In Name Only....

The Howling VI: Freaks    

     Really, I just wanted to phone this one in. 5 prior movies ranging from terrible to mediocre, hardly any of them cannon, F/X mostly cheap and dry....what was I supposed to feel? Fulfilled? Curiosity sated? Nope....just sleepy. How did this franchise survive this long? Sure, there's 2 more sequels, but who fucking cares?!? Just like the last 3, this is The Howling in name only.  Because of this, the franchise really has no identity and this is mostly why it fails. And this entry?....

    Let me just make this quick. British wanderer wanders into a small, dying town in USofA. He barters help for food/shelter, and a preacher abides and they fix up his church. Then some lame circus freak-show rolls into town and basically kidnaps our wandering Brit...because he's apparently a werewolf. Mean ol' Circus owner turns him into the main act and the show bombs. Then the local cop investigates and it's revealed that the circus owner is vampire? Right. So vampire kills the cop and mayor, and in turn,  werewolf boy turns him in to dust. The end.

     This is like one really long episode Friday The 13th: The Series. And there are parallels to that: boring, weak writing, has nothing to do with the original movie...sound familiar? 

 

     It's time to toss this one in the trash and get the better half of October rolling. I'm at the half way point and there's some cooler/dumber things on the way.

Saturday: 

If at first you don't succeed...

 ....just try 4 or 5 more times...

The Howling V: The Rebirth

     We start the film in ancient times because we are forced into thinking that we need deeper roots for a stupid series of werewolf movies. Some medieval jackasses slaughter a family and then add suicide to their homicide. All's fair, I guess. However, a baby starts crying as the impale themselves and they realize they failed. Fast forward to 1989, and a bunch of random wankers are invited to some castle. The guests include a tennis player, an actress, a bimbo, the Professor, a baker, a candlestick maker, and Dave.

     It takes about 27 minutes before the first body drops, but after that, it's pretty regular and becomes a typical cat & mouse stalking game. They were all brought to the castle because they're all decedents of the slaughtered...and I guess that family was wolf-people. It was all ruse by some secret order called The Martyrs to expose and kill the werewolf.  None of this really matters, however, because the werewolf wins and everyone is dreadfully boring. There's no cool actors, no great scenes...hell, the coolest kill was an accidental beheading....oh, that poor poor maid. This film was direct-to-video and it's a damn good thing. I can't imagine sitting in a theater watching all of these idiots walk around a badly lit castle while getting picked off one by one.

Friday: One more damn dog-people movie to go..

Do-over...

 The Howling IV, The Original Nightmare

     Let's call this a more faithful adaptation of the source material: books. Yes, those things with letters arranged in a formulaic manner that convey information provided you know how to decipher. The movies were based on a series of books, and this is basically a reboot. 

     Much like the first movie, our main protagonist heads to a remote town to dry out. Marie, one of our mains, is having visions of nuns and werewolves. Much of the story is the same, but there's several differences:

     There's no commune, just a half abandoned town

     There's no stalking serial killer

     Nobody is a TV anchor

     However, the biggest difference is this is WAY more boring than the first film. This boring-ass turd would be perfect for USA's Groovy Movies. You just sit there on a Saturday afternoon, watching this trash and napping half an hour in, only to wake up right at the climax and subsequent credit roll. Perfect timing!!!  I used to read a lot of horror novels when I was young. Only 1 of those books was a werewolf story. Turns out I like werewolf novels even less than werewolf movies. 

"SHUT UP!!!"

"...and this is what I think of your stupid book!!!"

Thursday: Nobody asks for the origin story of a turd....

When you just need a soft werewolf story....

 The Marsupials, The Howling III

Nothing in this movie look this good. NOTHING.

     Wow, where to start. This is a huge departure from the first 2 films. Jerboa is a poor country girl living in a family commune in a small Australian town called Flow (wolF). Her father is a incestual rapist and she's had enough so she runs away to Sydney. While in Sydney she meets a man that wants to put her in a movie...the surprising part, he DID in fact put her in a movie and it wasn't porn! At the film wrap party, camera flashes or strobing lights set off her transformation, so she runs away and is hit by a car. While in the hospital, we learn she's pregnant and has a bun in the oven...or rather a 'roo in the pouch. Turns out she's not really a canine, but a marsupial. But...wolves aren't marsupials so I have no idea what she is. They're all bipedal, live birth and nurture in a pouch, and wolf-out. So it's either Kangawolf or Wolfaroo. I'm going with Wolfaroo.

I skipped over this scene because it was just stupid. 

