On DVD: When the Wolfbane Blooms...

You may have to be an old-school psychotronica fan to get all flushed about The Wolfman, the big-budget, bandwagon-jumping remake famous at this point only for bad reviews and a brief box-office fizzle in February. It's a schizophrenic movie at heart, longing to be a big ker-splash that pleases the hordes but at the same time wallow in the deep pools of yesteryear "monster culture" with which not many filmgoers under 35 will be intimate. Even among those of us older than that, only a small slice will have seen the original Wolfman (1941), can recall Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and The Monster Times, harbor memories of local TV station "horror hosts," and can name the four actors that played the Frankenstein monster in the '30s-'40s Universal series, in order.

That's who The Wolfman is for, from the Depression-era Universal logo and onward, even if it drags and broods far too much and is so spectacularly overproduced and overdesigned that before long you're jonesing for documentary-ness like you'd ache for water after eating an entire wedding cake. Everything is too big -- the meat locker where hero Benicio Del Toro's dead brother is kept doesn't have five pig carcasses hanging but 50, while the musty family estate doesn't have two stag heads in the hallway but 20. The film is at least 65 percent set clutter, digital and otherwise, and busts the ceiling for arch Halloween atmosphere set by Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow. We shouldn't care about the film's notorious production problems and long gestation, and the way the screenwriters (including Seven-maestro Andrew Kevin Walker) turned lycanthropy into a family pathology in the end, following the lead of Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf and countless other over-plotted, every-question-answered Hollywood script.

The film is too serious by three-quarters, but that doesn't mean it's best consumed with a glower; it's an excessive blast of old-fashioned aerosol cheese, ready for a million crackers. The casting of Del Toro (who also produced) seems odd until you realize he resembles the original Lawrence Talbot -- Lon Chaney Jr., sad and swollen rumpot that he was -- and Del Toro knew it. Director Joe Johnston (replacing Mark Romanek, which seems a bit like Brett Ratner replacing Tarcem) feels free to quote from the classic Frank Frazetta werewolf cover painting for Creepy magazine (see what I mean about the hermetic psychotronica stuff). But he also dares to have Del Toro's post-transformation wolf-guy actually resemble Chaney's old Scottish-terrier lycanthrope more than the digital lupine creatures from Harry Potter, Twilight, etc. I mean, my God, I'm having flashbacks -- it's a man with a fur mask on.

Make no mistake, the CGI man-to-wolf-guy transformation is effective and appropriately qualmy when you're finally given a clear view. But the best is saved for last, when the film devolves (or escalates, depending where you stand) away from the Chaney paradigm and toward the grotesquely penny-ante '70s monster epics of Spanish sleazoid Paul Naschy (Frankenstein's Bloody Terror, The Wolfman vs. the Vampire Woman, etc.). If you've been there, you know what I mean. The Wolfman's climactic pata-a-pata battle, complete with trampoline jumps and flips through the cavernous castle parlor, is your reward for enduring the pout of Taylor Lautner, among a great many other things.