Author: Craig J. Clark

Inspired by the twin successes of The Howling and An American Werewolf in London, the ’80s yielded a veritable bumper crop of werewolf-centric horror comedies, most of which chose to accentuate the comedy over the horror. Whether this tendency arose out of a misreading of what made those hit films resonate with audiences or the desire to keep budgets down by limiting the mayhem, the end result was the same: almost to a man (and, in one case, woman), they were effectively defanged.

That’s definitely the case with 1981’s Full Moon High, which was written, produced and directed by perpetual triple threat Larry Cohen, whose approach to comedy is scattershot at best. The story opens in 1959, when high school football star Adam Arkin is attacked by the cheesiest-looking werewolf imaginable while accompanying his super-patriotic father (Ed McMahon!) on a super-secret mission to communist Romania. Upon their return home, Arkin takes to attacking young women, but the most he does is nip them in the butt, inspiring the local paper to run the understated headline “Werewolf Annoys Community.” After transforming in front of McMahon, who freaks out and accidentally shoots himself, Arkin leaves town just before the big game, which his school loses in his absence. The film then leaps forward 21 years, at which point he returns home and, posing as his own son, hopes to fulfill his destiny.

Chock full of non sequiturs, one-liners and running gags (such as the pesky gypsy violinist who seems to follow Arkin everywhere), Full Moon High comes equipped with a supporting cast augmented by the likes of Kenneth Mars, Jim J. Bullock, Bob Saget, Pat Morita, and Alan Arkin (a.k.a. Adam’s father), who plays a famous abnormal psychologist who specializes in insult therapy. In the end, though, the film is a little too chaotic for its own good, but that’s pretty much par for the course for Cohen. Still, it does cause me to wonder whether the makers of Teen Wolf, which came along four years later, ever looked at Full Moon High and said, “Hey, we could make a movie like that, only not so schticky.”

In many ways, Teen Wolf‘s Scott Howard (played by Michael J. Fox, as if I needed to tell you that) is one of cinema’s most nonthreatening werewolves, so much so that the movie even spawned a Saturday morning cartoon. A wholly unremarkable small-town youth, Scott plays for his high school’s lousy basketball team, hangs out with his slacker friend Stiles, is mooned over by his best friend Boof, and works part-time at his father’s hardware store. Then he starts noticing some things — extra hair on his chest and hands, heightened senses of smell and hearing, pointy ears — that aren’t the sorts of changes that they talk about in health class. Everything becomes clear on the night of the full moon, though, when he undergoes a full transformation and discovers that his father is also a werewolf (just not of the teen variety).

Since Teen Wolf is primarily a comedy as opposed to a straight-up horror film (or even a send-up like Full Moon High), being a werewolf turns out to be a pretty sweet deal for Scott, especially once he demonstrates his prowess on the basketball court. All of a sudden, the hot blond he has the hots for is giving him the time of day, the drama teacher is writing a part into the school play just for him, and his coach has a winning team on his hands. His only problems are the vice principal who’s gunning for him for some unknown reason, a sporting and romantic rival who knows how to push his buttons, and his teammates who grow to resent his ball-hogging antics. Will Scott learn to control the wolf within in time to help his school win the state championship? Do I even need to answer that?

When the time came to make a sequel to Teen Wolf, Michael J. Fox was far too big a star to want to don the hair, fangs and claws a second time, so it was left up to his sitcom sister’s real-life brother Jason Bateman to take on the role of his college-bound cousin for 1987’s Teen Wolf Too. Of course, his casting may have also had something to do with the fact that the film was produced by Jason’s father Kent Bateman, who in all honesty should have held out for a better vehicle for his talented son’s feature debut. I’m not saying Teen Wolf is an unassailable classic or anything, but on the list of unnecessary sequels Teen Wolf Too has to rank somewhere near the bottom.

