A strangely sudden return to classic monsters of yore has hit our movie theaters. Between these two and Lee Cronin’s Mummy movie on the way, Universal and other studios are returning to their classic horror icons for nearly guaranteed box office success. I saw both of these movies a couple of weeks apart, but felt it most fitting to use the double feature format to kill two big monsters with one stone.

Nosferatu - dir. Robert Eggers

Even Eggers lowballing his usual commitment to high intensity drama is a good time at the movies. Visually rich, with a cavalcade of awe-inspiring production design choices. But so much of this Nosferatu feels boilerplate, unable to create a smooth mixing of the avant-garde side of Murnau with the neorealism of Herzog. Eggers ends up stumbling through an awkward middle ground where a movie about a giant vampire with a big mustache in 19th century Germany where everyone speaks English has to be so damn dry. Eggers bringing a realism to even the most outlandish parts of the fantasy make both seem like the less desirable parts at different points of the film. Be strange! Be different!

Wolf Man - dir. Leigh Whannell

By all accounts this should have been a surefire success for Whannell after the heights of The Invisible Man, a surprisingly effective psychological horror with sadistically entertaining action. But Wolf Man is a pathetic whimper of a movie because it seems afraid to commit to having its titular creature reflect the attitudes it seems to represent in the script. In theory this is a film about the inherited behaviors of toxic masculinity that turns men into seemingly inhuman things, unable to properly connect with the people in their lives. In reality it’s a movie about a husband and wife slightly on the rocks who end up on the worst family retreat ever as the father is infected by a werewolf. There are plenty of effective sequences in here, don’t get me wrong. But the film is at its strongest when we are firmly in the point of view of the protagonist, the man slowly deprived of his humanity, unable to speak what’s in his heart to his family. And that perspective doesn’t gel with a movie monster meant to represent the alienating violent tendencies of men. A thoroughly underdeveloped film.