By Colin Covert
Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

A lavish coffee-table book of a horror film, “The Wolfman” features visuals so beautifully planned and executed that each frame begs to be lingered over and savored. The film is set in rural Victorian England in a fall where the skies are the color of lead, the woods exude a primal spookiness and the harvest moon blazes like the lantern of an onrushing train.

The editing moves at a stately pace, evoking an agonizing sense of dread.

Joe Johnston, best known for light crowd-pleasers like “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” and “Jumanji,” aims for grim gravitas here, as in Francis Ford Copolla’s “Dracula” and Kenneth Branagh’s “Frankenstein.” When the blood begins to flow — fly, actually — the gruesome tableaux are worthy of an art gallery slide show. Impaling on an iron fence, a white swanlike neck bisected by a straight razor, steaming viscera torn out by fangs.

In this era of reboots and reimaginings, “The Wolfman” sticks close to the classic story, adding psychological notes and, oddly, political references, to the legend. Benicio Del Toro, his heavy face echoing Lon Chaney Jr., plays the doomed Lawrence Talbot, here a Shakespearean actor specializing in the tragedies. Labeled mad and “fragile” as a child, he was shipped off to an aunt in America by his domineering father. His brother’s death at the claws of something brutal and violent brings both Del Toro and his brother’s fiancee Emily Blunt to Blackmoor, the isolated family estate.

They are welcomed with ambiguous hospitality by Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins). He’s a portly, bearded big game hunter with the manner of a sinister Santa Claus and a flair for pronouncements like, “Never look back; the past is a wilderness of horrors.”

If he looks to his guests like he’s chuckling over some nasty, private joke, it’s because he is. There are twisted roots to the Talbot family tree that justify Del Toro’s expression of inner torment.

The screenplay repeatedly notes that the line between man and beast is not always clear, and as computer-generated effects turn human hands into gnarled claws and mouths into foam-flecked muzzles, the film wallows in the horror of deformity and disfigurement.

Most locals scapegoat the Gypsies and their dancing bear for master Talbot’s mutilation but some mutter about a werewolf, and soon the blacksmith has a busy sideline melting heirloom silverware into bullets. Hugo Weaving glowers as the Scotland Yard detective assigned to the case. Monstrous mysteries are his specialty; he last led the hunt for Jack the Ripper.

After a scarring encounter with the lycanthrope, Del Toro inherits the curse. In the film’s best passage he is confined to a dungeon-like asylum where a smarmy psychologist prescribes submersion in ice baths and electroshock to cure his “delusions.” Del Toro’s explosive reaction proves that the textbook approach to an absurd claim isn’t always the correct one.

While the production design is a sumptuous swirl of eerie and disturbing Victoriana, there’s a 21st century subtext to the legend. The characters’ backstory hinges on a bloody encounter in “the Hindu Kush,” the British imperialists’ name for eastern Afghanistan, and Del Toro’s sessions of medical torture look a lot like the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” for al Qaeda suspects. There’s also a ripe strain of Oedipal conflict simmering between Hopkins and Del Toro and morbid sexual repression in his yearning for his late brother’s betrothed.

There’s plenty of bloodletting, but Johnston and his collaborators know that the real moments of fear come in those long, nerve-wracking moments when the finger hovers over the panic button.

Film focus
WHAT: “The Wolfman”
RATED: R for violence and gore
CAST: Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt
RATING: 3 stars

In this image released by Universal Pictures, Benicio Del Toro is shown in a scene from “The Wolfman.”

Best werewolf movies ever
By Robert W. Butler
The Kansas City Star

It’s weird: Every 20 years since 1941, the movies have produced a landmark werewolf flick.

• “The Wolf Man” (1941)

Though it was preceded by 1935’s “Werewolf of London,” this Universal effort wrote the book on cinematic lycanthropy. Lon Chaney Jr. is gentle Lawrence Talbot, an American who returns to his ancestral English home, is bitten by a weird creature and turns into a hairy beast under the full moon. Talbot’s tortured existence — he’s a gentle man who hates the beast lurking inside him — would be revisited in four sequels, none as good as the original.

• “The Curse of the Werewolf” (1961)

England’s Hammer Studios delivered the second good werewolf picture. Oliver Reed stars as a 19th-century orphan whose privileged upbringing by a local nobleman cannot reverse his lycanthropic nature. As a child he preys on sheep; as a young man he goes after beautiful women. This being a Hammer movie there’s oodles of cleavage and gore (nice production values), and Reed’s werewolf makeup may be the best ever.

• “An American Werewolf in London” (1981)

Jon Landau’s “London” follows a Yank (David Naughton) vacationing in England who is bitten by a beast on the moors and … well, you know. Buoyed by a scary transformation scene and by Jenny Agutter’s delectable love interest, the film also introduced humor into the mix – Naughton is haunted by the slowly decaying and very cynical ghost of his friend (Griffin Dunne), who was killed in the original attack.

• “The Howling” (1981)

Dee Wallace Stone is a traumatized TV reporter who retreats to a psychiatric “camp” in Big Sur and uncovers a clan of werewolves roaming among the pines. Directed by Joe Dante and written by John Sayles, it’s simultaneously creepy and hilarious. Both this and “American Werewolf” introduced a new type of werewolf, one that was more overtly canine than the guy-covered-in-hair monsters of earlier efforts.

• “Dog Soldiers” (2002)

British troops on exercises in remote Scotland run afoul of inbred locals and bizarre creatures that stalk them through the forest. They finally take shelter in a rundown house and are quickly besieged by hairy monsters out for blood. Director Neil Marshall ups the ante on werewolf movies, with action-picture visuals and zombie flick conventions. Good cast — Kevin McKidd and Liam Cunningham are the main guys — and the f/x are in-camera, not generated by computer. Nice.

What’s in a name?
“Werewolf” is probably from the old English, “wer,” meaning man, and “wulf.”
“Lycanthrope,” the fancy term, is Greek, from “lukos,” which means wolf, and “anthropos,” man.