I'm inured to disappointment at how bad werewolf movies are at this point - there's never been a genre or cultural figure about which there have been more awful movies made. Normally in a review of yet another one I'd mention a few, but there are just too many of them at this point.

What I was surprised by – and which the trailer gave no indication of – what how bad the filmmaking (as opposed to the film) was.

I know I say this every time I watch a movie that shows such a staggering lack of authorship or control over the technical elements of moviemaking, but it's like a really good director made a bet he could make the worst-made film ever, so complete and broad is the incompetence in every creative aspect.

The awful script and shockingly bad acting isn't that big a surprise – that's the case even in big studio movies that cost $200m. But it's the lines dubbed after the fact and played back on the soundtrack at completely different levels from the audio captured on set – to such an extent you're not sure who's meant to be speaking.

It's the soundtrack full of muffled bumps, either the boom operator or the actor's costume mikes scraping across their clothes, or maybe because they didn't dial down the gain in audio postproduction and you can still hear the wind. It's that level of bad.

It's the ridiculous pacing, writer/director Eddie Lengyel seeming to think it increases the tension in a scene of the werewolf stalking a victim by having her walk… and walk… and walk… the actress trying way too hard to maintain a nonchalant expression and not look into the camera the whole time and with her walking pace changing after every cut.

It all means the slightly silly werewolf costume (looking like an overly hairy bat) isn't even the worst thing in it.

All of which is even sadder as there's a halfway decent idea at the kernel of the story. Four friends are hanging around on Halloween night when one of them, Jett (Marshall Vargas) downloads an app that says it has the power to turn people into werewolves.

It involves the delivery of what's claimed to be werewolf blood (which somehow shows up five minutes after he orders it through the app) and a trip to a graveyard where they have to cut their fingers, mix their own blood with the werewolf blood and have him drink it.

As expected, nothing happens. Next morning April (Kayden Bryce) wants to forget the whole thing, but when a young woman is torn to shreds walking home after a night out soon after, it's just the first of a series of attacks around town that seem to confirm something has been unleashed in Jett – especially after April finds the skull of his pet cat under his living room table.

The race is on for April and the other two friends from the original party to find out what's going on, and it involves a teacher at their college and a former professor gone rogue who's behind the app and the whole scheme behind it.

It all comes to a head in a protracted chase in what seems like the biggest house ever built as the two final girls try to stay one step ahead of the villain (and if you've thought the acting was bad until then, wait until he starts twirling his metaphorical moustache) and the lycanthrope running around.

It's a laughingly poorly made project executed by a handful of people very low on resources and/or talent which for some reason happened to get a mainstream release through an actual distributor. It might be worth watching if you're stoned with friends, or maybe following the advice of a lot of artists – watch a lot of bad movies and read a lot of bad books so you internalise what not to do when you write or shoot your own.