Triskaidekaphilia: '13Hrs' (2010)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

There's a sort of cool idea at the very end of the low-budget British werewolf movie 13Hrs (unimaginatively retitled Night Wolf for U.S. release), about how a werewolf's attempts to protect their family from their monstrous nature might only put the family in greater danger, but it's barely an afterthought to this annoying, mostly tension-free horror movie. Thanks to the U.S. title, it's pretty obvious that the mysterious monster in this movie is a werewolf, but the low budget means that director Jonathan Glendening keeps the monster offscreen until the movie is nearly over, and the characters express confusion over what is chasing them even long after it's become readily apparent to the audience. Glendening represents the monster almost entirely via red-tinted POV shots and sound effects, which makes its kills tough to depict (he settles mostly for showing the gruesome aftermath with some mediocre gore effects).

The movie takes place at an isolated English country house, where Sarah (Isabella Calthorpe) has just returned to visit her family after moving to the U.S. for work. She finds her three half-brothers and a few of their friends getting wasted in the barn behind the creaky, spooky family house, but their evening of drunken obnoxiousness is cut short when they discover that Sarah's stepfather (the father of her half-brothers) has been murdered and mutilated. Soon whatever creature killed the family patriarch is stalking the irritating young people as well. They all behave like idiots, setting themselves up for easy kills, but without seeing the attacks, the deaths of the unpleasant characters aren't particularly satisfying.

The cast includes Harry Potter's Tom Felton along with some British TV stars, none of whom distinguish themselves in any way (although Glendening does find plenty of ways to showcase model Gemma Atkinson's generous bosom). The characters spend probably half the movie in a cramped attic crawl space hiding from the monster, meaning that the filmmakers fail to make use of one of their only real assets, the creepy old house. It's often hard to tell where the characters are in relation to each other and in relation to the monster, which diminishes the already minimal suspense. By the time Glendening actually shows the werewolf, the build-up has just gotten tiresome, and the makeup effects are laughable at best (the aftermath, with the werewolf changed back to human, features one of the most obvious bald caps I've ever seen in a movie). With a sharper script and more engaging characters, 13Hrs could have overcome its low budget and maybe even offered a new approach to the werewolf movie. Instead it aims for the bare minimum, and can scarcely even manage that.