The Wolfman

Of course, the Wolfman was always the poor relation of the Universal Studio horror crew. The Frankenstein monster and Dracula got there first and had defining stars in Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi; 1935’s “Werewolf of London’’ had the dull-as-dirt Henry Hull. (Nifty transformation scene, though, and points for inspiring Warren Zevon.) It was only with 1941’s “The Wolfman’’ that movie lycanthropy got a face: poor, hulking Lon Chaney Jr., who always suggested a football player who’d been forced to take over the family watchmaking business. That first “Wolfman’’ isn’t a very good movie, either, so it’s not like the new one is sullying hallowed ground.

On the contrary, director Joe Johnston (“Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’’) and writers Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self, working from Curt Siodmak’s 1941 script, treat the hairy old cliches with reverence. Set in 1891 in the fictional hamlet of Blackmoor, England, the new “Wolfman’’ lets the fog machines rip from frame one, and every time an offscreen wolf howls you may find yourself giggling uncontrollably.

In an inspired casting touch, Benicio del Toro stars as Lawrence Talbot, a traveling actor returning to his ancestral manse to bury his brother (Simon Merrells) and confront the family demons. Since del Toro already looks like the missing link - he has a hairline lower than Butch Patrick on “The Munsters’’ - this gives the makeup team only half the work to do.

Hopkins staggers merrily around as the unfathomably decadent Sir John Talbot, cradling a gun as if he were re-enacting his post-stroke scenes from “Legends of the Fall.’’ With tremulous conviction, Blunt plays Gwen Conliffe, the brother’s fiancée who’s drawn to the tormented Lawrence after he’s bitten one eldritch evening and starts staring fixedly at her neck. Since the original film’s Maria Ouspenskaya is long dead - not that that would have stopped her from chewing the scenery - Geraldine Chaplin has been drafted to play the aged Gypsy woman Maleva, issuing dire warnings and asking Gwen, “Vill you condemn him or vill you set him free?’’