"The Wolf Man has no disco in his soul."

Benicio Del Toro sans prosthetics in test shots from the film that was not to be(thanks to Solace In Cinema).

Shockwaves rocked through the horror fanboy world this week as it was announced that Mark Romanek was departing from the remake of The Wolfman, mere weeks before production was slated to commence. According the The Hollywood Reporter a dispute over budget with Universal had led to Romanek's ankling the project that had monster movie buffs seriously psyched. I didn't like One Hour Photo although would never deny it had serious mood and style, but Romanek's videos for Janet Jackson alone would get me into anything he'd do-and Benicio Del Toro as The Wolfman? As G.O.B. would say, Come on! You could see something really dark, majestic, even revelatory getting created there. A loosely connected group of people I know freely cop to a werewolf side Sex, booze, food, anything....the were-urge comes from our primitive animal side-carnivorous, hungry and horny. You know, good times. "Werewolf cage" and "were-pig" are part of our vocabulary. We were all looking forward to this re-telling of the story of good guy who succumbs to his darkest urges whenever the moon is full. This could have been our film.

But Universal balked at shelling out over $100 million for an R rated horror film. This unsettling trend of producers calling projects too costly when something like this with big names in in, and the worldwide market as massive as it is: Any piece of crap with a name makes a studio money, come on! Adding insult to injury hack director Brett Ratner has been called into replace him--actually, calling Ratner a hack is too generous. The kind of movies he makes are the laziest, most soulless pieces of mechanical, joyless revenue stream crap. And he himself is the smarmiest Hollywood phony going--for some reason he's on talk shows promoting his films all the time as though he's a celebrity himself, even stinking up Charlie Rose's round table. During that sit-down with Charlie he made reference to "Martin and Dean, Dean and Martin--I don't really remember, I'm too young", then flashed a blue-white smile from an orange face. Too young? You're a director, asshole, living in the age of Netflix. Do your research. He's Hollywood without history, branding chum.

Lon Chaney in the original Universal film.

Now Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool has succintly ripped into Universal and the choice of Ratner. For the past couple years Knowles' cred has sort of flickered rather than shone, as it's looked more and more like he was in the pocket of the studios as he's jetted around to private screenings, rather than holding them to the fire, which is how he became established. Universal won't be inviting him to any screenings anytime soon after this post though. Correctly  calling Romanek the auteur of the project, razing Universal's meanness and attacking poser Ratner as the worst possible choice for the decidedly dark project: "Ratner has a disco in his basement. There is no disco in The Wolf Man's soul." Ratner fans (how sad could these be?) have counter-attacked on Ain't It Cool, but without any legs to their arguments have attacked Knowles' weight, critiquing physical appearance being the default setting of the commentosphere. It's a good old fashioned, Gore Vidal Vs. Norman Mailer feud-except that there's no Mailer to Knowles' Vidal--just a movie that coulda been great, but was too beautiful and blood-thirsty to live.

 

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[d.riguer]

speaking of wolves, i spotted P.Crook in silver lake yesterday. he was too far away for words...