Stream It Or Skip It

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Teen Wolf: The Movie’ on Paramount+, in Which the MTV Series is Resurrected With a Bloated, Cheapo Feature

By John Serba

Teen Wolf: The Movie (now on Paramount+) arrives six long years after MTV series Teen Wolf unleashed its final awooooooo, which surely has been a time, to quote the Big Bad from the new outing, of “CHAOS! STRIFE! PAIN!” Granted, the hardest of hardcores have spent that time loading up the internet with fan fiction – knock yourselves out, kids! – although some of those franchise fantasies will be neutered a bit since TW:TM features bare butts and F-bombs. The series ran for six seasons and wrapped up neatly, so it takes a little retconning to get the movie revved up, including, but not limited to, conspicuously failing to mention the absence of a primary character (Dylan O’Brien’s Stiles is completely AWOL) and bringing another one back from the dead (Crystal Reed’s Allison). Longtime fans and newbs alike know that this Buffy-ized, post-Twilight Saga remake-in-name-only of the 1985 Michael J. Fox movie (and its asinine Justin Bateman-led sequel) is going to be a real howler, but whether anyone will be satisfied with any or all of its ungodly 139 minutes remains to be seen.

TEEN WOLF: THE MOVIE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-NINE MINUTES. I underscore and reiterate lest you think that was a typo. The movie opens with a barely comprehensible scene in a Japanese restaurant, but the gist of it is, a barely comprehensible evil has emerged, and it talks like Gozer from Ghostbusters. Meanwhile, in sunny Beacon Hills, thirteen years have passed in the Teen Wolf narrative space-time continuum since the final TV episode, so thank your chosen deity or deities that we’re no longer being asked to believe that these actors are playing teenagers. Some of them are graying and have a few more wrinkles than before and that’s OK, that’s just time doing what time does – but they still have their werewolf abilities to grow pointy claws and pointy teeth and pointy sideburns so massive you’d mistake all these guys for stand-up bass players in rockabilly bands. Let’s catch up with some of our principals now: Scott McCall (Tyler Posey) runs an animal shelter, since he’s the Alpha werewolf and therefore has the humane animal-control skills your average dogcatcher lacks. Lydia (Holland Roden) has mothballed her banshee screams for the life of a relative normie. Derek Hale (Tyler Hoechlin) struggles with his serially delinquent son Eli (Vince Mattis), and lest you think there are no Teen Wolves in this Teen Wolf, the kid is 15 and his pointy canines are starting to get supernaturally pointy. Eli plays lacrosse but he’s a benchwarmer and his room is decorated with posters that literally read ROCK MUSIC FESTIVAL and HORROR, because that’s what delinquent teens enjoy! You know, like, HELLO FELLOW TEEN DO YOU LIKE ROCK MUSIC FESTIVAL LIKE I LIKE ROCK MUSIC FESTIVAL? RAD, BRO. LET’S HANG OUT AND WATCH HORROR MOVIE. There are other characters, cops and old friends and old enemies, jammed in here too, to deliver mighty wads of exposition and/or pithy one-liners, all of it ancillary bric-a-brac for the primary plot: Scott and Chris Argent (JR Bourne) have been seeing crazy visions of long-dead Allison (Reed), the former’s one-time lover and the latter’s daughter, and they’ve deduced that she’s trapped in Bardo, a metaphysical limbo between life and death. Don’t you HATE when that happens? When you’re trapped in Bardo, a metaphysical limbo between life and death? I sure do. And you know what HAS to happen in that situation – the Bardo-trapped individual must be fetched from the realm and brought back to Earth so she may experience amnesia but still rely on the muscle memory of her considerable archery skills, which will come in handy since she’s the puppet of a demonic humanoid mummyfaced entity known as the Nogitsune (Aaron Hendry), a chaosmonger of some renown, known for his mighty mongering of much chaos, which ties into Eli’s big lacrosse game for some stupid-ass reason. And here I’m obligated to list some of the people involved in implementing Allison’s resurrection and then chasing down the Nogitsune: werecoyote lady Malia (Shelley Hennig), werewolf guy Jackson (Colton Haynes), pretentious windbag Peter Hale (Ian Bohen). Should the Nogitsune officially watch his ass? Yeah, sure, probably.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Teen Wolf: The Movie is the cheapest, crappiest depiction of werewolves/werewolf transformations since Blood and Chocolate, or maybe even Skinwalkers; so much for maybe boosting the FX budget of the series. It’s also the most annoying movie spun off from a TV series since Sex and the City 2. Performance Worth Watching: Hats off to Hendry as the Nogitsune for A) delivering drooly villain speeches with enough verve to almost make you forget they consist wholly of crippling exposition, and B) escaping this thing without anyone having to see his face. Memorable Dialogue: Some choice who-writes-this-shit decontextualized lines: “This can’t be real. It can’t be her. She was cremated!” “She looks pretty uncremated to me!” “The air is rife with homicidal rage!” “OK, you killed me. Now can we talk?” Sex and Skin: Equal-opportunity male and female bare asses. Our Take: So can y’all dyed-in-the-wool Teen Wolfers hang with this thing for ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-NINE MINUTES? Good luck, godspeed, knock yourself out, don’t forget to wear your seatbelt, and always look both ways before crossing the street. Blame the streaming age for such bloat, since this type of project used to clock in at about 82 minutes to fit it into a two-hour TV slot with commercial breaks. Then again, the streaming age might’ve inspired creator Jeff Davis to make it a miniseries “event,” in which this significant amount of jack shit could have been accomplished in four hours instead of a little over two. I dunno, somewhere in the ether exists a decent Teen Wolf movie without O’Brien/Stiles, one that’s built around snappy zingers and meaningful character development instead of endless reams of exposition; one that isn’t cluttered with pointless characters brought back purely for nostalgic reasons; one that beefs up the FX budget so the movie doesn’t look so laughably chintzy; one that isn’t paced and organized like three hourlong soap opera scripts whose pages are randomly shuffled together; one that features not just comprehensible action sequences, but exciting action sequences. Alas, I say. Alas. This thing dithers around for 45 minutes before the plot begins to click and characters utter MF-bombs and naked people get to wrapping their legs around each other. Not that the R-rated stuff is particularly juicy, mind you – it’s sprinkled on top like not enough nearly enough cheese on a plate of nachos. Why didn’t TW:TM go full-hog with the sex and violence and cussing? If you’re going to do a little, you might as well throw in a disemboweling or two, right? Then again, CGI intestines cost money, and it’s clear that nobody wanted to use too much of that stuff here. In summary: The movie begins, a bunch of stuff happens, a lot of it feels like dicking around, it takes a half-hour to end in anticlimactic fashion, roll credits. Woof. Our Call: I can see fans’ let’s-see-what-they’ve-come-up-with-here curiosity factor being too overwhelming to resist. And they may get over the potential gamebreaker of an outing sans O’Brien, and find a way to squeeze some meager enjoyment-nuggets out of it here and there. But Teen Wolf: The Movie is rough sledding from any standpoint. I recommend you SKIP IT and hold on for the truly inevitable reboot of the damned: Twilight: The Series. John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

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