Since two new releases made about $11 million each at the domestic box office this past weekend, and since I don’t have much to say about either movie, I’ve decided to throw them both a quick review.
“Wolf Man”
January horror movies are a special breed. The studio knows they can’t compete with blockbusters in the summer or better horror at Halloween, so they dump them in January hoping that the lack of competition will lead to a minor hit. This year’s offering is “Wolf Man,” a film whose trailer was so spiritedly derided that the film was practically declared a bomb before it even opened.
The film follows the Lovell family – father Blake (Christopher Abbott), mother Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) – as they head to the home of Blake’s estranged father (Sam Jaeger) in the mountains of Oregon. Before they can arrive, the family is involved in a harrowing car crash and Blake is attacked by a… his closest approximation is a wolf, but this creature stood on two legs. They seek refuge in the old house while hiding from the beast outside, but Blake starts going through a terrifying transformation that presents a danger on the inside.
Early parts of the movie show promise. Abbott is putting in a sincere performance, good decisions are made with editing and special effects, and the themes of intergenerational trauma are taken surprisingly seriously. I was thinking that maybe horror fans had been too quick to dismiss the movie, but then the family started making stupid horror movie decisions, the movie started getting cheaper with its scares, and by the end all its life was drained and it isn’t even a vampire movie. “Wolf Man” wasn’t the outright bomb I was expecting, but I can see why it was stuck in January.
Grade: C
“Wolf Man” is rated R for bloody violent content, grisly images, and language. Its running time is 103 minutes.
“One of Them Days”
“One of Them Days” follows two roommates and best friends, Dreux (Keke Palmer) and Alyssa (SZA), as they struggle to raise an emergency $1,500 to avoid eviction. Dreux is the responsible one, on the verge of a big promotion at work. Alyssa is the irresponsible one that trusted her no-good boyfriend (Joshua David Neal) with their rent money in the first place. Together they’ll get into some increasingly crazy and desperate adventures involving predatory loans, blood donation, abandoned sneakers, and more.
The good news is that Palmer and SZA have given life to two very funny and likeable characters that play extremely well off each other. The bad news is that they’re only funny with each other, the film fails to create any other funny or memorable characters. This wouldn’t be a problem if the story could emphasize the mains more, but this is a movie that requires its leads to interact with a whole wacky neighborhood that can never find quite the right way to be wacky. It’s not even that the auxiliary characters are annoying or actively unfunny, they’re just so bland that they make no impression.
Watching “One of Them Days,” I thought about the film’s obvious influences, from “Clerks” to “Friday” to “Do the Right Thing,” and I thought about how those films would have gotten the most out of the clearly-eager supporting cast and put together a more memorable film as a whole. As it is, we have a comedy where I’d estimate that a third to half of the gags work. I’ve had some painful experiences with worse ratios, but I can’t say this one made me feel fulfilled.
Grade: C
“One of Them Days” is rated R for language throughout, sexual material and brief drug use. Its running time is 97 minutes.
Robert R. Garver is a graduate of the Cinema Studies program at New York University. His weekly movie reviews have been published since 2006.
Last Update: Jan 20, 2025 7:19 am CST
