Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!
There’s an interview with Joe Dante talking about The Howling, one of the better werewolf movies around. In that interview, Dante says that they had to hide the fact that it was a werewolf movie in advertisements because people would have thought it was corny and trite. How times have changed. Werewolf movies are cool when they’re done well, and they are surprisingly ripe to be done as horror comedy. The Wolf of Snow Hollow has embraced all of these facts. It’s not hiding that this is a werewolf movie, and it shouldn’t.
One of the things that most werewolf movies have going for them is that they really turn on the idea of isolation. An American Werewolf in London, putting a lycanthrope into the middle of a big city, is the exception to the rule. Werewolves do better in the middle of nowhere, where anyone can be the monster, but the list of suspects is relatively small.
The Wolf of Snow Hollow is a case in point. This takes place in a small Utah town called (surprise, surprise) Snow Hollow. As the name suggests, this is a skiing town, but they’re having issues at the moment because of a killer who seems to strike only on nights of the full moon. We get a taste of this when tourists PJ (Jimmy Tatro) and his girlfriend Brianne (Annie Hamilton) are settling in to their cabin. PJ goes into the house, and when he comes out, Brianne has been brutally killed, and there are bloody wolf prints in the snow.
Leading our investigation is John Marshall (screenwriter and director Jim Cummings), whose father is the sheriff. John has a failed marriage, a teenage daughter who resents him, and a drinking problem he is dealing with through AA. Over the next few days, thanks to the full moon, the body count in the town rises, and it’s clear that the town has a serial killer on its hands. Or do they? John starts to spiral as his father (Robert Forster) starts to succumb to heart issues and the other deputies demonstrate how little they care about the job and how incompetent they are, with the exception of Detective Robson (Riki Lindhome).
There’s a lot of dark humor in The Wolf of Snow Hollow. None of it is really laugh-out-loud funny, but there is a sardonic edge to everything that happens in the film. Most of this comes in the form of John, who is clearly spiraling the entire film, dealing with his father’s declining health, the public outcry against the lack of movement in finding the killer, the sense that there is something more than just a serial killer at work, his daughter’s rejection of him, and his intense desire to return to drinking, something he naturally does, eventually.
One thing that is done very well here is that we’re kept in the dark for a considerable amount of time. Pretty much anybody that we encounter could be the werewolf because the only time we see the werewolf for the first hour or so of the movie, the only other people on the screen are the victims. Is it one of the cops? Could be. Until we actually get a survivor to encounter the werewolf, everyone is a suspect.
This was fun. It was not as wacky as something like Werewolves Within, but it definitely had the same kind of vibe to it. It’s very much a horror movie and very much a werewolf movie, and these always work best when the reveal comes at the end. It plays the tropes of the subgenre really well and, because John has all of the issues he does, it also humanizes the story in some real ways.
I watched this in part because I felt like something quick and easy that wasn’t going to tax me too much. An 85-minute easy horror movie felt like exactly what I was looking for. I expected, more or less, dumb but watchable, and it’s a lot better than that. John Marshall works as a character because he is so clearly flawed. He’s pitiable, and we root for him at least in part because he is so broken and because so much is coming down on him at once, including the realization that Julia Robson is a better cop than he’ll ever be. He’s desperate to follow in his father’s footsteps, and slowing coming to the realization that he might not even be as good as the other idiots on the force.
Movies are getting longer and longer right now. At exactly two hours, Conclave is the shortest Best Picture nominee from 2024, and most are a hell of a lot longer than that. Bringing in a movie that comes in under 90 minutes and tells a full story is kind of an accomplishment. This could be another 15 minutes longer, which is the sign that the movie did its job well.
Why to watch The Wolf of Snow Hollow: This is a really surprisingly good werewolf movie.
Why not to watch: It could stand to be 10-15 minutes longer.
I think I have this in my watchlist. There's so much horror that I want to watch but so little time.
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