I wanted to like Skinwalkers. It looks visually impressive, having been shot for the big screen but soon slides down into the ridiculous. Almost everything in the film becomes an absurd pose on Isaac’s part. The introduction and arrival of the werewolf pack comes in over-the-top posturing – cliche montage shots of them loading their guns, putting on their shades and then riding into town on their bikes four abreast. The shootout between werewolf bikers and townspeople becomes increasingly more absurd – with what up until then had seemed like ordinary townspeople popping up everywhere wielding Uzis, rifles with telescopic sights, even a granny whipping out a .357 Magnum. There’s a laughable scene with the werewolf bikers sprouting fangs as they drive along the road that cannot help but remind of Werewolves on Wheels (1971), which at least played the idea tongue in cheek. The werewolf sex scenes seem embarrassingly tame – certainly, nothing that holds a patch to the memorable scene between Christopher Stone and Elizabeth Brooks in The Howling (1980). Equally, when it comes to the town, Isaac offers up a vision of rural Americana that is crafted in such a hyper-real way that it verges on sentimentalism.

Skinwalkers has been slickly made, but is a series of borrowed poses from beginning to end. On a conceptual level, it is a rehash of ideas taken from modern vampire films like Vampires (1998), Underworld (2003) and sequels, Vampires: The Turning (2005) – of warring factions of vampires/werewolves, one of which has foresworn preying on humans; a predestined full moon/eclipse being a time when they can be remedied of their condition; and a prophecy (of exactly what and from where it is never said) to drive the drama along. The film gives us contrived situations – like a potentially interesting scene where the werewolves are trussed up in the back of the truck and the infected Sarah Carter swings back and forward between innocent and animal-like snarls as Elias Koteas and the others struggle to free themselves. It is not a scene that seems at all believable – one has trouble with the film’s notion that there are two types of werewolves, those that have foresworn eating flesh and those that relish it. The writers are here making an analogy between eating flesh and drug addiction, but one finds it hard to understand how something like ravenous hunger could be passed by a bite akin to an infection.

Skinwalkers assembles an interesting cast, including the always underrated Elias Koteas and the incredibly lovely Rhona Mitra, who alas suppresses her incredibly sexy natural British accent for a generic role as an American single mom. The Stan Winston Studio deliver some effective werewolves, which do the job passably but still do not surpass the dazzling transformations in The Howling and An American Werewolf in London (1981) made 25 years earlier.