Carnography

It (1990)

Since I so recently reviewed the new version, I should really be efficient and do the 1990 TV version now. So here we are with the "original" movie version of Stephen King's IT; the one that launched a generation's coultrophobia (although personally it was the bleeding photograph that did it for me).

Derry, Maine; 1990. Children in the town are disappearing, and what's worse only some of them are being found; or rather, only parts of them are being found. The town librarian, Mike Hanlon, knows what is going on but cannot get the police chief to believe him. Instead, he calls his six childhood friends - all now highly successful adults living across the USA and even in Britain - and reminds them of a promise they all made as children. Back in 1960 the seven of them faced down the shape-changing, child-killing monster that was preying on their town and defeated It, and then they all made a promise together that, if It ever returned to Derry, they would also return and finish the job that they started. But will they even have the strength as adults to repeat what they did as children - especially when they can barely remember what happened back in 1960?

This version of IT was of course the first to come out (not counting the book, of course) and so there has been a lot of talk and debate over whether this version or the 2017 version is the better/scarier option. Personally I think this is an unfair comparison as so many of us grew up with the terror of the 1990 version, but looking back on it now requires some nostalgia goggles. After all, what scared you as a child in film, TV or otherwise is unlikely to still scare you as an adult. Yes, IT scared me when I was a pre-teen, but so did Zelda from Terrahawks, the Kandy Man from Doctor Who and The Nothing from The NeverEnding Story (although to be fair, that last one might still scare me. Existential nilhilism...)

No, the biggest reason the 1990 version of IT is still held in such high regard by so many is because of one person: Tim Curry.

Tim Curry had the role of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, and to say his role was a memorable one would be something of an understatement - why all those clowns didn't step up to defend the good name of clowns in 1990 is a mystery, especially when Curry's version of Pennywise has (until now, perhaps) been the iconic "evil clown" for 27 years now. Remember, this is the same Tim Curry who lost out on voicing the Joker on Batman: The Animated Series because his laugh was just too creepy for a kids' cartoon.

Of course, Tim Curry wasn't carrying the whole two-part TV movie on his back solo. The late Jonathan Brandis as young Bill Denborough, Seth Green as young Richie Tozier, and the late John Ritter as the adult Ben Hanscom - among others - all gave stellar performances, but somehow whenever this version of IT gets talked about it's nearly always about Pennywise and/or Tim Curry's performance.

Much like in the book version, there's a hint of Cthulhu or otherwise otherworldly entities in this version of IT, with the revelation of IT's true form and the concept of the "deadlights" as something that, if you look directly into/at them, they drive you completely insane. Of course, the deadlights have also been brought up in the 2017 version, but as that only deals with the events as children we're yet to see how things pan out there, while the 1990 version has everything contained within the two parts of the TV mini-series.

This 1990 version of IT, as I said, was originally made for TV in two parts that were later put together to make one three-hour movie, and it's here that the movie does fall down when you look at it critically. Stephen King's IT is a long book, and so trying to fit it all into three hours (plus ad breaks) is just not going to work. And they didn't even try to fit the whole book in - yet it still feels awkwardly paced - rushed in some places and too slow in others. That's the risk of the TV movie, of course. Looking back at it now, it's also incredibly dated, but that's not really a fair judgement to make on it considering it's cultural impact at the time. It was more than good enough for us in the early 1990s.

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The Howling: Reborn (2011)

At last, we have reached day eight and the final (for now) film in the Howling franchise - The Howling: Reborn. There's no Clive Turner attached to this film either, so we can at least breathe a sigh of relief knowing we're unlikely to see any line dancing, country and western songs, or talk of lycanthropy as "devil possession" combined with long scenes of people doing nothing very much at all.

Well, actually we might still get that last one still. You know what these films are like.

A pregnant woman, Kathryn Kidman, is attacked in her art studio and apparently killed by what I think we can all guess are werewolves at this point, but not before her unborn child starts to be born. Eighteen years later her son, Will, lives an unremarkable life with his father (other than his father having him take silver nitrate pills daily, which should technically have turned him blue-grey or purple by now). Will is about to graduate high school and is something of a sadsack of a student - unnoticed by most, pining after the girl he has a crush on, Eliana, and occasionally getting into fights with the school thugs and Eliana's jock boyfriend Roland, who at one point uses his class ring to try to cut Will's throat. Will's only friend appears to be wannabe filmmaker Sachin, who plans to hack the school's communication network to broadcast his horror film on graduation night. Suddenly though, Will's luck and life begin to change - Eliana suddenly takes an interest in him and invites him to an underground graduation party; he starts seeing better without his glasses, and he develops enhanced strength and healing abilities. Will is a werewolf, and his werewolf nature is finally coming to the surface, much to the delight of the werewolf pack who have been watching over him in school for some time, led by a mysterious woman named "Kay". Will is unwilling to join them in their plans to create a werewolf army across the globe to reveal themselves to the world and take their place at the top of the food chain, however, and he and Eliana find themselves trapped in the locked-down school and fighting to survive against the werewolves. Will they be able to survive and will Will be able to resist his more animalistic urges?

