Harefooted Halloween: Silver Bullet

What I Liked: The pacing is really good with concise storytelling and three werewolf attacks in the first half hour alone.  Initially I thought they may have tipped their hand too early with who the murdering beast is but they end up building off that knowledge to great effect.  The whole thing is just well constructed.

Amazingly the kid protagonists are not annoying.  Corey Haim (The Lost Boys) as Marty is likeable and not smart-alecky at all.  He does somehow predict that a werewolf is killing everyone in town but it’s a tossed off idea that he doesn’t bring up again until he witnesses the thing with his own eyes.  And the relationship he has with his sister is believable where they may fight sometimes but one of them sheepishly apologizes without actually saying sorry and they move on.

They assembled a cool cast for this.  You got Terry O’Quinn (Stepfather II) as the town sheriff who doesn’t know what the hell to do about his citizens being mutilated, Everett McGill (Under Siege 2: Dark Territory) as the priest who tries to comfort the community, Bill Smitrovich (Renegades) as the leader of a mob inciting vigilantism and Gary Busey (Under Siege) as Marty’s drinking, gambling, rude joke telling uncle (in other words he plays himself).

It’s cute how the title has a double meaning in that it takes a silver bullet to stop a werewolf and it’s also the name of Marty’s motorized wheelchair.  However, I have to admit I’m disappointed they didn’t use the wheelchair to deliver the death blow at the end.  Seems like a natural with the setup and it would’ve been a good twist on the legend.  Oh well, maybe next time.

What I Didn’t Like: The movie ends fairly abruptly.  There’s some good suspenseful cat and mouse stuff with the person who’s the werewolf and Marty but then we jump ahead a month and suddenly it’s all over in a rushed finale.

The werewolf itself isn’t the best design.  It’s definitely not the worst but when the camera stays on it for more than a half a sec you can tell it lacks.  This is especially true in the final battle where there are a few shots that are clearly some dude in a modified bear costume.  Most of the time the cuts are very quick and they only show a small part of the wolf so it works well enough.  It’s those couple of shots sprinkled in that unfortunately sorta ruin the illusion.

Overall Impressions: What a nice little werewolf movie.  It doesn’t try to do too much or blow you away with spectacular special effects or anything.  Nah, this guy only wants to gnaw on some arms, knock a head off or two and beat a few folks with a baseball bat called “The Peacemaker”.  Sounds like a good time to me.