Werewolves review – post-apocalyptic lupine horror makes an enemy of the moonlight

<p>In Steven C Miller’s intermittently effective film a supermoon turns those exposed to its light into werewolves – or rather people wearing hairy Halloween masks</p><p>Intermittently effective but grindingly repetitive, this lupine-themed horror posits a world where nearly a billion people have died after a supermoon turned anyone exposed to its light into a werewolf. A full year has passed, and in an unnamed city (San Juan, Puerto Rico and Los Angeles, California are listed as the locations used) folks are preparing for yet another supermoon-werewolf apocalypse by securing their homes with booby traps and arming themselves to the teeth.</p><p>Sensitive yet studly former soldier turned scientist Wesley (Frank Grillo) takes leave of his widowed sister-in-law Lucy (Ilfenesh Hadera) and her daughter Emma (Kamdynn Gary, a strikingly good child performer) as he heads off to help out in a special experiment. At a facility nearby, a team of boffins have developed a kind of “moonblock” that is designed to stop the reflected rays from Earth’s largest satellite from turning people into snarling, uncontrollable werefolk. The science-y bits are insultingly ill conceived, but that’s not really the point here; it’s all about those moments of transformation, the money shots common to all werewolf films, coups de cinema overseen by make-up and prosthetic designers and various effects (both special and visual) teams. Here the actual transitions are quite nifty, featuring lots of bulging veins and grisly-looking in-between stages as people turn into different kinds of snarling mammalian creatures. However, once they are done transforming, the masks or make-up or whatever the actors are clad in are so ineffectual they end up looking like a bunch of underlit extras in Halloween costumes recreating The Purge while howling.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jan/14/werewolves-review-post-apocalyptic-lupine-horror-makes-an-enem