Marvel’s Werewolf by Night slays with ghoulish and cheesy style

polygon.com:

Ever see the music video for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song “Heads Will Roll?” It’s great. There’s a dinner party and a concert and then a werewolf shows up and murders everyone with sweet dance moves. Werewolf by Night, “a Marvel Studios special presentation” — basically the streaming era version of a TV movie — is kind of like that. There’s a big, foreboding party, which goes about how you’d expect, until a werewolf shows up. And then it gets even better?

Directed by acclaimed composer Michael Giacchino with a script by Heather Quinn and Peter Cameron, Werewolf by Night pulls double duty as both a loving genre pastiche and an introduction of several of Marvel Comics’ storied horror characters to the MCU proper. Like the ’70s comic it’s based on, Werewolf by Night follows Jack Russell (Gael García Bernal), the eponymous man-monster on a spooky adventure. Famed monster hunter Ulysses Bloodstone has died; a powerful relic, the Bloodstone he was named after, is now up for grabs, and several monster hunters are invited to his estate to try and win it in a competitive monster hunt.

The monster being hunted is kept secret from the assembled hunters, but it’s not Russell — to everyone there, he’s The Man With No Name, someone with an impressive monster-killing resume and a backstory that’s effectively a blank slate. (As someone who turns into a werewolf, it’s ideal that Russell keep his ability under wraps.) And he’s not the only one bringing baggage to the night’s proceedings: Elsa Bloodstone (Laura Donnelly of The Nevers), Ulysses’ estranged daughter, has come for what she sees as her birthright, despite seemingly having little interest in the family profession.

Unfolding across a zippy 53-minute run time, Werewolf by Night is