For the most part, The Howling: Reborn is a typical unremarkable teen werewolf movie - no swearing, no skin, very little as-it-happens gore and no on-screen werewolf transformations, and so I was finding the whole thing rather dull - up until the end credits. Interspersed through the credits are news clips telling of werewolf sightings and attacks across the globe, much as the pack in the movie were planning, and the retaliation against these attacks - essentially World War Werewolf. And that caught my attention. That sounded interesting. I think I'd like to see a movie about World War Werewolf - just so long as it wasn't a Howling sequel or the people who butchered World War Z were kept away from it.

I will say that, as a film, The Howling: Reborn is not a badly-made movie. It's competently shot, reasonably well-paced and cheerfully throws away the albatross of a backstory that the previous films might have lumbered it with straight out of the window. The film credits its story to the Howling II novel by Gary Brandner, but it tended to remind me more of the first movie, especially the idea of Will broadcasting himself turning into a werewolf to people and asking Eliana to kill him (this is not a spoiler, the film all but starts with this scene and then backtracks through the events that led up to this) - obvious parallels between Will and Karen White there, even if things go differently for them. It is, however, still a teen horror movie and victim to the cliches that teen horror movies tend to fall into instead. Will is said to be an "outcast" in high school, of course (in reality he's just unnoticed by most people); he's got a crush on the hot rebellious girl whose boyfriend is a violent jock (who brings a gun to school and gets away with it despite the high security because of plot reasons), and of course the whole underlying theme of the movie is growing up/graduating and finding out who you really are. Most of the movie's major revelations are telegraphed well in advance, while other plot points are completely ignored - did Will's father know about his werewolf nature or not? If not, why was he making him take silver nitrate daily? And what was the deal with the circular, almost Ouroboros-like tattoos that the members of the werewolf pack had on their wrists? Obviously, it's supposed to be some sort of pack tattoo, but we see people with it who don't seem to be werewolves, and despite camera angles sometimes pointing them out, nothing is ever said of them. And what the hell are they teaching in high school science classes now that teaches students how to build flamethrowers out of parts just lying about a lab?

Will's horror nerd friend Sachin was clearly only there to be the exposition fairy (teaching Will everything he needed to know about werewolves), and so once he's done that you know his remaining screen time is going to be limited, which I found disappointing. They never turn the horror nerd into a vampire or werewolf or other monsters, and I think that would be an interesting (and probably amusing) twist. There's also cases of Chekov's Discarded Handgun and Chekov's 2nd Place Debating Trophy for those of you counting, the latter of which even gets an amusing little quip when it comes up. But other than that, The Howling: Reborn is pretty anaemic and by-the-numbers, which makes it a rather dull affair but still miles better than some of the other films we've seen this week. And I still think World War Werewolf should be made into a separate movie.

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Howling VII: New Moon Rising (1995)

Clive Turner makes his return to the Howling franchise with Howling VII: New Moon Rising, writing, producing, directing (after wresting control from the original director Roger Nall), starring and editing. So I think it's safe to say that this film, even more than the others he left his mark on (4 and 5) is his cinematic baby. Unfortunately, I'm about to indulge in some baby-killing.

An Australian biker and drifter called Ted Smith arrives in the small town of Pioneer Town looking for work. and quickly gets a job working in the town's one bar, where he quickly becomes popular with the locals and his fellow employees and even starts a romance with the town widow. Ted has a secret, however - one that he wants to keep hidden from the townspeople, and anyone who confronts him or starts a fight with him soon turns up missing or dead, with reports of coyotes or mountain lions prowling the outskirts of the town... At the same time (I think) a detective investigating the killings meets up with a priest who is also a werewolf hunter. He helpfully recaps the events of Howling V: The Rebirth for us, and a little bit of Howling VI: The Freaks. Later on, Marie Adams from Howling IV: The Original Nightmare turns up as well to recap that movie for us as well. All of this talking and recapping is to hammer home the fact that there is a werewolf in Pioneer Town, and all bets are on Ted Smith. So, of course, it's not. Who is the actual werewolf, and will they be able to stop it before it kills any more people and/or leads to the cancellation of line dancing night at the bar?

