Considering Charles Band named his production company Full Moon, it’s curious that he has largely shied away from making werewolf movies. One of the few exceptions (along with 1990’s Meridian, which he directed himself) is 1998’s Werewolf Reborn!, produced as part of Full Moon’s abortive “Filmonsters!” series. Slated to appear alongside stories about Dracula and the Mummy, Werewolf Reborn! and Frankenstein Reborn! were the only two to make it across the finish line, and since they run about 45 minutes each, Band cut his losses and packaged them together as Frankenstein & the Werewolf Reborn! We are only concerned with the latter rebirth, though.
Werewolf Reborn! has an evocative opening, culminating in a backlit wolf man howling at the moon, but it gets bogged down in the travails of a teenage girl sent to a backwards town in Eastern Europe (the country isn’t specified, but the film was short in Romania) to stay with her uncle while her parents are tied up with diplomatic duties in Geneva. Put out when she isn’t met at the train station, Eleanore (Ashley Tesoro) gets a frosty reception from the clerk and, given no other options, has to walk five miles to her uncle’s crumbling mansion, outside of which she is accosted by a gypsy boy and his grandmother, who give her a message for her uncle. Uncle Peter (Robin Downes, who gets the “introducing” credit) immediately tries to send her away, but opts for locking her in her room while he waits for the full moon to rise and the change to come over him.
The resourceful Eleanore takes the door off its hinges so she can snoop around and read the note from the gypsies (which is naturally in rhyme), but misses her uncle as he’s out in the woods being hunted by the villagers, one of whom falls prey to his blood lust, and one of whom shoots him. The next morning, when he limps home, Eleanore is stunned by his fast-healing wounds and listens to his story of the time he was bitten three months earlier by what the gypsies call “the wolf that walks like a man.” Overheard by the official Inspector Krol (Len Lesser, by far the most experienced actor in the cast), Peter is arrested and locked up, but his pleas fall on deaf ears. “Bars will hold you, bullets will kill you, and the rope with hang you,” Krol boasts, but we know better.
To make a long story short — or a short story even shorter — Eleanore is given a gun loaded with silver bullets by the gypsies and Peter breaks out of jail when night falls, shrugging off the ordinary bullets Krol and his men pelt him with. When he confronts his niece at the mansion, Tesoro does some of the worst “scared” acting I’ve ever seen, and Eleanore eventually shoots her uncle, who undergoes a bad morphing effect to return to human form in time to deliver his parting words. “This was my destiny,” he says. “To be a figure of wonder and terror, and to die. Do not cry. Do not be said for me.” No one is.
