Bad Moon (1996)

A photojournalist and his girlfriend are having unnecessarily graphic sex in a tent in the forest of Nepal when a werewolf attacks, as is werewolf film opening tradition. They don't hear all of the Nepalese villagers being eaten outside, thanks to the amazing sound isolation of 2mm of plastic. The girl is gored right to bits by the large, bipedal man-in-a-wolf-suit before her wounded boyfriend blasts its head off.

This film basically ended director Eric Red's career, who would later go on to kill a couple of people with his car before transitioning to a career as a writer. The most famous actor is the child, who would shortly after play the child Dirk Calloway in Rushmore. The uncle is the cop from Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich.

We meet a nice suburban family and their friendly german shepherd Thor. It has one of those piano- and woodwind-heavy dreamy and overly dramatic 90s scores. A whole symphony plays Thor to sleep in front of the fireplace. They get a call from Uncle Ted, the journalist who was slashed by wolves in Tibet, who invites them up to visit him in his trailer in the woods. He has a bunch of books about werewolves in his trailer. Thor is suspicious of Uncle Ted.

In those very same woods, a surveyor and/or lumberjack who works alone in the dark and misty nights gets chased around by an unseen snarling beast, and then a wolf bites him right through his construction helmet.

The cops come to investigate the woods, so Uncle Ted moves to the suburbs with his sister. Thor finds Uncle Ted, as a poorly-animated combination CGI and animatronic werewolf, though looking remarkably bear-like, handcuffed to a tree in the woods. The next morning, they watch The Werewolf of London (1935) on TV, which is an odd breakfast choice.

They take their sweet time playing up the Thor-doesn't-trust-Uncle-Ted bit. They stare at each other awkwardly for a minute or two between every event. Thor goes to check that the wolf is handcuffed to the tree, understands that the handcuffs laying on the forest floor mean he is not, and darts back to the house just in time to battle the massive wolf off of the lawn. Nobody in the family sees, so they don't know why Thor is bleeding.

The mom reads Uncle Ted's diary and finds his notes about devolving into lycanthropy. In it, he suggests that perhaps the "restorative power" of his family's love will cure it, after medical science has failed. It doesn't seem to be working. The mom doesn't bring it up or change her behavior towards him much, but she takes over Thor's role of staring at him suspiciously for long periods of time.

Thor breaks the truce and bites the hell out of Uncle Ted's arm. They basically setup in the first scene that Thor is going to defend them from werewolves, and now they have to wait an hour before they can show it. In between, it's just the same few conversations and confrontations repeated over and over again. The great big drama is animal control coming to take Thor away while Uncle Ted waves victoriously.

The kid runs down to the pound to break his doggy out of lockup. The mom follows Uncle Ted into the forest to watch him lock himself to a tree. He soliloquies at her instead of locking himself up, and keeps going while he slowly transitions into both a wolf and an asshole.

I think it's the first werewolf movie where somebody throws an entire grandfather clock on the wolf's head, but it doesn't work. Thor runs all the way across town and gets there just in time. Somehow eight revolver rounds to the chest don't stop him but a tumble out of a second story window does.

Thor tracks him night and day through the woods, finds him in terribly wounded human form (what happened to those bullets?), and puts him down. The state drops all charges against Thor for some reason.