Movie Review: Skinwalkers

By Cynthia Fuchs

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What Parents Should Know
Parents need to know that this dark, poorly edited horror movie has plenty of violence, including multi-gun shootouts, careening cars, and werewolf attacks (bloody, shredding flesh, usually in deep shadow). The narrator, a nearly 13-year-old boy, has a difficult relationship with relatives that he's just discovered are werewolves (the fact that they've lied to him his whole life creates a lot of tension). A female werewolf shows cleavage and midriff as she chomps on her victims; some beer and liquor is shown in a bar scene. Language is relatively mild, including several "hells" and fewer uses of both "s--t" and "damn."

Families can talk about the movie's family dynamic. How does his relatives' lifelong lie affect Tim? Does it have a greater impact on him because of his age (13 is tricky even without monsters)? What kinds of revelations could affect real-life kids just as much? Families can also discuss the differences between the male and female werewolves. What sets them apart from each other? What characteristics are typical for TV and movie werewolves? Do these werewolves stick to the pattern?

Common Sense Media Review
In SKINWALKERS, there are two kinds of skinwalkers (though both are, essentially, werewolves with Native American folklore in their backgrounds): Some see their monthly bloodlust as a curse, while others "embrace the power of the beast." But neither group is especially frightening or sympathetic; this, in addition to their very shadowy appearances, makes director Jim Isaac's "horror" movie rather boring.

Young narrator Tim (Matthew Knight), like Wesley Snipes in Blade , has mixed blood; he's part werewolf and part human. According to a hazy prophecy, when he turns 13 (three days after the film starts), something -- viewers aren't really told what -- will happen. Either the bad werewolves will be able to rampage at will, or the curse will be lifted from all.

Trouble is, Tim hasn't been told about his special status, so he's grown up thinking that his asthma and nightmares are his individual burden. And his human mom, Rachel (Rhona Mitra), doesn't know what's going on when the moon turns red and the bad werewolves ride into their western small town on big black motorcycles, either. Only Uncle Jonas ( Elias Koteas) understands. He, his mother Nana (Barbara Gordon), his daughter Kat (Sarah Carter), and assorted other "good" werewolves know that they need to shoot at scruffy-faced Varek ( Jason Behr) and his alarmingly cleavaged girlfriend Sonja (Natassia Malthe).

There's quite a lot of shooting in Skinwalkers; the sound of bullets being fired punctuates the human-to-wolfish transformations. But only occasionally does anyone hit a target -- which means that the shooting scenes can go on and on. The actual werewolf attacks, on the other hand, though howly and loud in their own way, tend to leave victims shredded and bloody, unable to continue battling.

Once the action commences, the adults spend precious little time explaining Tim's ancestry and fate to him (during one particularly disturbing scene, Jonas has Tim and his mother watch the good werewolves transform -- it's an ugly, scary process, even if the beasts are tied up in harnesses so they can't attack anyone -- and Tim cries as he watches his beloved uncle bark and drool). As Tim learns to load weapons and help his family fight the bad werewolves, he resembles The Terminator 's John Connor, but Rachel is no Sarah. She's disinclined to fight and complains to Jonas repeatedly about the big fat lie he's told all these years.

But in the end, of course, the two groups will have a showdown -- good werewolves versus bad. As this scene finds all the werewolf characters speechless (though very growly), Tim and Rachel have to figure out their own mission, as well as how to make their family unit work. Sadly, the movie has at this point become so disjointed that you won't be worrying about them anymore. Maybe the confusion emulates Tim's sudden, frightening shift into responsibility -- lycanthropy as metaphor. Or maybe it's just shoddy filmmaking.

Fans may want to see variations on this theme (monsters arguing over whether to kill humans): Try Blood and Chocolate or Undeworld . Or, for a smarter, more stylized film about a family of monsters "out west," check out Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark.