Universal futzed around with rebooting its classic werewolf horror franchise “Wolf Man” for years, and delayed releasing the latest finished film as well.

Perhaps they were hoping more time would pass and we’d all forget the many other incarnations of the man-becomes-werewolf trope. Fat chance.

We all remember how this goes, right? People find themselves in werewolf country. Somebody gets bitten. That somebody wants to bite, too.

“Saw” veteran Leigh Whannell’s “original” take on this hairy, hoary and downright moldy horror staple fails to reinvent, reboot or truly re-launch anything. Pretty sure we’ve seen the werewolf as monster-villain and werewolf as “hero” twist before.

Folding in a Native American tradition of a “hills fever” that turns one into “Face of the Wolf” introduces little that’s interesting and nothing that’s important.

The Pacific Northwest setting, where a widowed father (Sam Jaeger) lectures his young son (Zac Chandler) on the ways of the woods, and the dangers, culminating with son Blake (Christopher Abbott) returning to those woods decades later with his journalist wife (Julia Garner) and wee daughter (Matilda Firth) doesn’t alter the inevitability of it all.

“My job as Dad,” Blake tells the kid he named Ginger,” “is to keep you safe.”

Ginger’s job? “To read your mind,” to anticipate Dad’s directions for keeping her safe.

There’s your foreshadowing.

Put a troubled marriage in peril the minute the arrive in the woods of Oregon, briskly toss them into an over-the-top accident with a moving truck as they trek north to clean out Blake’s “finally declared dead” Dad’s off-the-grid farm. Have Blake slashed by the claws of the not-quite-seen “beast,” with wife Charlotte (Garner of TV’s “Ozark” and “The Assistant”) forced to cope with his injuries, his “transformation” and the threat still growling outside threat.

Try not to guess all that happens, because rare RARE mild jolts aside, this picture’s as clockwork as my Citizen watch.

Garner gives us a taste of what facing the shock of “This can’t be REAL” looks like. The child actress never gets across the requisite terror of their peril.

And Abbott, of “It Comes at night?” He’s just another guy in (CGI) hairs arms and furry face trying to maintain his humanity, his loyalty to his family in the face of attack from his “new” pack/species.

Suffice it to say that Whannell and horror producers Blumhouse are more at home with ghostly, “Insidious” horror, and tactile threats from Jigsaw than with this underwhelming, predictable, everything-but-vampires homage to Universal Studios’ horror legacy.

Rating: R, gory violence, profanity

Cast: Julia Garner, Christopher Abbott, Sam Jaeger, Matilda Firth and Ben Prendergast

Credits: Directed by Leigh Whannell, scripted by Leigh Whannell and A Universal release.

Running time: 1:43