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Non-Review Review: Teen Wolf

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Darren

Teen Wolf is quite possibly the single strangest werewolf movie I have ever seen. I would love to have been a fly-on-the-wall at that pitch meeting:

Teen movies are all the rage this year, sir.

And werewolf films have been trending up since The Howling.

Now if there were only some way to combine the two.

As the name implies, Teen Wolf is the story of a teenager who discovers that he has hair in places where he didn’t have hair before. Lots of places. The film does an… interesting job using a conventional movie monster as an exploration of teenage “otherness”, and I actually like the film’s second act is completely off-the-wall, but even the considerable charisma of Michael J. Fox isn’t quite enough to salvage a muddle mix of eighties clichés, knock-off eighties theme songs, and confusion about the movie’s rather basic “be yourself” metaphor.

Scott’s attempt to grow a beard has gone horribly wrong…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Adolescence, An American Werewolf in London, film, Folklore, Howling, literature, Mark Vieha, Michael J. Fox, Movie, MTV, non-review review, Randy Newman, review, Teen Wolf, Tyler Posey, werewolf, werewolves, wolf | 3 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Insidious

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Darren

I’m of two minds about Insidious, the latest entry in the “haunted house” horror subgenre. On one hand, I definitely respect its attempts to return to the roots of these types of films without dwelling on gore for the sake of gore. On the other, it doesn’t seem like the film is entirely certain what to show you when it can’t fill the screen with fountains of blood and guts erupting. Film is obviously a visual medium, but horror is very much an exception to the old maxim “show, don’t tell.” The problem is that Insidious shows too much.