by Jason Adams
The alchemy of the Horror-Comedy is a notoriously tricky mix -- add too many snips and snails and nobody's laughing; too much sugar and spice and you can make a person's face being torn off smell like a bouquet of roses. Neither of those extremes are necessarily bad -- I like roses! -- but you want to somehow straddle both extremes at once, goosing the gore-hounds while tickling the easily-terrified. Basically you're asking a damn lot of yourself and your audience, but when the routine really lands it'll be 10s from every judge, and Werewolves Within, Josh Ruben's new horror-comedy (based on the VR game) that just premiered at Tribeca this week, lands... well 9s. Let's say 9s.
Werewolves stars Veep's Sam Richardson (who somehow mixes cheerfulness with a deadpan dullness that always delights) as Forest Ranger Finn... brand new to the cozy snow-buried mountain hamlet of Beaverfield which lays somewhere in what I can only imagine must be the Pacific Northwest. They say every snowflake is different and Beaverfield has a full blizzard of big characters lurking about -- think Knives Out: Chalet Edition. There's the sweet and adorable postal worker (Milana Vayntrub), the tech-millionaire gay couple (Cheyenne Jackson and What We Do in the Shadows’ standout Harvey Guillén), the weird lady who makes shampoo bottle Christmas angels of everybody (Michaela Watkins).
Oh and there's the intimidating real-estate entrepreneur guy (Wayne Duvall) who's come to town to sell an oil pipeline that'll no doubt brutalize the natural beauty of the landscape -- straight out of the 80s movie villain catalogue, that one, although given our recent Presidential choices it's a stereotype probably due revival.
Cue up one killer snowstorm and one even more killer-ing monster lurking in the shadows and offing the towns-folk one by one by one, and before you know it everybody's trapped in the big bed-and-breakfast with no electricity save the savage frisson spark of their ill suspicions toward one another. Secrets will be revealed! Throats will be slashed! Werewolves will be Within-ed! And lots of goofiness will abound. It might honestly all end up being just a hint too goofy for the Horror-Comedy alchemy to land that Perfect 10 that I talked about -- I wish I cared about the characters a little more and they weren't all broad types, but with a cast this large I suppose that's the trade. It's "Clue with Lycanthropy" and as such an absolute hoot, or make that a howl.