Welcome to Howling: the Clipshow. Seriously, a good portion of this film is just a recap and clips from The Original Nightmare, The Rebirth and about a minute from The Freaks (merely to try to connect all the films together with the appearance of the surviving werewolf from The Rebirth, Marylou Summers). Apparently the original plan was to have the entire film made up of footage from the previous films and no new footage at all, which I'm pretty sure doesn't count as a film but a scrapbooking project, but in the end, they decided on having an original story wedged in there as well. Or they had a half-finished mystery story set in Pioneer Town that they hadn't come up with an ending for, and decided to splice the two films together and hope for the best. To say it doesn't come out well is an understatement.

Howling VII is pretty clearly a vanity project for Clive Turner if you hadn't already guessed that from his writing, editing, producing, directing and starring in it. He also really liked Pioneer Town, so he decided to set his movie there, and rather than hire actual actors, he just had the locals play themselves going about their everyday lives, with the occasional mystery/werewolf subplot thrown in to remind people they were watching a werewolf movie. On that note, if you're a fan of country and western and line dancing, then this is the film for you! Sadly it wasn't able to win me over as, apart from Johnny Cash, country and western has never been my thing. But there's a lot of it in the film, be it as the background music for montages, or being played and sang by the owners of the bar, who also have a C&W band (of course).

As I said, every now and then the film seems to remember that it's supposed to be a werewolf movie, and so we get some werewolf POV shots as it stalks victims, but said POV shots are just a camera with a red jelly over the lens. It looks like Predator-vision when he's not got his mask on or his contacts in. then at the very end of the film, when the true identity of the werewolf is revealed - it's supposed to be a mystery for us but the astute/awake will probably have figured it out before this point) we get a brief shot of a bad mid-90s CGI transformation and someone in a Yeti suit runs about for a few seconds before being shot. Then we've got just enough time for another C&W number before the credits.

Howling VII also brings back that idea of lycanthropy being devil/demonic possession that is now quite clearly Clive Turner's pet idea, as it only appears in the films he's involved in. It also attempts to retcon a lot of things, including Howling IV allegedly happening after Howling V, and Ted Smith also being Ray Price from Howling V, who everyone thought died but actually didn't (no explanation as to why he changed his name and went from music star to drifter though). Also, Marylou the werewolf from Howling V arranged things with the town of Drago in Howling IV, werewolves have mind control abilities and can jump into other people's bodies, but need three years to reach their full power and can make other people werewolves. Suddenly vampires able to turn people into werewolves in Howling VI seems perfectly reasonable.

A few days ago I said that Howling IV: The Original Nightmare was the nadir of the Howling franchise. I now think I spoke a little too rashly, because holy crap, I don't even think this qualifies as horror, except maybe if it was to haunt film students with threats of being the films they end up making if they don't study hard. If there's ever a crossover with the Howling franchise as it is at this point and the Hellraiser franchise as it was after its last film, I think it might cause the apocalypse to start. Pray no-one ever has that idea.

 

(Note: I literally could not find a trailer for this film, so this is the best you're getting. Even YouTube, which has a trailer for The Nostril Picker, doesn't seem to want to have much to do with this film.)

Howling VI: The Freaks (1991)

Howling VI: The Freaks was actually the very first Howling film I saw, way back in the mid-90s. I recorded it off late-night TV one night and watched it with a mixture of awe and bewilderment. Having never seen any of the other films in the series at this point, all I could think was, "Are all the other films like this?" Alas, as we've already seen and we're going to see today, this was not to be the case, but let's be honest, while many B-movies aspire to the top level of spectacular confusion, very few actually make it to the top, and for good reason. Howling VI is one of those special few, by reason of being utterly round the twist.

A drifter, a British man named Ian Richards, arrives in the small town of Canton Bluff - a farming town in the middle of a drought. He takes a job helping the town preacher restore his wooden church in return for room and board, and becomes friends with both him and his daughter Elizabeth. At the same time, a travelling circus comes to town, led by the mysterious (and also British) Harker. The circus also has a freak show, with such exhibits as a three-armed dwarf, a hermaphrodite who is male down one half of their body and female down the other half, a half-geek, half-bokor called Bellamey, and their newest attraction, Winston the Alligator Boy, who is slow-witted and bullied and tortured by the other freaks. Ian is hiding a secret, however - he is a werewolf - and when Harker finds this out he kidnaps Ian and forces him to be part of the freak show as well. When he finds he can't control Ian, Harker then sets him up as having murdered several of the townsfolk, when in reality it was Harker who had killed them, as Harker is, in fact, a vampire. In the end, a posse is formed to take down the monster (either/or at one point) and it comes down to a fight between werewolf and vampire - but who will win?

...I had forgotten in the 20-odd years since I last saw this movie that a cat gets killed in it. It doesn't happen on screen, but it still happens and is an upsetting scene (as it is obviously meant to be). The fact that the character who commits this act has already been shown to be a pretty nasty and irredeemable character doesn't improve matters in my eyes either - Carnography's Rule of Animal Deaths in Horror states that the death of an animal in a horror movie needs to be for some reason other than, "To show how unpleasant [x character] is", otherwise it's a cheap death. So when watching this film, be forewarned if you're sensitive to animal death.

