'Wolfman' true to original

Benicio Del Toro copes with his wolfman alter ego as Larry Talbot in "The Wolfman." (AP photo)

Larry Talbot (Benicio Del Toro) is pure at heart and says his prayers at night, but the wolfbane is blooming, and, boy, is that autumn moon bright.

In other words, Larry better fit himself for a flea collar.

“The Wolfman” is Universal Pictures’ latest attempt to revive the classic movie monsters in the studio’s catalogue. Unlike “The Mummy” and the best-forgotten “Van Helsing,” “The Wolfman” yearns for the old world dread that infuses those original films. Publicists love to bandy about the word “reimagining,” but this is a fairly faithful remake of 1941’s “The Wolf Man” starring Lon Chaney Jr.

The new film opens with that familiar gypsy lament: “Even a man who is pure at heart, etc.” The locations and character names haven’t changed, and except for several variations (some significant, others not) the basic story is the same.

In 1891 Shakespearean actor Larry Talbot returns from an extended tour of America (where he picked up the accent) to his ancestral home on the English moors. Cue the fog. Larry has come to join the search for his missing brother, but he arrives too late. His brother’s corpse was found in a ditch, looking as if it had been mauled by a giant animal.

Larry settles in at the foreboding Talbot Manor (key décor elements: elephant tusks and cobwebs) where he befriends his brother’s fiancée (Emily Blunt), renews the prickly relationship with his father (Anthony Hopkins) and dreams again of his mother’s mysterious suicide.

Seeking answers to his brother’s death, Larry journeys to the gypsy camp outside the village. Here Larry gets bitten by the strange hairy beast that killed his brother. In the Lon Chaney Jr. version the werewolf bite was a solitary encounter, but in the remake it is a full-scale action scene where a dozen gypsies and villagers become kibble before the werewolf chomps Larry. Violence is a significant difference between the films, and the R-rated remake doesn’t shy away from those gory D words: dismemberment, disemboweling and decapitation.

Oddly, the gypsies serve no purpose in the remake than to add local color. They’re here because they were in the original. In that version, fortune teller Maleva (played by Geraldine Chaplin in the remake) was the only one who could inform Larry about the curse of the werewolf.

In the remake, the people of late 19th century England are remarkably werewolf savvy. Maybe the events of that “Doctor Who” episode with Queen Victoria made the papers. Even before the first full moon, the village’s menfolk are melting their wives’ jewelry to cast silver bullets.

If nearly everyone in the movie knows about Larry’s curse before he does, where could the plot possibly go? It certainly can’t follow the traditional werewolf story where the hero realizes he has become a monster and tries to hide his secret. The answer comes with a twist halfway into the story. Saying too much about this twist will spoil things, but it is a good one that makes the film’s second half much more entertaining than the first. It also allows Universal to incorporate elements from another of its classic titles, “Werewolf of London.”

The acting is conspicuously stronger than the material. If you want to cast a doomed title character, you can’t do better than Del Toro. On the happiest day of his life, Del Toro probably looked like he just watched the ending to “Old Yeller.” Hopkins has a great time, too, just managing to keep camp at bay.

Listen to the way he purrs “lycanthropy,” and you can’t help but smile.

Director Joe Johnston (“The Rocketeer”) fills the screen with shadows and mist and a palette of grays.

“The Werewolf” looks like second-generation Tim Burton, but it fits. Makeup specialist Rick Baker, who revolutionized werewolf transformation scenes in 1981’s “An American Werewolf in London,” returns to tradition. Del Toro’s wolf face resembles Chaney Jr.’s, as it must. The original makeup is Universal’s trademark.

Although the story packs some thrills, it never fulfills its own promise. Writers such as Andrew Kevin Walker (“Seven”) and David Self (“Thirteen Days”) should have written a better script. They probably did. Many characters and story elements go undeveloped, suggesting that “Wolfman” was chopped up and rearranged in the editing room. The ending certainly feels truncated.

Yet this moody and violent remake has several terrific moments. A scene in an insane asylum literally eviscerates the strained Freudianism preached in the 1941 film. The script also slips in the delicious implication that the “wolf boy” who started this whole mess is Mowgli from “The Jungle Book.”

The sequel could be a Disney vs. Universal lawsuit. Then the fur would really fly.

“The Wolfman”

3 stars

Rated R for bloody horror, violence and gore

Running time: 1 hours, 43 minutes

Written by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self

Directed by Joe Johnston

Starring Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, Hugo Weaving