The movie is set in the Oregon woods. I know something about the woods in that part of the world: they can be scary as shit when you're all alone and a little freaked out. Big trees, like really big trees. Steep hills. It's always kinda dark. Drifty noises and skeleton creaking of the trees. It's a good place to set a werewolf movie.

Wolf Man starts off with a kid and his dad hunting in these woods. The dad's kinda harsh to the kid, pretty intense, but then he seems to know something. They see a deer but can't get a good shot. The kid darts away from the dad and the dad freaks out. Before he finds his kid again, the kid sees something...but we can't make it out. The dad is seriously freaking out now. Get in the deer blind, now! He's yelling at his kid and there's some growling noise...but maybe it's part of the soundtrack? And they're racing up the ladder and in safe.

Then a great scene where the dad is tracking noises through the wooden walls of the blind. He's pointing his rifle at it and we see a puff of steam as if hot breath in the cold rise over the wall of the blind. Dad's leading it with his rifle. He knows what this is, even if the kid doesn't and we can only guess.

And it's gone.

Cut to Manhattan and the kid all grown up, walking with his daughter. Clearly trying to be a better parent than how his dad treated him, but daughter disobeys, does something silly, accidentally bumps into a homeless guy who scares her and the dad -- who was the kid -- freaks out. Nicely done.

So of course he has to go back to Oregon because his father has been declared deceased...finally. In a werewolf movie, if they have to declare you dead, you aren't.

Going back home turns out to be pretty freaky. The kid has married what seems to be an uptight journalist Karen lady, but we suspect that the movie is going to give us a chance to see how she acts in different circumstances. The circumstances do get different quite quickly.

Time honored tradition: they swerve off the road to avoid hitting...something in the road. Everything goes downhill from there (including the moving van they are in). The kid-dad gets gashed by the creature, but they all make it to the ancestral house.

Her husband is turning. The journalist Karen lady is slowly realizing what's happening, even though she can't believe it. He's sweating and losing the ability to talk and growling and looking just really bad, hearing things like the spiders moving around in the attic, smelling stuff you can't normally smell.

She bandages the arm, but it's rapidly getting worse. Also, the werewolf is stomping around outside the house trying to bash it's way in. I suspect they are setting up a great newly turned werewolf fights old werewolf (which may be his father) to defend his family even though maybe he just wants to eat his family.

Didn't get to find out because right about the time our hero really enters into his werewolf phase and starts chewing on the flesh of his own arm in a particularly gruesome way -- blood, slobber, chomping noises -- I noticed my daughter wasn't watching Harry Potter, but was staring somewhat goggle-eyed at my screen (we were on an airplane). I switched it off.

We still haven't seen the werewolf at this point.