Other than that... Howling VI is an awesome B-movie, which is all the more surprising when you consider the last two sequels. There's a potential reason for that - Clive Turner, the writer/producer/director of the last three sequels in one way or another, was not involved in this chapter of the series. Now I'm not saying that he is the touch of death for these movies, but... He comes back for the next movie in the series, so let's wait until then to come to any conclusions, shall we? Regardless, there is one blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment of continuity between this movie and Howling V: The Rebirth, when one of the two surviving characters from the end of that movie turns up to see Harker's werewolf show at the circus. Nothing is made of this in the film and the character isn't even listed in the credits (and hell, I wouldn't have even known other than IMDB's trivia page telling me) but it is there.

The various characters in Howling VI are all either remarkably sympathetic or thoroughly unpleasant, rather than just being stereotypes created to merely fill a role. the town sheriff, for example, starts off as suspicious of Ian but comes round as he gets to know him, and does far more than your average small-town sheriff in these movies. Winston the Alligator Boy might seem a little too much like a slow-witted innocent, but his character is genuinely endearing. And as nasty as they are, Mr. Toones the three-armed dwarf and Carl/otta clearly have a romantic relationship where they both care about each other, which was a brave movie even if it is only briefly shown (although for some time afterwards, I was a little confused as to how exactly hermaphrodites "worked", so to speak). Also... yes, that is Huggy Bear as Bellamey and Bruce Payne as Harker.

Harker the vampire deserves his own paragraph as well. He dresses like a low-budget Lestat a full three years before Interview With the Vampire came out, and just in case that image wasn't confusing enough when he is in his vampire form his head is bald, purple and shiny. He looks like a Halloween balloon stuck to a random body - quite effectively inhuman, but a bizarre choice of appearance for him.

There are a few genuinely confusing moments in the film - how exactly does a vampire attack turn someone into a werewolf? That and the crystal (moonstone?) and spell Harker uses to force Ian to transform makes me suspect something got left on the cutting room floor - but after the previous Howling sequels, especially the last two - Howling VI is a breath of fresh air. The fact that it works perfectly well as a stand-alone film as well helps it to no end, as you can then show it to people without needing to inflict the previous films on them. And you should show people this film. It is gloriously cheesy and entertaining in a way that only the B-movies of the late 80s and early 90s could be.

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Howling V: The Rebirth (1989)

After yesterday's travesty that was Howling IV: The Original Nightmare, you'd be forgiven for either being leery of any further Howling sequels or for thinking that the series could only go up after that. Well, I can't say that you wouldn't be right to be cautious, but at the same time Howling V: The Rebirth is an improvement on part 4... but that's also like saying that the Great Fire of London was still an improvement on the Great Plague of London a year previously.

We start in 1489, in the fictional city of Budapest (because Budapest did not come into being until 1873), where a whole bunch of people in a castle have just massacred each other. 500 years later, that castle is being opened again for the first time since the massacre, and to celebrate this a group of wildly disparate people have been invited to be the first people to set foot in the castle after all this time (seriously, they all allegedly answered an ad in a newspaper). It isn't long after they arrive there, however, that people start going missing and getting killed, and a blizzard ensures that no-one can leave the castle until the morning at the earliest. As the body count rises, the survivors learn the truth - they are all descendants of the people who died 500 years previously, and one of them is a werewolf. They were all brought to the castle so that the werewolf could be uncovered and killed, but the werewolf has had other ideas and is killing everyone else off before they discover its true identity. Will the survivors be able to learn who the werewolf is and stop it before it's too late?

Welcome to Ten Little Indians: Werewolf Edition. Seriously, even the IMDB plot summary calls it that. Admittedly, it's actually kind of fun to try and guess who the werewolf is - is it the mysterious Count who brought them all here? The glamorous film star? The airhead actress? The professor? The doctor? The tennis pro? The recovering music star? The photographer? Or one of the others in the cast who weren't so easily labelled for identification? Actually, if you're relatively plot or genre-savvy you'll probably have figured it out or at least narrowed it down to one or two by about the halfway point, but I feel that the film deserves at least some credit for trying to keep the tension going with this plot point... especially since it's more or less the only tension we get in the film.

For example, I hope you weren't expecting to see an actual werewolf in this film. The best we get is one or two dark shots of a snarling werewolf muzzle, and a hairy arm grabbing someone about the neck at one point. That's it. No transformation scenes, no full-on shots of the werewolf. That shot of the werewolf on the poster? I don't remember seeing that, although that could be because the movie was just so dark. Either I saw a bad copy of the film, or someone forgot to pay the light bill just as filming started and they decided to go on with just candlelight instead of set lighting. Also, the werewolf had a strange tendency to attack its victims by bursting through walls (and at one point a snow bank) at them and grabbing them, as if someone had made the Kool-Aid Man into a werewolf (which is quite the mental image), so that we never once get a clear shot of it.

