Like playing Bioware DLC without the rest of the game.
While this is multiple layers of "I don't go here" (modern movies, the MCU, Marvel in general), I emerged from my hole to watch this with some friends. It's in black and white! You can pet our cat! Man Thing!
Props for trying something slightly different, but imagine if it had been something slightly different and also done well and thoroughly.
I might not feel I had such pressing unkindness to share with respect to this hour of streaming entertainment with leads whose names I've already forgotten (I think they were Jack and Ilsa but I wouldn't put money on it) but the very end violates one of the important rules of modern media: don't remind the audience of a Better Thing.
You're right, Werewolf in the Night, I could have been watching THE WIZARD OF OZ. That's a great movie that you're reminding me of while simultaneously evoking without integrating the reference in a thematically coherent way, namely with a record playing young Judy Garland's rendition of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", a song she sings at the beginning of the movie when the world is colourless and she's longing for something beyond her drab and unkind-seeming Kansas farm life. Not when she arrives in Oz and her world floods with colour, a visual the significance of which five-year-olds can grasp. I suppose the choice to bring in colour at the end with Werewolf the Night is meant to tell the audience that it's morning which is.
Fine.
Although it also draws attention to how little attention was paid to the actual aesthetic of black and white films, the care with which colour and lighting have to be used in anticipation of how they will look in black and white so images are clear enough in the lower visual quality of the time which extended to colour films.
It's too sharp. HD crisp high resolution bright and perfect underscoring that the previous fifty minutes haven't really been like the Universal monster movies the aesthetic is hoping to evoke, but just someone slapping a monochrome filter on their instagram post. Nowhere is this more obvious than when Man Thing is on screen. The CGI monster looks wrong. He just looks wrong. He doesn't belong there. There's a similar problem in the choice to have the magic red stone be the only thing shown in colour when everything else is black and white. It's red, laser light red, and it looks tacky and wrong, visual nails on the chalkboard of my eyes. In university, I went with some friends to see a movie constructed as a throwback love letter to old pulp serials, SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW. I still remember having a great time, because, even though it was in colour, there was a softness to how everything was shot that felt closer to the movies of the '30s and '40s I grew up watching than the black and white Werewolf to Night.
The thing is, colour was introduced to black and white photos before the pictures moved. There are silent movies with colour scenes (the Lon Chaney PHANTOM OF THE OPERA has one). The original BEN-HUR opens with the birth of Christ and in the nativity, Mary's blue robe is the only spot of colour. It's not something as simple as there can be no colour in a black and white movie. It just doesn't look like it does in Werewolf in Night. It's jarring.
There are a few moments where the black and white is used well; a properly contrasted transformation scene through black shadow splashed across a pale wall is pleasantly striking. The werewolf design has a lot in common with Lon Chaney Jr.'s iconic wolf man makeup which makes it feel more appropriate in black and white than Man Thing's clean CGI slickness.
Pushing past the visuals, as a narrative all I can think after watching Werewolf to Night is that screenwriters need a crash course in compressed storytelling because there's not much here, even if the soft pencil sketch of the characters has charming pulpy comedic potential. They could have also leaned more into the hard woman archetype the female lead is trying for; a full serious Katherine Hepburn approach would have been good, fitting with the aesthetic and distinguishing her from the Strong Female Character favoured by genre fiction writers of the last twenty-five years.
All I'm saying is: I watched THE WOLF MAN a couple weeks ago. It's only 70 minutes and doesn't feel like a collection of afterthought cutscenes used to stitch together a lackluster Dragon Age add-on.
