Del Toro, 'Wolfman': Howlingly bad

You may find it hard to distinguish the howls of the beast from the howls of the audience in "The Wolfman."

There are a lot more laughs than scares in this inadvertently campy debacle, a thoroughly botched attempt by Universal to leverage one of its classic horror brands. Everything is bad - the awful script, Joe Johnston's un-atmospheric direction, and the acting, which contains enough ham to meet the protein needs of an entire pack of wolfmen.

Benicio Del Toro stars as Lawrence, estranged son of a Victorian aristocrat (Anthony Hopkins) who owns a gloomy estate near a small foggy, village, where citizens are being mauled in the night by a fangy, toothy creature.

One of the victim's is Lawrence's own brother, and Lawrence returns from abroad to investigate - he visits the morgue, pulls the sheet off the body and is aghast at what he sees, although it's really hard to tell who looks worse, the dead guy or the surly Del Toro, who looks as though he's trying to method-act his way into "The Hangover."

It's not long before Lawrence himself is bitten, and that makes for an interesting transformation - Del Toro is the only actor in the history of wolfmen whose disposition and appearance actually improves.

Director Johnston is a special-effects pro ("Jumanji") and was no doubt brought in to manage the computer-generated images. The money shot is Del Toro's man-to-wolf transition, and it's pretty decent, but it's your money, and if you spend it on this, it's shot.

Without dramatic context (absent here), the special effects carry no weight. You may as well be watching time-lapse photos of a Chia-pet. "Wolfman" rises to the occasion only once - Lawrence is captured and sent to an asylum, where a (comically) Freud-ish psychiatrist arrogantly endeavors to cure Lawrence of his "delusion." The doctor demonstrates his cure to a roomful of scientists on the night of a full moon, only to find that Lawrence's bite is way worse than his bark.

The ersatz Freud does not survive, but Freudian ideas linger in Lawrence's Oedipal struggle with his father, an eccentric and creepy fellow made so by his wife's suspicious death. Now, giving Hopkins free reign to play an eccentric, possibly homicidal aristocract is a dangerous thing, more terrifying than any wolfman, and you can see Hopkins' only regret is that so many of the dingy backdrops are animated - he has that much less scenery to chew.