Howling V is also very drawn-out. Unlike Howling IV which felt like it was a particularly bad TV movie, Howling V could have been a halfway decent one... if they'd cut the running time down to about an hour. There's a lot of people wandering aimlessly through corridors and secret passages, and of people having drawn-out arguments over what to do, where it feels like each person, in turn, gets to have a say, followed by everyone else commenting on that, and then on to the next person. Did some of the script get sold to pay the light bill, or maybe burned to keep the fire going, and then they realised they still needed to make it to 96 minutes? Possibly the most egregious moment of this is when one character, thought to have been killed by the werewolf quite early on, is found barely clinging to life in the castle's secret tunnels. They stay alive just long enough to say, "Werewolf! It's-" and then leave this mortal plane, which gave me an incidental chuckle as it reminded me of that scene from The Naked Gun. So I guess the film at least made me laugh.

It's very difficult to find out any background or behind the scenes information on Howling V. IMDB and Wikipedia both only have the bare minimum of information on the film, to the point where it felt like the filmmakers might have been put into some kind of cinematic witness protection.  We know that the film was actually filmed on location in Hungary and that the producer Clive Turner (who also had a small role as one of the doomed guests) was also the producer, writer and/or director in Howling IV and some of the future Howling films. So I guess if nothing else, we know who to blame...

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Howling IV: The Original Nightmare (1988)

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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Howling III: The Marsupials (1987)

When I first told people that I would be covering the Howling franchise in July, everyone's reaction was the same. All of them asked, "Isn't there a film where the werewolves are Australian and/or marsupials?" And my response would always be, "Yes, that's Howling III: The Marsupials." So I guess this review is dedicated to all of you. You know who you are.

In the Australian outback, a young woman named Jeroba runs away to escape her abusive stepfather and makes her way to Sydney, where she is found by a young man named Donny who wants to cast her in the lead of a horror film he is working on. She accepts and the two of them start a relationship, despite some of Jeroba's stranger comments such as how the werewolves she sees in movies "don't transform like that". Jeroba is, in fact, a were-marsupial, complete with gestation pouch, which is soon to come in handy as it is discovered that she is pregnant after being triggered into a transformation at the movie's wrap party by strobing lights, flees and is hit by a car. At the same time as all of this, anthropologist Harry Beckmeyer is investigating the existence of werewolves, worried that werewolves are a dangerous worldwide phenomenon. He hears of Jeroba and wants to study her, but before he can three of her sisters, dressed as nuns, arrive in the city and kidnap Jeroba and take her back to their hometown of "Flow" (twinned with the American city of Nilbog, no doubt), killing anyone in their way. However, as luck would have it, there is another werewolf in Sydney - a Russian ballerina recently defected from the Soviet Union so she can search for the were she is allegedly fated to be mated to. This turns out to be Jeroba's stepfather Thylo, and as weres are captured and subjected to scientific tests, Beckmeyer starts to have second thoughts and helps Thylo and Olga escape. They meet with Jeroba (carrying her son in her pouch now) and Donny in the outback and together attempt to survive as the Army and others try to hunt them down and exterminate their species once and for all...

Well, you certainly can't blame people for remembering this movie over some of the others in the series, that's for sure. Were-marsupials, a woman carrying her fetal child in a pouch in her belly, and the shot of three were-marsupials dressed as nuns alone are going to be embossed on your memory after this film. Howling III: The Marsupials is a very strange film - quite slow-moving, washed-out in places and with many scenes that seem rather dream-like; it all dovetails into the Aboriginal spirituality it sometimes brings up to explain the origin of the were-marsupials, who claim to be descended from the spirit of a thylacine (a species of wolf who were allegedly hunted to extinction in the 1930s). That aspect and the inclusion of both white and Aboriginal natives in the pack (and the apparent ability of pack elders to call the spirit of their ancestor thylacine into them) is probably the most interesting part of the film for me, and I was slightly disappointed that there wasn't more of it in the film.

But as you can see from the synopsis above, they had quite a lot to cram into this 94 minute-long film, and so quite a lot of potentially interesting stuff had to be truncated for the final film. Even with everything that happens in the film, however, it still feels rather... slow. It's probably the least "horror" of all the films in the Howling series, or at the very least of the ones I've seen so far (it's also the only PG-13-rated film in the whole Howling series). There's even less blood and gore than in Howling II, and so the film puts most of its horror moments into the transformation sequences (and into the ideas of the extermination teams going after the weres, if you want to add in the horror of humanity's habit of killing off anything it's a little bit scared of or is a little bit strange). And the transformation sequences are good, don't get me wrong, but once you've gotten over the initial body horror of them they start to become a little repetitive. Making the werewolves/were-marsupials into sympathetic protagonists probably didn't help there either.

