aren’t really sure what killed his brother, but they are sure that it was some kind of animal. While Lawrence is investigating what really happened to his brother he is wounded by a wolf-like creature. He then turns into the wolfman creature that we are all so familiar with. Every full moon he transforms into this rampaging, hungry wolf-like creature and brings terror to the small town. Hugo Weaving (from the Matrix and Lord of the Rings) plays inspector Abberline who is on a hunt to stop Lawrence in his tracks. The story of this film is very classic monster movie material and isn’t the best in the world, but at the same time it isn’t bad either. There are some clever plot twists that you won’t see coming, but for the most part the story feels clunky.

One thing that is disappointing about this movie was how un-scary it was. They use extremely cheap scare tactics throughout the whole film that don’t really get the job done. The film keeps a fair level of suspense in the early stages when they don’t fully show the monster. When they do, the effect of suspense is gone and the monster looks quite silly. To make the monsters in this film they just put the actor in makeup. This can be cool at times, and in 1941 in the original film it was passable. In 2010, they could have done so much more with CGI to make the wolf look cool and frightening.  You end up sitting back and thinking how much more could have been done to make this a better film.

The acting was good and bad, depending on the character. A chubby-looking Anthony Hopkins does yet again a great job at being creepy, but our main character’s performance was lacking. In the early stages of the movie Benicio Del Toro acts like a sack of potatoes—no personality and kind of just…there. He is then diagnosed with an age old curse, finds out all kinds of crazy secrets about his family, falls in love and he still acts like a sack of potatoes. Only this time he seems in a worse mood; if that’s even possible. They rest of the characters do a passable job but there isn’t any Oscar-worthy performances here. There is a real lack of character development that this film really needed. It would have been much better off as a story driven psychological thriller than a slasher movie.

The Wolfman does in fact have a few positive things to it. For one, the action scenes are very cool. This movie is jam packed with violence and a surprising amount of gore. A lot of people are disemboweled, decapitated or just brutally killed in random ways which is a plus or minus depending on your personality. The scenery of the film is very well done. It’s all done in typical monster-movie fashion with foggy forests, dreary towns and of course the full moon.

Overall, The Wolfman tries to be a legitimate remake of a classic monster movie. It doesn’t do this well mostly due to the bad acting by some characters and a clunky story. So next time you are at the box office and you are in the mood for a movie, make sure to count this one out.