Failed to deliver on expectations.
For some reason, I didn't see this as a kid, even though I was a big horror fan and dragged my mom down to the VHS store to rent every horror in there. This was always on my radar.
It was 18-rated in the UK, which should be a seal of quality for scares or gore. 15 rated horror always disappointed me as a kid, as they felt watered down. Films like The Gate, Monster Squad, and Return of the Living Dead Part 2 were let downs on the horror scale. Basically, if a movie was 15 rated I didn't expect the horror to be good.
Now I catch up with Silver Bullet which is pretty well known as a HORROR and sits alongside The Howling, and American Werewolf in London.
I loved the first 45-something minutes, I liked the story, the actors, and I was really into it. Then I started to lose interest and check out. It just kept dragging on. By the end, I didn't care, then it insulted me one final time with the finale.
It lacked the kills, actual horror and I don't understand why it's classed as a horror film over being a teenage drama that happens to have a few minutes of actual werewolf, and kills in between.
They killed off the fat dad in the beginning, then Terry O'Quinn which was quite gory, but too little too late. Looks like they trashed their whole rating by having one and a half good kills. Either make it like the Monster Squad with a 15 rating, or make it a full horror, have more kills, earning that 18 rating. At least the Monster Squad did have some horror artistry and tried to scare in a mild way. Gremlins the same which was a 15 rated over in the UK.
The ending was the final straw. The final showdown lasted only 2 minutes. A minute's worth of build-up, then the werewolf smashes through the wall.
Within 2 minutes it's dead. Total letdown of a finale. No tension, no chase, no struggle, super easy, barely an inconvenience.
It even comes back for a second time in the usual horror fashion, but they couldn't even pull that off and the werewolf moves a few inches, then drops back down.
Freeze frame on characters, movie ends.
6/10. Top marks for the first half, and the performances. Low marks for the 2nd half and lack of kills throughout. They should have gone all the way teen romp with soft horror and a bit of horror artistry, like a Fright Night for kids. or full horror with more kills.