Howling III was directed by Phillipe Mora, who also directed Howling II: ...Your Sister is a Werewolf, and this time he managed to keep creative control over the film and so it is much more the horror-comedy he envisioned it to be (Mora had been unhappy with the way Howling II turned out after the producers had their way with it, particularly the 17 breast-baring spectacular that the credits became, to which I'd just like to point out that he was the one who said it was inspired by New Wave Eroticism and that he told the producers to go ahead with that credits sequence, stating, "If you're crazy enough to do that. Go ahead.") Some people might find the comedy hard to find in the film (possibly along with some of the horror), but I'd say that it's more surrealist than anything, with only the occasional toe dipped into more traditional comedy. Still, the film has to be given credit for trying new ideas with the concept of werewolves, diversifying the species in a way we didn't see again until White Wolf brought out their Werewolf: The Apocalypse RPG line and gave people to roleplay as just about a were-anything.

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Howling II: Stirba - Werewolf Bitch (1985)

The first sequel to The Howling took three-to-four years to come out, which I think is something of a record for all the franchises we've covered so far. Joe Dante was not brought back to direct, not least because Gary Brandner, who wrote the books upon which the first film was based and also worked on the screenplay for this film, did not like Dante and what he had done with the first film. Quite what he thought of Howling II: Stirba - Werewolf Bitch (also known as Howling II: ...Your Sister is a Werewolf) isn't recorded but I can't imagine this improved things any.

Picking up where the first movie ends, Howling II starts at the funeral of Karen White, the heroine of the first film who we saw transforming into a werewolf on live television before being shot dead with silver bullets at the end of the film. That death has been retconned considerably, however, and now that broadcast never went out and so the werewolf revelation remains secret. What's more, the silver bullets were removed from Karen's body during the post-mortem, allowing her to rise again as a werewolf. There to stop this from happening is the mysterious Stefan Crosscoe, who has been hunting werewolves for a long time. He tries to convince Karen's brother Ben* and her former work colleague Jenny about the existence of werewolves, but they are varying degrees of sceptical until they see Karen's transformation themselves, as well as the attempts of several werewolves to rescue her. Stefan then tells them of the existence of Stirba, the 10,000-year-old werewolf queen and how he plans to track her down and kill her. Ben and Jenny then join him on his quest, travelling to Transylvania where Stirba resides and is preparing for a ritual to mark her 10,000th birthday that will give power to werewolves all over the world...

Oh, Sir Christopher Lee, why? Well, actually, he gave his reason for taking the lead role in Howling II as simply having never been in a werewolf movie before. I suspect another factor in this was that Howling II was directed by Phillipe Mora, with whom Lee had worked with in 1983 on The Return of Captain Invincible (where Lee played the supervillain Mr Midnight and which, incidentally, everyone should see because it's a funny film, a good satire and Christopher Lee sings in it). As it was, Lee seems to have regretted his decision to star in Howling II quite quickly - apparently having quite the low opinion of his co-stars' acting ability and, when cast in Dante's Gremlins 2: The New Batch, one of the first things he did was apologise to Dante for having appeared in Howling II. Certainly there's a couple of points in the film where I think I spotted him looking at his co-stars and silently counting the number of ways he could kill them.

So, Howling II is a mess. Its key points of notability are the afore-mentioned Sir Christopher Lee and the fact that the credits repeats the shot where Stirba, played by Sybil Danning, bares her breasts no less than 17 times. Other than that, it's got made-up werewolf lore coming out of its ears - werewolves can only be killed by silver bullets or blades, except for some who are immune to silver and so can only be killed by titanium. But holy water, holy medals and garlic can also be used to protect oneself from them, and at one point holy oil is thrown on a werewolf who goes up like it was napalm. It's bewildering, to say the least. Stirba is also a witch as well as a werewolf, which gives the film a couple of opportunities to perform some strange spells which either result in some gory special effects or some very dodgy cell-drawn ones. Originally, the film was meant to be a horror-comedy, which makes the movies title and alternate titles make more sense, but while director Mora was in Australia shooting another movie, the studio recut the film to make it more of a straight horror with some comedy elements. The fact that Brandner, who had been brought in to write the script originally, eventually quit because of executive meddling and so was replaced by another writer who re-wrote most of it couldn't have helped matters much either.

