Well, this series went downhill fast. Seriously, there's no way I can come up with anything to say that will hide my opinions of Howling IV: The Original Nightmare until further down the review - this one is bad. I don't think I've seen a Part 4 of a franchise quite so bad since Hellraiser: Bloodline, and that at least got somewhat redeemed when I looked into it and found all the stuff that got cut out. Explaining this to a friend just now, he responded, "Please tell me you were at least compensated with nice breasts to ogle," and even there the movie's one topless scene was shot badly. I can't even give it credit for that. If a B-movie fails at even that basic task, you might as well take it around the back of the barn and shoot it.
Marie Adams is an author who's recently started having visions, including of a nun and of a wolf lunging at her from a fire. Diagnosed as having had a mental breakdown due to her "overactive imagination", Marie and her husband Richard take a holiday away from the city, staying in a woodland cabin just outside the country town of Drago (not home to the dreaded Ogards, despite what we might have learned from other films). Marie at first thinks the cabin and location to be perfect; however, she soon starts hearing strange howling at night and her visions of nuns and wolves continue. Her dog disappears and she later finds its decapitated head, and of course, all the locals act a little strange - particularly Eleanor, who owns an antiques and craft shop and starts coming on strong to Richard almost immediately. Marie also meets a woman called Janice, who used to be a nun and is investigating the area to try to find out what happened to her friend, sister Ruth, who was found wandering the area a year ago, muttering incoherently about bells, the Devil and the phrase "We're all in fear". Marie and Janice join forces to investigate and find out what is happening in Drago and what happened to Sister Ruth, but is all of this just in Marie's mind?
Howling IV: The Original Nightmare was a direct-to-video movie. However, its quality is such that it looks and feels more like a made-for-TV movie. The budget was so low, in fact, that the film had to be shot without sound, and have all the audio dubbed in afterwards in post - and even then it seems they couldn't afford proper sound effects as I'm willing to swear Marie's dog was dubbed by a man going, "Woof!" There's a grand total of two decent special effects in the movie, and both of them involve werewolf transformations. What I think happened was that someone had the idea for these transformation scenes (which are admittedly pretty good, especially considering the quality of the rest of the film), went all-out filming them first... and then realised that those two scenes had cleared out the budget and so had to make do with whatever else they could desperately scrounge up. Even the other werewolves, when we see them at the film's climax, look like they've fallen out of I Was a Teenage Werewolf or are suffering from a bad case of Sideburnsitis.
Howling IV is also the last film in the series to have anything to do with author Gary Brandner's trilogy of books, and even then the connections had been stretched very thin indeed over the previous films. In fact, Howling IV actually sticks the closest to the plot of the first book, with a married couple heading into the country to help the wife recover from trauma/mental breakdown and finding a community of werewolves - but it's still pretty clear that this might as well just be a retread of the first film, right down to the "town vamp dressed in black seduces the husband, who gradually reaches peak asshole just as he also becomes a werewolf" subplot. Which leads me to another major problem I have with this movie - it might as well have "Gaslighting: The Movie" as an alternate title. Just about everyone bar Janice spends the movie telling Marie that she's just imagining everything, up to and including outright denial of evidence right in front of them. Richard is, of course, one of the worst for this, as he becomes more and more abusive to his wife as the film goes on, and Marie meekly takes it because "overactive imagination lol". "I heard howling last night." "Oh, it was probably just owls." "But-" "Owls!"
For most of the film, nothing happens. All the gore and effects and "scares" happen in the final fifteen minutes or so, which leave us with 75 minutes of film where Marie and Janice go investigating in scenes not even as suspenseful as an episode of Scooby-Doo. And even our protagonist Marie is an uninspiring one, being that she spends most of the film doubting her sanity and going along with what others tell her, and then under-reacting incredibly to scenes like someone melting into a puddle of goo and then emerging as a werewolf while people stand around chanting "Satan" in a half-hearted sort of way.
It also has a jump-scare ending, as if it needed any further condemnation.
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