Lawrence Talbot (Benicio del Toro) undergoes a beastly transformation in the new remake of The Wolfman. (Universal Pictures)

"Clap for the wolfman," as The Guess Who would say. Or, to be more precise, clap for Hollywood makeup maestro Rick Baker and his special-effects colleagues, who've done a bang-up job in re-envisioning Universal's shaggy monster for a 21st-century audience.

We expect a little more from an eight-figure budget and a cast that includes Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt and soulful Benicio del Toro as the sexy beast of the title.

As for the movie surrounding the monster – that's another story. Not that the new remake of The Wolfman is all bad, by any means. If anything, it's faithful to its B-movie, creature-feature roots. It's just that we expect a little more from an eight-figure budget and an A-list cast that includes Anthony Hopkins, Hugo Weaving, Emily Blunt and, as the sexy beast of the title, the soulful Benicio del Toro.

Ironically, despite a screenplay with intellectual pretensions, a surfeit of surreal nightmare sequences and buckets of gore, this homage fails to best the modest entertainment value of The Wolf Man, the 1941 classic on which it's based.

Screenwriters Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self have heavily embroidered Curt Siodmak's original 1941 script and stitched in scraps of other werewolf movies and lore. The story is set in the 1890s and stars del Toro as Lawrence Talbot, an American Shakespearean actor on tour in London, who is summoned back to the village of Blackmoor and his ancestral home. Lawrence left Talbot Hall as a traumatized boy, after witnessing his mother's suicide, but now his older brother Ben has mysteriously disappeared and Ben's fiancée, Gwen Conliffe (Blunt), has written asking for his help.

Lawrence arrives at the hall only to learn Ben's body has turned up, savagely mutilated, on the moors. Nonetheless, he's heartily welcomed by his father, Sir John (Hopkins), as a prodigal son. Dad seems to be a retired hunter/explorer, who now potters about his cobwebby, candlelit Gothic pile accompanied by a gun-toting Sikh manservant (Art Malik) and the occasional growling cur. Sir John is given to dispensing cheerless bits of paternal advice like, "Never look back – the past is a wilderness of horrors." This fails to put off Lawrence, however, who finds compensation in the occasional bedroom-door glimpse of a semi-nude Gwen. He decides to stay on and solve his brother's murder.

The early part of the picture is antic and choppy, reaching a low point with an abysmally edited sequence in which Blackmoor's rampaging werewolf attacks a gypsy camp. Director Joe Johnson – who helmed such '90s family fantasies as The Pagemaster and Jumanji – seems to have no idea how to pace a horror film. Instead of slowly building suspense, he administers repeated jolts like some Taser-happy cop. Given this movie's troubled production history of rewrites and re-edits – detailed in a recent Los Angeles Times article – you begin to fear you're witnessing a sloppy salvage job.

Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt) falls for Lawrence despite his affliction in The Wolfman. (Frank Connor/Universal Pictures)

However, after Lawrence is bitten by the werewolf and goes lupine himself, things improve. No mere feat of follicle growth, Del Toro's canine metamorphosis is a bone-wrenching, skin-stretching freak show. It recalls and outdoes the terrific man-to-wolf sequence in An American Werewolf in London, which won Baker a 1982 Oscar for makeup effects.

Like that Jon Landis film, The Wolfman then ventures – albeit briefly – into black comedy. Lawrence, suspected of suffering from lycanthropy, is locked away in London's Lambeth Asylum and given a series of Victorian-era shock treatments by a gleeful German doctor (a gimlet-eyed Antony Sher). They climax with a demonstration in a moonlit lecture theatre, where Sher's smug expert prattles on about delusions, oblivious to Lawrence's hideous transformation behind him. It's a funny-horrific scene that suggests what the rest of The Wolfman might have been if its makers hadn't taken it quite so seriously.

The movie's uncertain tone is reflected in del Toro's performance as Lawrence. The Wolfman was a pet project for the actor, who also co-produced it, so you wonder why he's so unsure about how to approach his role. He can't seem to decide if he's paying tribute to Lon Chaney Jr.'s lovably ingenuous Larry Talbot from The Wolf Man, or channelling swarthy Oliver Reed in Hammer's The Curse of the Werewolf. He arrives at Talbot Hall straight from acting Hamlet onstage and stalks about, darkly brooding, like he's still playing the melancholy prince. Only his dialogue isn't theatrical, it's taciturn and bland. What happened to the creepy panache del Toro brought to Sin City?

Hopkins is the creepy, theatrical one here. As the calmly crazed Sir John, speaking in an imperturbable purr, there are times when he could be rehearsing a distracted King Lear. He quotes from scripture and talks a lot about the beast within – reminding us again that the werewolf tale is really just Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with fur and fangs. His Sir John is a far cry from suave Claude Rains in the original Wolf Man.

For suavity, we have to turn to that fanboy favourite, Hugo Weaving, who is cucumber cool as Aberline, a mutton-chopped Scotland Yard inspector who shows up in Blackmoor fresh from tracking Jack the Ripper. While the superstitious villagers are casting their silverware into bullets, Aberline's convinced the "werewolf" is really just another madman in the Ripper mould. He's set up as Lawrence's rational nemesis, but they end up sharing few scenes together.

Then there's the late-blooming romance between Lawrence and Blunt's emotionally intense Gwen, which suggests we're heading into a Beauty and the Beast scenario. Finally, in the last frames, the film decides it's also a family revenge tragedy (more shades of Hamlet).

The story may be wildly unfocused, but give Walker and Self's screenplay credit for its literary references to Shakespeare and the Bible. (It had never occurred to me that the feral Nebuchadnezzar was the first werewolf.) Production designer Rick Heinrichs and his art directors also deserve plaudits for their splendidly gloomy decor, which evokes Universal's old backlot sets. You wish all that loving craftwork paid off in a more coherent and enjoyable movie. Instead, this Wolfman is far from a big hairy deal.

The Wolfman opens Feb. 12.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.