One thing that this sequel does carry over from the original is the female sexuality and empowerment themes, although even then they're given a beating with the silly stick. Apparently, if you're a female werewolf you're duty bound to wear leather underwear - the kinkier, the better. Stirba is described by many reviews as "bi-curious" but I'd say there's very little of the "curious" about her, and there is one infamous scene where she takes part in a threeway with her lover Vlad and another female werewolf, Mariana, where the three of them writhe erotically on a bed in mid-transformation, yet unable to touch each other in case the glued-on wolf hair fell off. Mora said that the film was inspired by New Wave Eroticism and that's certainly clear throughout the film, complete with a New Wave Punk band providing the movie's signature (and repeated throughout the film, so you know they got their money's worth from it) track, "Howling".

In the end, Howling II could just as easily have been a stand-alone movie instead of a sequel; it bearing so little resemblance to the first film other than the opening scenes (they don't even bother to use the same footage of Karen's on-air transformation, instead managing to make her werewolf makeup look even sillier than her look in the previous film). Sir Christopher Lee gives a fine performance despite everything, but the best that can be said for the rest of the film is that it would probably be a good film to watch with friends while getting drunk and making fun of it. Oh, and the 17 shots of Sybil Danning's breasts in the credits.

 (* - For some reason I kept calling Ben "Mike" throughout this review. I don't know where the name "Mike" came from, but I think it says something about just how uninteresting the character was that I can't even keep his name right in my head...)

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The Howling (1981)

July has arrived and with it comes another franchise marathon. This time around I've decided to tackle the Howling series, both because I've tended to avoid the werewolf genre somewhat as I've never been all that taken by it (I've only ever seen four werewolf films before this that I've really enjoyed - An American Werewolf in London, Dog Soldiers, Ginger Snaps and Brotherhood of the Wolf - and one of those doesn't even have any actual werewolves in it), and because I didn't really feel ready to tackle the convoluted mess that is the Amityville series just yet. So let's start at the beginning, of course, with the 1981 film The Howling.

News Anchor Karen White is investigating the case of a Los Angeles serial killer known as "Eddie the Mangler". She's been communicating with him for some time and has agreed to meet him while also being part of an undercover police sting to capture him. Things go wrong, however, and she is nearly killed by Eddie in a porn theatre before he is shot dead by cops. After this, Karen and her husband Bill are invited to stay at a coastal community called the Colony so that Karen can recover from her trauma. Things and people are a little odd at the Colony, however; not the least of which is Marsha, another resident there who is said by the others to be a nymphomaniac and who wastes no time in coming on strong to Bill. Meanwhile Karen is hearing strange animal howls in the night, Bill starts to act stranger and stranger as he becomes more involved with the others at the Colony, and as two of Karen's fellow journalists investigate deeper into Eddie the Mangler, they uncover a disturbing supernatural background for him that could mean he is far from dead...

The Howling was released in the same year as that other classic werewolf (and 80s horror!) movie An American Werewolf in London, and it's interesting to compare the two. Aside from the obvious point of both featuring werewolves, both deal with the idea of an outsider coming to terms with the idea of werewolves and possibly being cursed with lycanthropy themselves and both have some spectacular special effects for the transformation from human to werewolf. It's also interesting to note that while An American Werewolf in London ends in a porn theatre, The Howling begins in one - a coincidence, I'm sure, but an interesting one; werewolves being linked to unbound and even deviant sexuality, both in cultural folklore over the centuries and more explicitly in The Howling (Marsha's "nymphomania" and Eddie's obvious interest/fetish in rape). The sexuality on display in The Howling is also considerably darker than in An American Werewolf in London; perhaps it could be seen that the former film is picking up where the latter ended and kicking things up a notch or two - but that would have to have been a conscious decision on the part of director Joe Dante and as I said, I don't think that's the case here.

Joe Dante is a favourite director of mine, having directed two of my favourite horror-comedies - The 'Burbs and Gremlins 2: The New Batch, and while The Howling isn't a horror-comedy here, it does have one or two moments - the recurring motif of certain characters eating from cans of "Wolf" chili being one of them. Another is the character of Walter Paisley, played by long-time Dante collaborator and B-movie stalwart Dick Miller, who is the owner of the occult bookstore that we get a lot of the werewolf exposition from. For the most part, though, the movie is played as straight horror, which is good as I think adding humour, however black, to this film would have run the risk of diluting the horror of it and leaving it open to accusations of being an inferior An American Werewolf in London.

There's a lot of sexual politics in The Howling as well. Eddie the Mangler's deviant and obviously predatory sexuality throughout is clear, but there's also the idea of the wolves being more sexually open and free to do what they want in general. There's also an interesting comparison between Karen, the pretty blonde reporter whose job and trauma seem to have inadvertently emasculated her husband, and Marsha, the dark, mysterious and very sexually aggressive woman who sets about seducing Bill by being everything that Karen is not. Once she seduces him, Bill's whole personality changes; he becomes aggressive towards Karen and starts devouring meat when before he had been a vegetarian - a slightly ham-handed (hah!) metaphor for the freedom that lycanthropy brings, but an effective one nonetheless.

