The death kiss of the “American Pie” franchise continues, as Rodman Flender’s comedy asks us to pontificate the notion of one of the guys from “Teen Wolf” actually growing up to be married. And what if this guy didn’t tell his wife that he was a werewolf by nature, or super nature? Sure, this is really just a ninety minute sitcom in reality that uses a small horror device that doesn’t even place it within the horror fold, but it does indeed rip off “Teen Wolf” considerably. This could very well have been a sequel that occurs ten years later if they pushed for theatrical distribution hard enough.
Rich is a young secretive man who works for Animal Control while not working on his dissertation. Every full moon he retreats to his cabin in the woods to get away and turn into the beast he’s always been and struggles to maintain his hunger. Thankfully, his fiancé Julia has no idea what type of man he is, and he intends to keep it that way, even as the wedding date comes closer putting him in a spot with his next transformation. And if that’s not bad enough, there’s another monster out there kidnapping victims and Rich is worried. Hilarity ensues. It’s really tough not to dislike “Nature of the Beast,” because it’s so incredibly similar to an actual television sitcom that this almost feels like a pilot for ABC Family. “Nature of the Beast” is awful mostly because it takes a potentially amusing concept and really never knows what to do with it. At times it intimates that it’s a family romance comedy, and then includes some graphic violence and sexual references.
When it’s not pushing for burning the candles at both ends, it resorts to sitcom devices. There are your usual clichés for this formula; wacky relatives, a permissive fiancé, a villainous father in law, and of course our hero Rich who has a secret that induces much goofy misunderstandings involving body hair and dogs. To set up poor foreshadowing, our friend Rich thinks back to when he was a college guy and accidentally got bitten by a werewolf, and this coincides with the introduction of his friend, played by Eric Mabius. Mabius is introduced in the most forgettable instance as a jealous studly friend of Rich who seems to resent his astute writing, and then is just completely pushed into the background for the second half of the movie, once Julia discovers the lycanthropy. Mabius has such a minor role, I had a truly difficult time finding his character’s name researching this review, in spite of the fact he’s included in the making of featurettes on the ABC Family website.
His name is Donovan, apparently. ABC Family thinks that they’re tapping the horror comedy sub-genre by featuring this character as a werewolf who is not above eating other people, but it clearly underestimates the fans and never rises to the level of an actual horror film at any point, even with the director and writers pushing horror devices on us like the hunter who mysteriously knows what a werewolf is, and Mabius doing his best imitation of James Spader a la “Wolf,” while Eddie Kaye Thomas pretty much phones it in the entire time as a one-dimensional Jack Tripper.
When Rich turns into a werewolf, he’s pretty much always out of range of humans who always get away in time, and through those coincidences, “Nature of the Beast” is hardly ever the horror movie it attempts to convince us it is. Actual horror geeks won’t even bother to lump this in with actual horror titles, but ABC Family will sure try their damndest to change their minds, and their efforts are clearly in vain. Out of all the terrible movies that premiere on television, “Nature of the Beast” is hardly one of the worst. I would suggest this for kids, but they’ll likely tune out during the whole romance drama malarkey. There’s not a clearly defined audience for this sitcomish, goofy, silly, poorly acted attempt at posing as a horror comedy, and thus “Nature of the Beast” is a creature with no identity.