A disagreement about the level of blood and gore in Skinwalkers was one of the things that kept the Ontario-made werewolf picture on the shelf eight months longer than expected, say producers. There was also trouble mounting an expected spring release and, more recently, the unappealing prospect of opening amid the buzz of The Simpsons Movie.

The film, about a 12-year-old boy caught between two groups of warring werewolves, comes out Friday but was originally due in December 2006. It was then pushed back to March, July and then August.

Producer Don Carmody (Silent Hill) tells Playback Daily that the film was delayed at first because its American distributors — Freestyle Releasing for theatrical, and Lionsgate for home entertainment — wanted it to be rated R. Freestyle is the distribution arm of After Dark Films.

‘Lionsgate and After Dark had been distributing pretty hard Rs, including Saw and Hostel… they felt that we should try to punch Skinwalkers up, and add some new scenes with harder elements,’ Carmody explains. ‘While we didn’t agree, we re-shot and added some scenes.’

He says when the producers and distributors tested the R version with a core audience of fanboys, they realized Skinwalkers worked better as a PG-13.

‘We were never going to be a Hostel or a Saw, because the picture wasn’t designed that way, and we were just going to alienate our audience,’ he says.

‘It’s not a standard horror,’ agrees co-producer Dennis Berardi of Toronto-based FX shop Mr. X, which handled all the CG effects and animation for the film. ‘We’re a bit of a retro movie in the classic sense of the older horror films like [John Carpenter’s] The Thing.’

Skinwalkers is rated a PG-13 by the MPAA and carries the similar 14A rating in Ontario. It was further delayed as distributors deliberated over a suitable release date.

Carmody says After Dark’s promo campaign wasn’t ready in time for March, and that the film wasn’t generating enough buzz ahead of its re-scheduled July 27 release because of the hot summer box office.

‘The summer has been very odd… all the major tentpoles have been holding like mad. The Simpsons was so powerful that nothing opening opposite it was tracking,’ he says, adding the makers are happier with the Aug. 10 date, though they got fewer screens.

‘We’re not in great theatres… I’m not downtown in Toronto, which makes me crazy,’ Carmody says.

Skinwalkers opens on 40 screens across the country via Maple Pictures and on nearly 800 in the U.S. through Freestyle. It arrives opposite major U.S. releases including the action comedy Rush Hour 3, from New Line Cinema and handled here by Alliance Atlantis, and the fantasy Stardust, from Paramount Pictures

Other releases include Camelia Frieberg’s drama A Stone’s Throw, which bows on one screen in Toronto, before expanding to Halifax next week and Vancouver on Aug. 24.

Christal Films is opening Molière at the arthouse Cumberland theater in Toronto, and will move the French import to Vancouver on the 24th. The comedy, set in Paris in 1658, played for 13 weeks in Quebec after it opened on April 13.

Also on screens are the romantic drama 2 Days in Paris, distributed in Canada by Seville Pictures, and the Cuba Gooding Jr. comedy Daddy Day Camp, from Sony Pictures.