Sorry this one's coming at you a day late, dear audience.

I spent the whole weekend geeking it up at RadCon, and even for a scintillating local superstar such as myself, it can take a while to find someone to paint your '91 Tempo up like the Batmobile.

-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.

Because if my ride looked good, then the eyes of those girls in the corsets would pop. And not just because their chests were being squeezed so hard their brains had to make room for their incoming lungs. They'd be so busy swooning over the jet black paper towel roll-rocket tubes to notice the locks don't work, or that my trunk is crusted over with a petrified milkshake splashed there by a helpful dickface, or that the reason I'm doing a rolling leap from the driver's seat is that my only brakes are the nearest tree trunk.

But there's more to life than looking good blah blah blah. You know, I won't totally rag on making something beautiful. That takes skill and effort. I'll give The Wolfman credit for looking pretty special. It's the rest of it I'm less than impressed by.

Following the brutal death of his brother — the wounds suggest a savage beast or a madman — Benicio Del Toro returns home to England and the dusty manor of patriarch Anthony Hopkins.

There, Emily Blunt, his brother's fiancee, asks Del Toro to find out what happened. While investigating suspicious gypsies, the camp is ravaged by a terrible wolf monster. Del Toro is bitten. Soon, he too will become a werewolf, driven mad each time the full moon shows its face.

In this time of paranormal mania for sexy vampires, sexier half-vampires with werewolf boyfriends, and vampire-hunting Keebler elves and the rainbow-barfing unicorn-centaurs who love them, a throwback about a simple case of lycanthropy feels downright refreshing. Well-framed and lighted by director Joe Johnston, The Wolfman harkens back to a simpler time of misty fens, cobwebbed estates and easily-riled mobs waving torches and pitchforks.

Mostly because it has all these things. And stubbornly refuses to do anything with them.

Whatever I might think about the paranormal explosion, hey, at least they're out there trying new things. Even if all they're doing is crushing an old thing over the hoary head of a second old thing so that second-old-thing gets mad about having first-old-thing gunking up its hair, at least both those old things are showing us a new face. Think about it.

The Wolfman doesn't. It is content to pretend no one's ever filmed a superstitious preacher before. After a while, you start to wonder why they wanted to remake this in the first place.

The main reason probably rhymes with "millions of mollars." And it does have a few things going for it. Hopkins' performance as a grief-deadened father is pretty snazzy. As are the visceral transformations and spattery dismemberment. The drama's appropriately gothic, too.

But boring cliches are boring. And instead of building tension through dread, The Wolfman relies on the "SUDDEN LOUD NOISES!!" school of lazy scares. When you're not terrified of being devoured right there in the theater, it gives you a lot of time to chew over any nonsense a movie has tossed your way, such as why Del Toro can only be saved by someone who loves him when the plot clearly suggests he could have been saved even harder by someone who hates his bloodthirsty guts.

That — and some babble about defining the line between man and beast — is as deep as The Wolfman ever gets.

Grade: C