     In what appears at first to be unrelated, a ballerina senses a new mate and it turns out to be that bumpkin rapist dad of Jerboa's. Quickly she succumbs to the mating heat and wolfs-out during a ballet rehearsal. After some interrogation, her trail leads them to Flow and all the wolfaroo's are rounded up and examined while Jerboa and her new offspring and new baby-daddy wander the countryside while being hunted. This is where the film really slows down and examines semantics and fills in a lot of back story in relation to origin. Well, that's just fucking exciting. Jebus Hizzy Chrizzy, move on with it and do some damn wolfaroo stuff!

     Long story short, the hunting parties fail, rapist incest dad is killed by a bazooka, and the pack starts over in new land with a scientist hooking up with the wolfaroo ballerina. Does any of this constitute beastiality? Yes. Yes it does. In one of the longest epilogues I've ever witnessed, we learn that over a 20+ year period, the remaining wolfaroo's reintegrate into more society after being granted amnesty by, get this, the Pope! That's one hell of an endorsement. It's sort of a happily ever after ending till Jerboa wolfs-out at an awards ceremony.

This movie was dull, and slow moving. It was like 'werewolf-lite'. Feel free to skip it. I would rather have watched this instead:

Wednesday: Can we get back to bloody murders? Please?

So much hair....so gross....

 The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf

     At the start of the film, we catch up with Karen's corpse, recently suffering from a silver bullet infection. As with most funerals, family shows up. Her brother and close friend are in attendance and so is a werewolf hunter (wouldn't that make him a 'wherewolf' hunter?), played by an O.G. named Christopher Lee. Maybe you've heard of him? 

He blends in seamlessly in any situation.

     Anyhoo, he drops a bomb informing both of them that his sister was a werewolf, and being shot and killed on live TV was planned. Turns out she wasn't into the eating people and being hairy. After convincing them of his sisters newly acquired DNA, they pledge to help him hunt down every dog person they can. Now to me, that sounds like a murder spree! Quick, to the Balkins!!!

    Once in some sort of east European country, no doubt under a Soviet puppet government, we're introduced to the main baddie and newly re-incarnated Stirba. Played by Sybil Danning, she assumes control, starts barking orders and showing her boobs. She also has a 3-some, strictly for procreative purposes, I'm sure.

Since when do werewolves have hand-powers?

     What was to be murder spree turned into a rescue mission as one of the trio is kidnapped and held in a really cool catacomb cell, complete with walls made of skulls! In the end, Christopher Lee kills the werewolf lady while the two are embraced in...em...glowy stuff?

Too much glowy stuff for a proper werewolf movie

     Maybe not the best ending, but far from the worst. At least the theme was the same throughout the film. Oh and the money shot was the end credits: The faux punk band named Babel we're treated to at the beginning also ends the film accompanied by a montage of scenes we JUST saw and they put Sybil's boobs in every 3-5 seconds, over and over. That's a lot of boobs and I think I was being trolled. 

Tuesday: We're going down!...under......

Time for a marathon...

 The Howling 

     I've put this one off for years because I have to be honest....I don't really like werewolf movies. However, The Howling has a long list of entries and this is the year to hammer them out. If I can watch all of the Puppet Master movies, I can suffer through this....

     Poor Karen White is a news anchor with a problem: She has a stalker that also happens to be a serial killer. She confronts him in a police sting operation, but it went bad and the stalker is shot and killed (allegedly) . Actually, that's a good thing. Anyhoo, Karen instantly has amnesia and is sent to a mountain retreat to dry out with her husband. 

     The colony is filled with mostly rednecks and country folk and they all have their little eccentricities. But naturally, not all is as it seems. After a 'wolf' attack, Karen's husband becomes an werewolf and hooks up with the local  werewolf nymphomaniac for some dirty werewolf sexing. It's gross and oddly not doggie-style. Turns out, the entire colony is a refuge for werewolves. After realizing that her husband is doing dirty with someone else, things all start to fall apart and she calls her friend to come hang out. Little did she know this was a death sentence for her friend who is kill by, you guessed it, a werewolf. 

    As the climax starts creeping to it's peak, we find out that the stalker was a werewolf the whole time and is damn near invincible...even surviving acid to the face. However, the dead girls friend brought a gun with silver bullets and lays down the law. He also burns them alive in a barn. Not THAT invincible after all. As they bug out, she's bitten by another werewolf and I think we all know what that means.

    When Karen returns to her TV job, she is determined to alert the world of the existence of werewolves by wolfing out on live TV and then quickly shot by the very guy that helped her escape. I'm getting mixed signals from that guy....

Monday: More hairy dog people go woof....