The Hunting (2021)

In The Hunting, “When a mysterious animal attack leaves a mutilated body in the forest, a conservative small town detective must enlist the help of an eager wildlife specialist to uncover the dark and disturbing truth that threatens the town” (IMDb).

Maggie Talbot (Joelle Westwood), i.e., the eager wildlife specialist, runs a wolf sanctuary with Todd (Joaquin Guerrero). She speculates that the attack could be the work of a “coywolf” (which is a coyote-wolf hybrid, as opposed to a really modest wolf, though that probably would have made for a better movie), because a regular coyote (or, presumably, a regular wolf) would not be capable of “tearing a man’s legs off.”

Now, since precisely a leg is the only thing missing from this supposedly “mutilated” body, perhaps Maggie and “small town detective” Connor Ryan (Peyton Hillis) should consider the possibility that it wasn’t a Canis Lupus but a Felis Horribilis — that is, a multi-cellular life form with stripes, huge razor-sharp teeth, and about eleven foot long; what doctors, in fact, call a tiger.

Monty Python references aside, Maggie and Todd quickly jump to the conclusion that they’re dealing with a werewolf, and she tells Connor that “everything I’ve seen, everything I know, just points to this being real” — and of course it is, because this movie is too simple to understand the concept of ambiguity (unlike, say, The Wolf of Snow Hollow).

It should also be noted that, at this point, Maggie hasn’t seen the werewolf yet, and thus is unaware that it looks like Ozzy in the Bark at the Moon album cover — something that could very well make her rethink everything she allegedly knows.

Seriously, though, its monster is about the only thing The Hunting doesn’t screw up. Director Mark Andrew Hamer could have easily decided to CGI the crap out of his werewolf, but opted instead for a person in a suit.

Regardless of whether or not the result is realistic (and since there is no such thing as werewolves, how could it be anyway?), it’s at the very least real; it’s there, it takes up space, it casts a shadow, and the camera can see it as well as we can.

And now the damn veggies: 1) as much as a quarter of a century ago Bad Moon, a unanimously despised film, managed to produce, employing almost exclusively practical effects, one of the best-looking lycanthropes ever to grace a film, and 2) if on the one hand the director’s attitude regarding the appearance of his feature’s creature is very commendable, on the other Hamer cheats regarding the beast’s human identity, coming up with a last minute identical twin in what is best described as a Lupus ex Machina. Eat shit and bark at the moon, indeed.