Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. Ticketmaster By Night
For this (hopefully) brief installment of my Stay Tuned series of articles, I thought I'd take a cue from last decade's Marvel Comics run by bringing back the old title and numbering sequence. I toyed around with updated, day-of-the-week-themed branding in Streaming Saturday, content-themed titles like Timely Thorsday, and even took a crack at the limited series format when covering What If...? and Chucky. But even though it's antiquated terminology, I still use Stay Tuned as a sign-off suggestion in almost every post, and it's just part of my brand identity.
So I went back through my post list, counted up the articles that fit into the Stay Tuned mold, and here we are at Stay Tuned #44.
If you haven't seen it yet, go check out the new Marvel Studios Special Presentation: Werewolf By Night, now streaming on Disney+. I don't want to spoil anything because it's a single episode/short film/ whatever that clocks in at only fifty-five minutes long, which means that what there is to spoil is pretty much what the plot hinges on, and there would be no point in me recommending it to you after reading this. But I want to be able to recommend it because I think it's good, so I'll try my best to not give anything away.
Here's the image break:
I'll start off by saying that I don't usually pay attention to the production logos or movie soundtracks (at least, as they have been redefined outside of Disney movies and films of the 90s and early 2000s). When breakdown videos acknowledge changes in which characters appear in the Marvel Studios logo, or they comment that so-and-so's "familiar theme" is playing in the background to signify some Easter egg of importance, I don't notice, and I don't really care to. When someone says "
Avengers Soundtrack," my mind is geared more toward Soundgarden than Silvestri.
But when the gothic-epic remix of the Marvel Studios theme hit, and the production logo was all desaturated and shot through with claw-marks and lightning bolts, and the above title card transitioned in from that like I was watching an old Hammer-era monster movie, I was hooked. Even the narration by Rick Wasserman (a prolific voice actor who provided his talents to various Marvel cartoons and video games, including Surtur in
Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes) lent gravitas to the already unsettling atmosphere. His Clancy Brown impression is so spot-on here that I thought the formerly titled, "Marvel Halloween Special" was being narrated by Surtur himself (even though he died in
Thor: Ragnarok).
Ticketmaster's Note: I had no idea when I was writing
this post that William Hurt (the actor who portrayed Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross in the MCU) had passed away, which was why I thought it unusual at the time that he--whether as the titular man behind the
Thunderbolts or as the character's Red Hulk persona--was not a feature player in his eponymous film. Which is where Wasserman or Brown (if not Sam Elliot, who played Ross in the 2003 Ang Lee-directed
Hulk film) could come in. When not acting in film and TV roles (
Carnivale,
Dexter: New Blood,
John Wick Chapter 4), Clancy Brown has had a prolific voice acting career, including Lex Luthor in the "DCAU," Mr. Krabs on
Spongebob, Surtur in
Thor: Ragnarok, and (as is relevant here) Red Hulk in
Hulk and the Agents Of SMASH. With the multiverse in play, it's entirely possible for either Sam Elliott or Clancy Brown to be a surprise addition to the
Thunderbolts cast.
On the plot of Werewolf By Night, if you read the comics and you've seen the Marvel Studios panel at D23, you're already spoiled on who the title character turns out to be. The how and why are something else.
Basically, it's more of an Elsa Bloodstone story than a Werewolf By Night story. The Bloodstones are a family of monster hunters with fanatical, xenophobic, vigilante religious cult motivations (the lunatic fringe on both sides of the aisle, boiled down to a family of three, plus other like-minded "superheroes"). The Winchesters, they most certainly are not. Except for Elsa. She's kind of seen as the black sheep of the monster-hunting community, as she got out of the life at a fairly young age to see the world and hone her self-defense skills in private. But when her father dies and has his body converted into an animatronic time capsule corpse (triggering her mother's necrophiliac tendencies?), Elsa returns home to claim her birthright in a hunt to the death against the best monster-killers in the world. The sur-eponymous Bloodstone is a magical artifact that has the power to weaken or forcibly transform monsters, and it has been passed through her family for generations because comic book writers love doing the coincidental naming convention thing. According to a sketch we see during Wasserman's narration (of a humanoid silhouette surrounded by seven orbs), the Bloodstone could be a seventh Infinity Stone, but maybe that's a stretch. It is the only thing for most of the Special that has color, though....
Anyway, not everything or everyone is as they seem, questions of morality and humanity arise, we're treated to some great Marvel fight choreography and homages to The Wolfman, there's blood on the camera at one point, a Savage Avengers movie (if not a series) is starting to look more and more likely, and the MacGuffin ends up where it belongs.
The final fight suffers from the black-and-white cinematography and an excess of stylized flicker, but what can be seen is creative and brutal, the classic horror homages are on-point, the character reveals are just obscure enough and recognizable enough to be impactful, and the story is pretty well paced for a sub-hour one-shot with this much lore to dump. I didn't feel at any point like I needed more or less of what I was seeing, and I didn't feel like I needed to dissect every name or image or Google every character to find out who they were (but you can if that kind of content creation is your thing).
Werewolf by Night explains itself competently, is incredibly entertaining, and applies the MCU cross-genre formula to horror such that you don't really need to know anything about Marvel going into it. Horror, but with superheroes. Check it out.
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So, how did I do on not spoiling the plot? Like and comment down below with your thoughts, and Stay Tuned for next Monday's Anime Spotlight on the two SSSS anime that were released so far.
Ticketmaster,
Out.
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