The special effects are a bit of a mixed bag. While some scenes are spectacular, particularly the scene in which we finally see Eddie's full transformation (that demonic lupine grin will haunt me for some time), other scenes are a bit too obviously claymation or badly drawn cell animation. And the final transformation at the end of the movie looks less like a werewolf and more like one of Chewbacca's family from the Star Wars Holiday Special. Robert Picardo, who played Eddie, had to spend up to six-and-a-half hours in the makeup chair for some of those scenes, and at one point complained that his first acting role in California was "[his]face get[ting] melted in a low-budget horror movie.". Personally, I'm more amused to see him in a role where he has hair, as today he's probably more known as the Doctor in Star Trek: Voyager. Interestingly, there's also surprisingly little blood throughout, especially if we go back to comparing it with An American Werewolf in London - the emphasis is more on the creeping, psychological horror of it all.

As a werewolf film and a product of the 80s horror movie boom, The Howling is an important, if sometimes overlooked, film. It takes things in a different direction to certain other werewolf films of the same time - a direction which it can't really be said it managed to maintain throughout its sequels...

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An American Werewolf in London (1981)

The first time I saw An American Werewolf in London was at my 14th birthday/slumber party. A friend had brought the video for us all to watch, but unfortunately when we got to the nightmare with the Nazi zombies I got rather freaked out and ended up being sick in the kitchen. Not exactly my finest hour (in my defense, I had a rather strange phobia of people getting their throats slit at the time, and was under a lot of stress from other sources as well). Thankfully I'm over all that now (at least I'd hope I'd be after 22 years) and so I can properly appreciate the entire movie as it was meant to be appreciated.

Two Americans, David and Jack, are touring Europe and have hit the England portion of their tour. Arriving on the Yorkshire Moors, they briefly visit a pub called The Slaughtered Lamb where the locals are only slightly stranger than usual for isolated British village pubs (trust me on this), before setting off again to get attacked by a werewolf when they get lost on the Moors. Jack is killed but David is only injured before the locals arrive to kill the werewolf, and so David is taken to hospital in London to recover. It's there that he learns from his undead friend Jack (that only he can see) that he has inherited the curse of the werewolf and will become one on the next full moon, unless he kills himself. Has David just snapped as a result of the attack and death of his friend, or has he really become a werewolf?

Director John Landis apparently got the idea for An American Werewolf in London all the way back in 1970 while working on another movie on location in Yugoslavia, when he came across a Roma funeral - the deceased was being buried feet-first and wrapped in garlic to stop him from rising from the dead. It took him nearly a whole decade before he had the funds to actually make the movie, but I think we can all agree that it was all worth the wait. One of the main reasons for this is the Oscar-winning work of special makeup effects maestro Rick Baker, whose work on the werewolf transformation scene has become a benchmark against which all other werewolf transformations now get measured (his work on the undead Jack and later on the other werewolf victims is also spectacular, of course).

Another reason why An American Werewolf in London is so beloved and has stood the test of time (and the fickleness of horror fans) is its humour. It took a long time for Landis to get the funding for the film because many financiers thought that the film would be too funny and not horrific enough to be a 'proper' horror film - producers even wanted him to cast Dan Akyroyd and John Belushi as David and Jack. Now I love The Blues Brothers as much as the next person with taste, but I think we can all say that the film wouldn't have been anywhere near as good if that had been the way the casting went. However, the humour that is there makes the characters in the film seem much more sympathetic - including the various victims of the werewolf, some of whom helpfully suggest ways to commit suicide as David hides in a porn theatre in Soho, despairing of his situation.

(Amusingly, many of the audience when the film came out also believed, because of John Landis' previous work on films like National Lampoon's Animal House, that the film would be an outright comedy, and a great many of them ended up fleeing the cinema is horror when they actually saw all the blood and gore on screen. I like to think that a lot of them were broken by the Nazi zombie nightmare just like me.)

Now I will freely admit that, out of all the classic horror movie monsters, werewolves tend to be the ones that impress me the least, but An American Werewolf in London is one of the few exceptions to that. I think it's because it focuses less on the mythology of werewolves or the whole "humans have deep-down animalistic tendencies and werewolves are the psychological release of these subconscious desires" theme that often comes up in werewolf films, and is much more about the horror of becoming a werewolf, especially when the protagonist is an everyman that the audience can identify with. And there's no actual villain, either, just people with varying degrees of bad luck. So I most definitely have to recommend An American Werewolf in London, if for no other reason than any werewolf movie that I actually enjoy has to be a good one.