Remember channel surfing? Well, this is stream surfing. Movie reviews from your favorite streaming services chosen at random. I take six streaming platforms, three paid and three free. Roll some dice and review whatever I land on. To start, I need to see where I'm watching. Pluto TV. Now roll for the genre. 16 is fantasy. Now to roll for the movie. 14. 14 is Skin Walkers. I remember seeing trailers for this back in the day. It's a werewolf movie, but for some reason, I've never seen it. Ah, let's fix that.
Okay, you have a werewolf movie with practical effects by Stan Winston Studios, the original Lara Croft model Rona Mitra, two of the girls from DOA, and somehow the film is still super lackluster. Skinwalkers is from 2007 and was directed by James Isaac. Interestingly, one of the writers was James Roday, who was Shawn from Psych.
The movie was about a mother and her son. The kid, unknown to the mom, is half werewolf, which I have no idea how that works. I think someone watched Blade and tried to pull something out of there. So, does he have all their strengths and none of their weaknesses? No, he's just a normal kid whose father was a werewolf, although he has a hidden ability. Unknown to them, a group of good werewolves have been protecting them for years. But some bad werewolves have been hunting them, and they need to kill the kid. The reason being is that the kid is prophesized to be able to stop the werewolf curse.
So, right off the bat, the movie has one of the most boring, overused movie clichés ever. The chosen one is a kid who will save the world unless the bad guys can kill him before his 13th birthday. The bad werewolves like their powers and enjoy eating people, while the good guys believe they're cursed and are trying to find a way to become human again. The kid can somehow cure them of their lycanthropy, but only after his 13th birthday.
The bad werewolves find a town where he's been hiding, and they have a big dumb shootout with thousands of rounds fired and almost no one gets hit. It doesn't matter, though, because even though everyone's using silver bullets, the silver bullets only work if you hit the werewolf in the exact right spot where the plot calls for. So, one guy can get shot in the arm and still be fine, but then another time he gets hit in the shoulder and oh, now he's dead.
We don't even see the werewolves transform until about the 45-minute mark. The film goes about how you would expect. Bad werewolves almost get the kid a bunch of times, but he keeps getting away. Then there's a big showdown and there's more bullets fired than fur flying. The werewolves, when we do see them, look really good. However, their transformations are done via quick cuts and shaky cam.
Now, full disclosure, this may not be the fault of the movie, but rather the version that I saw. Apparently, the movie was heavily cut to get a PG-13 rating when it was released in the US. While it was released with an R rating and a longer runtime elsewhere in the world, so the transformations may actually be visible in that version. It seems like they took a lot of the edge to get the lower rating. They removed the swears, nudity, and violence.
Ah, smooth move studio. Regardless of the edit, there were still stupid moments in the film. The action scenes felt sloppy, and the scenes that were supposed to be tense dragged on to the point of where I stopped caring, like when one of the good werewolves turns evil and another werewolf is tied up and tries to get his gun to shoot her. That scene went on for way too long.
Rona Mitra was good and I really feel like she should have had a bigger career. They did throw in a little Lara Croft moment for her which was cool. Natasha Moth was also good as the sexy evil werewolf.
My biggest complaint with the movie is who cares. The kid can turn you back into a human but you have to get injected with his blood. So that would imply that you want to be human again. So why not just let the kid live and you can continue to be a werewolf elsewhere in the world? Is the kid going to go around forcing everyone to take his blood? It just felt dumb.
Skinwalkers was disappointing. Bad clichéed story, effects that would have been great if we could see them, and action that should be exciting but ultimately were dull. I'm sad. I was hoping this would be good. We don't get very many good werewolf movies. What a waste. I'm going to try to track down the international version because I'm genuinely curious to see if the different edit makes the movie better. It's happened before. However, for the PG-13 version of the film, I have to give Skinwalkers a thumbs down. Thanks for watching everybody. I'll see you next time.