[blackjack60]

Originally Posted by Cursebearer

I think they've chosen an effective path even if it is neither true to humanity nor werewolves.

But if it doesn't have much to do with weres or if wolves, one wonders why they bother with calling the monster a werewolf in the first place.

Nobody is wondering what these creatures are, they're all recognizably lupine, which is the most I think a werewolf ever needs to be.

Are they recognizably lupine? The spindly spider fingers, catlike claws, wrinkly skin, and overlong ears suggest otherwise. They suggest that filmmakers have basically exaggerated the features of the werewolves in AWIL and The Howling. Like bad counterfeits, the copies grow progressively worse. Both of those films were original in their time, but very few filmmakers have advanced on them.

From there, the form of the wolf should serve narrative.

But does narrative make detailed obligations on the form or just very broad ones? Bad werewolf movies (i.e., most werewolf movies) merely require a killing machine.

I think that's exactly what the OP was asking for. You'll even see he came back in and praised "Bitten" and "Blood and Chocolate" for their depiction of werewolves which are wholly anatomically correct.

He did, but he also said "my point was its not that we have to nail down a perfect werewolf form as a standard, have a movie with a full wolf, the wolfman or something like wolfsbayne from the comics, we each have our own idea what a werewolf is. But its that the artists creating the monster puts some effort into it. Like that Wolves movie that came out like a year or two ago..."
Granted, I don't think Bitten or Blood and Chocolate are imaginative when it comes to the look of the wolves, but they are slightly more "realistic" about the social lives and mental attitudes of the werewolves, which was the other part of his original complaint.

I wouldn't want the werewolf to stop being a dangerous, murderous creature of horror (no new age crap for me!), but I think the mindless killing machine cliche is exhausted, and ditto for the visual image of the werewolves, which haven't advanced much beyond AWIL or The Howling (though Wolves did a good job in modernizing the Lon Chaney look, though it was an otherwise dull movie). I think filmmakers would do a better job if they challenged themselves to create werewolves that was both a horror-movie creature and one that also looked and thought more like a human/wolf hybrid. This would require more thought and research than the usual approach to werewolves in horror films.