Movie Review: Skinwalkers
Skinwalkers, which sneaked into town yesterday with virtually no ads and no critics' screenings, is an uninspired attempt to inject fresh blood into the werewolf thriller.
Using ersatz American Indian mythology - namely that an ancient Navajo legend decrees that skinwalkers are cursed werewolves and the curse will be lifted after four days of a red moon that signals a skinwalker boy's 13th birthday - Skinwalkers is far too predictable and familiar to be original, much less scary.
Mixing bits of Terminator, Near Dark and the motorcycle gang of Marlon Brando's The Wild One, Skinwalkers is a pastiche of little bits from far better movies.
Rachel (full-lipped Rhona Mitra as the poor man's Linda Hamilton) doesn't know that her kid Timothy (Matthew Knight) is the chosen one to break the curse.
In her autumnally picturesque little town of Huguenot, Rachel is shocked when everyone in town, from gray-haired granny to the family leader Jonas (Elias Koteas) is loaded for a gunfight with the scruffy gang that suddenly motorcycles onto main street and tries to kill Tim.
This kind of turnabout from idyllic little village to full-bore violence was handled with much more wit and gunfire in the English spoof Hot Fuzz earlier this year.
Leading the forces of evil is Varek (Jason Behr), the gang's surly tattooed leader whose goth girlfriend Sonja (Natassia Malthe) is even nastier than he is. "You find this boy or it's the end of us," she snarls.
Sadly for bloodthirsty Sonja, this gang lets Tim and his family escape, which means the chase, with its countdown to Tim's birthday, is on.
Along the way to more murder and mayhem, Skinwalkers describes the battle being waged. It's a war between those skinwalkers who want to lose the curse to eat human flesh - like Tim's family - and those in Varek's gang who can't imagine living without such tasty fare. As Jonas explains, "Once you feed, you can't go back."
Mostly, the attractive cast declaims as in a high school pageant. It would help if anyone outside of the dependable Koteas could really act. Behr, despite the six-pack, has neither personality nor presence, much less menace. Neither, for that matter, do the hokey monster transformations, which imagine that werewolves are hairy alien creatures that have seen An American Werewolf in London one time too many.
