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Horror films are typically bad. Often, a combination of factors including low budgets, poor actors, and awful writing amalgamate into something virtually unwatchable, unless you're a masochist. What's even more rare than a good horror movie is a good werewolf movie, the last in memory being An American Werewolf in London, which was released in the 80s.

Anticipating The Wolfman felt like setting myself up for disappointment, considering the development horror stories being told about it, but I was more than pleasantly surprised. The writers smartly avoided making a movie about a stoic man who wears dark clothing and sulks everywhere. Rather, The Wolfman's titular character responds to his curse with madness and fury, excellently portrayed by Benicio Del Toro. The movie is about Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro,) an actor who returns to his childhood home on the moors when he hears that his brother was violently slaughtered. Upon his return, he is greeted with hostility, not only from the natives, but also from a giant wolf monster. It's a remake of The Wolf Man from 1941, and it's very, very good.

It's also violent. Body parts are ripped gruesomely from bodies, and blood spurts from the bloody stumps like jelly from a donut. Great deals of the special effects were done digitally, in lieu of prosthetics, and the movie is a little worse for it, though only marginally. There's a huge missed opportunity there, and I have no doubt the movie would have been much better with a little bit larger budget.

Hugo Weaving plays the villain well, the Scotland Yard detective assigned to the moors to investigate the wolf monster murders. The amount of screen time he gets is tragically small, as he is the most entertaining character on screen, easily dwarfing scenery-chewers like Anthony Hopkins and tacked on love interests like Emily Blunt.

The Wolfman's real strength isn't in its acting or its effects, however. What sets The Wolfman apart is its setting. It almost flawlessly emulates the cinematography and sets of the monster movies seen more often in the 1940s, and almost perfectly reproduces some of the sets from the Lon Chaney Wolf Man from 1941. It's impressive and it's very pretty.

The Wolfman is, like Drag Me To Hell, largely homage to horror from a previous era. Wolfman is the perfect Universal horror movie. However, some of the hammy acting and already-dated digital effects hinder it from being as perfect an emulation as Drag Me To Hell, and for that, it falls just short of great.

(Nick Shuler is an editor for The Wando High School paper, the Tribal Tribune)