The Wolfman [2010]
This is not a gothic horror movie, it's an action movie with lots of gruesome violence. And that's the movie's biggest problem. There's never any build up of tension, the gruesome horror starts in the very first scene. The action's too violent, too fast-paced, too in-your-face to actually be scary. They're probably meant to be exciting or something, but the gore and blood feels too out of place with the lulls for the characters to brood and stare. It tried to interject a bit of scares with two utterly laughable jump-scare scenes that go thusly: *jump-scare* then *character wakes up* then *jump-scare* then *character wakes up again*. Those two scenes are just so utterly ridiculous that they're impossible to take seriously. Another problem is that there is no ambition in storyline or characters, they're ripped straight from the simplicity of the early Universal horror movies simply updated with modern aesthetics and violence. But too much violence, rendering it impossible to establish a feeling of dread or to ever be genuinely unsettling [unless you're unsettled by lots of gruesome violence]. It fails at being anything other than a Victorian action movie and that's unfortunate. It's not all bad though, the acting is uniformly good throughout and the production is absolutely gorgeous, with lots of detailed sets and convincing, creepy locales. But ultimately it's one that got away, an almost good movie that never reaches the heights that it should have.
