With this messy tale of teen horror, director Wes Craven tries to reinvigorate the werewolf movie in the same way that his Scream series breathed life into the jaded slasher genre. The film stars Christina Ricci and Jesse Eisenberg (years before his Oscar-nominated turn in The Social Network) as LA siblings who are infected by a lycanthrope after a road accident. The events that follow, as the two slowly begin to transform, aren't so much scary as darkly amusing, with scriptwriter Kevin Williamson's adolescent witticisms and whinges to the fore. The first third of the movie is like TV's The OC with added gore and light tension, giving the film an enjoyably breezy appeal that masks its surprisingly clumsy direction and ridiculous storyline. It's only when the werewolf effects go from a teasing flash of fur to full-frontal monsters that the feature disintegrates entirely. The CGI effects are so appalling that they overshadow everything else, spoiling the creepy fun and turning a guilty pleasure into groan-worthy rubbish.

A werewolf loose in Los Angeles changes the lives of three young adults who, after being mauled by the beast, learn that the only way to break the curse put upon them is to kill the one who started it all.