NEVER CRY WEREWOLF

In a quiet neighborhood, Jared, a handsome single man in his forties, moves in and immediately becomes the center of attention for the local women. But in reality, the man hides a secret: he is a ravenous werewolf! Loren, a sixteen-year-old neighbor of Jared, is the first to notice the man's bestial nature and tries in every way to raise the authorities' suspicions about the recent cases of missing persons right onto her neighbor, naturally without being believed. The girl then seeks help from Redd Tucker, the star of an adventure television program, only Redd is not exactly the hero who appears on screen. "The Hour of the Werewolf" (originally "Never Cry Werewolf") is nothing more than "Fangoria" with a werewolf instead of the vampire, no more, no less. Of course, we are only referring to the narrative aspect, because if we then look at the quality, the cult film by Tom Holland is definitely in a different galaxy compared to the television movie by Brenton Spencer. Because "The Hour of the Werewolf" is exactly that: a TV movie that bizarrely copies—homages or plagiarizes?—a cult of the youth horror of the 1980s. From that cinematic period, an attempt is made to reproduce everything, from the decidedly fast pace to the use of humor to lighten the tense scenes, from the attention to the adolescent target to the artisanal special effects that make the monsters look decidedly fake but much less so than happens today with computer graphics. Let's just say that the director Brenton Spencer ("Cataclysm from the Sky") is neither Joe Dante nor John Landis, so his attempt to retroactively insert himself into the horror of the decade is a half-success that is somewhat flawed in all respects. Visually, we are faced with a TV film commissioned by Sci-fi Channel, so imagine a somewhat sloppy aesthetic and absolute absence of "strong" content (sex and explicit violence, to clarify) to pad the flimsy and derivative story. Another flaw is perhaps one of the most serious that can be found in a feature film, and that is the evident inability of the director to manage the film due to logical gaps and poor scene direction. Take the long sequence in the gun shop, which is the perfect example of both problems. With the dark desire to cite "Terminator" (?) Spencer and his screenwriter John Sheppard make the werewolf reveal himself in public, but this would have a series of consequences for the rest of the story that the authors completely ignore, making the story continue as if nothing had happened, and simply justifying the sequence to make Loren and the television hunter meet. So why build this sequence in such a way as to get into trouble and then ignore having done so? It would be better to invent something "less" sensational and more coherent with the intentions of the script. If we then add that the entire sequence is also poorly shot (but not the only one), the picture is complete. The usual rule still applies that every viewer who is about to watch a direct-to-video should always keep in mind, that is, "Could I have/should I have expected something better?" Well, armed with this necessary question that places products like these on a different plane from the mainstream, we can then appreciate the little that "The Hour of the Werewolf" has to offer. Spencer's film is fast and knows how to entertain, the story almost makes you smile for the naivety with which it refreshes Holland's film, and the old-style special effects work well (contextualize, please), strangely even where the inevitable CGI scene is present, less intrusive than usual. If the villain, played weakly by Peter Stebbings ("Suspicion"; "K19"), is decidedly anonymous and the protagonist's bespectacled little brother (Spencer Van Wyck) is irritating, Nina Dobrev ("The Vampire Diaries") as the protagonist and Kevin Sorbo (legendary Hercules in the eponymous TV series) as the ironic quasi-self-parody of the action TV star work well. Questionable is the choice to include the half-werewolf and his (ugly) freak look. In short, "The Hour of the Werewolf" is a small, small movie, objectively ugly but still better than many other similar products destined for home video. If you embark on viewing with the right mood, it might even be entertaining. It deserves half a point less.