‘The Wolf of Snow Hollow’ is an enjoyably blithe horror-comedy hybrid for Jim Cummings’ trifecta of headliner, writer and director and beyond that, it is a bittersweet epitaph for Robert Forster whose gravitas stratify this lycanthrope tale to snowbound film noir on the wavelength of Coen Brothers (“You feel like you’re having a heart attack? Right now?” “Nah, since August.”).

For connoisseurs of the werewolf subgenre, the litmus test is the tenable efficacy of the transmogrification effects and the creature itself. In that respect, the lupine menace is a wooly, bipedal victory for suitimation. Unfortunately, its appearances are unconscionably scant.

With pulchritudinous shots of the full moon, Cummings engraves a brooding aura before the slice-and-dice escapades. Cummings is naturalistically deadpan and occasionally splenetic as Officer John Marshall. His quarrelsome behavior at a forensic crime scene is an example of his folksy sensibility.

The quixotical murder-in-a-small-town singularity is a mainstay of the Coens since ‘Blood Simple’ and Cummings is at the tangential in-jokes of the ski-resort municipality. Surprisingly, all the victims’ peripheral backstories are juicy such as a politically correct couple on the precipice of a betrothal and a jilted slopes instructor.

Although he is mostly ambidextrous, Cummings doesn’t always titrate the recipe between yuk-yuks and teeth-chattering terror precisely such as a postmortem interview with survivor PJ Palfrey (Jimmy Tatro), but, at a lean 83 minutes, the asymmetry is hardly an impediment.

In a direct address to the camera, Fred Williamson vehemently rallies against the crimes within the community and how the “books don’t balance”. Without the context of Nick (Williamson) as a gun-range instructor, his words are wildly sensationalistic and inflammatory for a classroom environment.

Via a fascist advocacy for street justice, William Lustig’s gossamer, plodding Vigilante doesn’t pave its road towards anti-recidivism amorality with the most subtle of brushstrokes. But, in the spirit of grindhouse cinema, sometimes the reptilian jollity of Williamson championing illicit brute force is the tonic from more highbrow fare.

Ostensibly Nick and his ilk are charter members of a capital-punishment group who perambulate around the alleys in search of goons and hooligans. They’re a grungy version of The Star Chamber pollinated with a less bureaucratic A-Team. As for the Puerto Rican gang who violate Eddie Marino’s (Robert Forster) wife and son, they are the stereotypically cartoonish, assortment who blare Latin music on their car stereo and expectorate on gringos.

Why the cumbersome cutaways to television screen’s destruction in the midst of a home invasion? Somehow, Lustig bumbles through the prerequisites of this tasteless scene with a reprehensibly manipulative child death and the overwrought acting by Rutanya Alda (who quickly outpaces the marauders into the backyard instead of garrisoning her toddler who is whistling in the tub upstairs).

As stoic as Forster usually was, he is practically somnambulistic through the motions here. When he asseverates to the district attorney that he “wants this guy to pay for what he did to [his] family”, he can barely muster a churlish tone. The courtroom scene in particular is untenable (22 prior arrests has “no bearing on present allegations” according to the myopically dunderheaded judge). Forster’s other retribution flick Walking the Edge was a much more vividly umbrageous picture and not as insulting to the audience’s intelligence.