Leigh Whannell

Wolf Man (2025)

The most impressive thing about Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man is that it got made.

Whannell, the Australian horror maestro who introduced us to the Saw and Insidious franchises, clearly has serious show biz clout to get this turkey green-lighted.

This was obviously a “troubled” production.

Blake (Christopher Abbott) is a stay-at-home dad married to busy magazine writer Charlotte (Julia Garner). While Charlotte earns bucks, Blake looks after their daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth), until he’s notified that his father Grady (Sam Jaeger) has been declared officially dead, after being reported missing for several years.

Now the owner of the family farm, Blake drags his dubious brood out to the Middle of Nowhere, and in real time they are attacked by a strange creature (see the film’s title), and spend the evening running and hiding from same.

Meanwhile, Blake, the dutiful husband and father, begins to change into something remarkably similar to the beast that’s stalking them.

Wow. Didn’t see that one coming.

There is little dialogue, which lends itself to Mystery Science Theater ad-libbing during the howlingly bad action sequences, such as Blake gnawing on his own arm, and two guys in simian rubber masks wrestling on a dark floor.

What are we watching?

Wolf Man is simply godawful, and since Whannell directed and cowrote this mess, he gets the lion’s share of the blame.

It’s a complete waste of Julia Garner’s talents, and hopefully won’t interfere with her trajectory as one of Hollywood’s best young actresses. She’s given very little to do besides wander through the night with a flashlight.

I’ve said this before when reviewing werewolf movies and it certainly applies to Wolf Man: If you can’t come up with better transformation effects than The Howling or American Werewolf In London—both of which were made 43 years ago!—then don’t bother.

Dying Breed (2008)

Another entry in the “isolated cannibal clan” genre, Dying Breed is way better than the earlier-reviewed Hillside Cannibals (but then, so is an average episode of Three’s Company), thanks in no small part to its being set in the deep, vibrant woodlands of Tasmania.

Zoologist Nina (Mirrah Foulkes) plunges into the harsh and unforgiving forests of Western Tasmania seeking evidence of the presumed-extinct Tasmanian tiger—the same mysterious beast that her zoologist sister Ruth was chasing several years earlier, before the latter turned up disfigured and drowned. (Dunno Nina, think I’d leave this one alone.)

Along with her boyfriend Matt (Aussie Leigh Whannell, who also wrote Insidious and a couple Saw movies), his obnoxious buddy Jack, and Jack’s cupcake, Rebecca, Nina wanders hither and yon before stumbling upon the rustic and remote township of Sarah.

As luck would have it, the town is populated by the descendants of Alexander Pearce (aka, “The Pieman”), an escaped convict who eluded the police in that area nearly 200 years earlier.

Pearce was later captured and hanged under a cloud of suspicion that he had resorted to chowing down on his chums while hunkered in the bush. Needless to say, the party soon finds itself firmly ensconced in the soup. (Or they end up in quite a pickle, your choice, but I like soup a little better.)

Instead of intrepid ineptitude (again, see Hillside Cannibals), Dying Breed is a grim, well-executed “don’t-go-in-the-woods” fable, directed, plotted, paced, and acted with unwavering efficiency.

The Tasmanian locale carries the same palpable sense of dread and foreboding as the back country of Pennsylvania in Deliverance (a movie that’s referenced here), and the local color is even more bloodthirsty.

Trigger Warning: There are some highly unpleasant implications vis-a-vis “women as breeding stock” here, which may not play in your particular domestic Peoria.