Jack Pierce's makeup makes the werewolf come alive with a feral humanity missing in today's CGI lycanthropic concoctions. The painstaking lap dissolve process that appears for seconds on screen took hours of laborious work and filming as layers of yak hair were applied to Lon Chaney's face and photographed. The mist-enshrouded forest sets, with their gnarled tree limbs and dark landscapes, give The Wolf Man a claustrophic and eerie tone of desolation, as Larry Talbot struggles against, and succumbs to, his inevitable fate.
Lon Chaney Jr. reprised his signature role as the Wolf Man in four more Universal films, but The Wolf Man remains his most poignant performance as a man cursed, through no fault of his own, to walk on padded-feet by night, when the moon beckons, with the unquenchable thirst for blood.
Daniel Woolstencroft: Silver Bullet (1985)
Once upon a time, I could rattle off the whole Taco speech from Reservoir Dogs, or maybe even Tarantino's Madonna monologue. I can remember a lot of lines, from a lot of movies. But there are some lines, some snippets of dialogue, that are so burned into my brain as to be unforgettable.
"I'd rather not spend the rest of this winter TIED TO THIS @!#%ING COUCH!" is one. "They're coming for you Barbara" is another, naturally. But one of my personal favourites is "I'm a little too old to be playing Hardy Boys meet Reverend Werewolf!"
It's difficult to imagine anyone other than Gary Busey delivering that line, and I'm glad I live in a world where I don't have to. Silver Bullet, based on the Stephen King novella Cycle of the Werewolf, is probably Busey's finest hour. He's magnificent, plain and simple. It's the kind of performance you can watch time and again, and it always makes me smile.
Corey Haim's not bad either as the young protagonist confined to the titular wheel-chair. His performance here predates his turn in The Lost Boys, and at this point I'm sure he never expected to turn up in anything like Prayer of the Rollerboys. Megan Follows, Everett McGill, and Terry O'Quinn fill out the rest of the cast nicely.
Silver Bullet is a film I always loved as a youngster and still adore now. It's got the brother and sister bonding, the cool uncle, the neat gadget (even if it is a wheelchair), and a werewolf! It's not a bad one either, as screen werewolves go; standing formidably tall and looking a lot like the Bernie Wrightson artwork in the novella, if memory serves.
Article comments