This review is of the TV-14 edited version of the film. All thoughts below should be addressed as such as a review of the unedited version would be more negative

It’s time for another Werewolf movie! Uh oh, these don’t tend to be all that good most of the time and I’m afraid this title is no exception. You’re rather limited in what you can do with this kind of plot and the movie doesn’t really try and branch out. Everyone is systematically taken down and crushed by the rampaging beast while the heroes try to find a way to overpower it. It won’t be easy though since two of them are kids and the adult tends to be drunk most of the time. Not the strongest trio to save the day.

The film opens up by introducing us to a small town that is quite happy. Everyone gets along and it tends to be rather peaceful around here. Crime just doesn’t happen and when one person is destroyed, they assume it must have been an accident. When two more people get bumped off, they figure there’s a crazy killer on the loose. The problem is that the bodies continue to pile up and there are no real leads. Marty suggests that it could be a werewolf but his uncle Red doesn’t take him all that seriously. Still, Red has decided to protect his family and prepares himself with a silver bullet. Between the actual bullet and Marty’s wheelchair which is also known as the silver bullet, they can defeat any form of evil that appears to cause any trouble.

One of the ways the film immediately tries to lose points by is making the whole cast pretty unlikable. Most of the characters who were bumped off at the beginning are rather unlikable like the bully kid and the alcoholic guy. Then you have someone who was in a scandal because she had an affair with someone. I don’t remember the guard doing anything shifty at the beginning though so that was tough luck. Then among the survivors, well Red is definitely not a great role model so it’s not like he’s going to be a great character. You can’t put him in the same conversation as the others but he still could have been better.

Marty means well but should have defended the heroine more from the pranks near the beginning of the film. It wasn’t really a good look for him and of course he is in a wheelchair so it’s not like he can move around as well as the other characters but I feel like he still could have done something here. At least he does well with the whole Werewolf issue. Marty knows how to drive around on his super wheelchair pretty well, he can even outrun several cars. That takes a lot of skill for a kid to pull this off and he makes it look easy.

The film’s tone isn’t quite as grim as you would expect even with everyone getting bumped off. I think I was expecting it to all be very serious but the film has its share of humor as well. The music randomly gets happy at times too and everything. It can be a little weird to be sure but it could have worked out if the film was better at that. Like throw in some puns and everything and make this part parody. That may have actually worked out better.

After all, this version still has a lot of violence so that isn’t going to help matters. The Werewolf takes a lot of injuries before going down and of course the victims all get brutal ends as well. I think the worst part here for them is that Werewolves are hardly all powerful. Even without a silver bullet you can at least wound and slow one down. The fact that they all panicked with their guns and didn’t shoot until it was too late was awful. The whole point of having a gun is so you can shoot it when the going gets tough. These guys absolutely fumbled the bag in every possible way here.

I would have liked to have seen more of the town meetings because to me that was the strongest part. Have them debate on how to handle this crisis. The sheriff tries talking against the whole community justice because it can get out of hand but in terms of the debate I would say he lost that one. He couldn’t really think of any reasons not to have it that would justify having the town wait on standby. There were already too many victims for that. I think what he should have done was to accept it, but coordinate who goes where himself. That would at least keep it controlled to a degree. It probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference against the Werewolf but that would have been my plan at least.

Also, the writing can be really dicey at times. So the main characters know that the werewolf will be targeting them in the climax. In fact, they know the exact day he will be attacking. So they barricade themselves at home and get ready. Then in the 11th hour, Red starts letting his guard down and even saying the kids should go to bed. He’s ready to fight them over it and doubts it when the girl says she saw a Werewolf. That was just crazy and it’s the kind of scene that would work well if this was a full on parody but we know it isn’t. So that was just bizarre, there’s no way you would even think of sending the kids to bed when the monster could be showing up any second now.

Overall, Silver Bullet is definitely not a good film. It’s a far cry from 1408 which was a whole lot more interesting from the King adaptions. This one is just super basic without anything really going for it. There are no characters that you really want to follow. The most interesting is probably the reverend and he doesn’t get a whole lot to do. The main characters could use a lot of work before they would really be all that likable. The film is definitely quite violent with everyone getting bumped off but lacks purpose beyond that. I would say to definitely skip this one and in general, continue to skip werewolf movies as they aren’t quite up to par yet. This one didn’t even bother with a big plot twist ending which was annoying.

Overall 2/10