Believing the werewolf gene has skipped his generation, Bateman’s Todd Howard has landed at a second-tier college where he wants to study science to become a vet, but the imposing Dean of Men (John Astin) would rather he concentrate on boxing since he’s there on a sports scholarship due to the machinations of Scott’s old coach, who has graduated from high school basketball to college boxing. From there, the story follows the Teen Wolf template almost to the letter (there’s even a direct callback to the first film in the scene where Todd’s eyes go red and he uses a deep voice to intimidate an unbending registrar into changing his classes), even to the point of giving Todd a nerdy, Karen Allen-ish biology lab partner who’s hopelessly hung up on him. And like in the first film, Todd doesn’t know quite how to handle his new-found popularity after he becomes the wolf during his first boxing match and cleans his opponent’s clock. The post-fight celebration is something else entirely, though, with Todd singing “Do You Love Me?” and leading an embarrassing dance number. And his cousin Scott would have never consented to catching a Frisbee in the air, which is beyond degrading.

If Full Moon High and the Teen Wolf diptych tipped more toward the comedy end of the spectrum, then The Monster Squad (also from 1987) made up for them by not skimping on the horrific aspects of its story. Of course, instead of being centered on a sympathetic (and occasionally just plain pathetic) werewolf, it had the advantage of having five kinds of monsters to work with, led by a ruthless Count Dracula bent on world domination. Written by Shane Black and director Fred Dekker, The Monster Squad follows the titular quintet of grade-school Van Helsings as they take on not only Dracula, but also Frankenstein’s Monster, Wolfman, the Mummy and the Gill-Man in a bid to restore the balance of power.

A real treat for horror movie fans, The Monster Squad gave special effects wizard Stan Winston the opportunity to have a go at all of Universal’s iconic monsters. He does an especially good job on Frankenstein’s Monster (who’s played quite effectively by Tom Noonan), although I’m less impressed with his Wolfman since the poor guy’s completely unable to turn his head and his face is pretty immobile. And then, of course, there’s the Scary German Guy (played by veteran character actor Leonardo Cimino), who turns out not to be so scary after all. So I guess the moral of the story is don’t be afraid of the German guy who lives down the road because he just might be able to help you banish the bad guys to limbo where they belong. Also, Wolfman’s totally got nards.

Skipping over 1988’s Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf and Curse of the Queerwolf (something I recommend you do as well), the final werewolf comedy of the decade is 1989’s My Mom’s a Werewolf, which was directed by Michael Fischa (who apparently felt that he was under no obligation to make it a good one). As it opens, klutzy housewife Susan Blakely is feeling decidedly unappreciated, both by her schlubby hubby (a well-cast John Schuck) and her headstrong teenage daughter (Tina Caspary). Then, while out running errands one day, she meets charming pet shop owner John Saxon, a werewolf on the prowl for a mate who seduces her and, one bite on the toe later (shades of Adam Arkin’s butt-nipping), she’s on her way to becoming the wolf woman of his dreams. She also goes from being a strict vegetarian to eating raw meat and growing fangs, pointy ears and hair all over her body. (And she thought Saxon was a “furry little devil.”)

At first Caspary merely thinks her mother is having an affair, but when the truth comes out she turns to a gypsy fortune teller (played by Laugh-In‘s Ruth Buzzi) for help. Along the way there’s a lot of silly gags, forced physical comedy and cartoony sound effects, and more dog- and hair-related jokes than you can throw a stick at. These would be tolerable if they were even marginally funny, but alas, that is not the case. It may have taken a decade, but My Mom’s a Werewolf proved that the werewolf comedy had finally had its day and needed to be put down.

Unlike Universal, which had its writers concoct original stories for its werewolf films of the ’30s and ’40s, Hammer Studios used a literary source — namely Guy Endore’s sensationalistic 1933 novel The Werewolf of Paris — as the basis of its lone such effort, 1961’s The Curse of the Werewolf. Directed by Terence Fisher and scripted by producer Anthony Hinds (using the nom de plume John Elder), the film is a very loose adaptation of Endore’s book, as evidenced by the fact that the setting was moved from France to Spain in order to utilize a set that the studio had built for a film about the Spanish Inquisition that never got made due to censorship problems. Even so, within those limitations Fisher and Hinds managed to produce an engaging film that adhered to the spirit, if not always the letter, of Endore’s story.

They also gave Oliver Reed’s budding film career a boost by casting him as the title creature, the son of a mute servant girl (Yvonne Romain) who was raped by a mad beggar (Richard Wordsworth) who was imprisoned by an excessively cruel Marques (Anthony Dawson) and left to rot in his dungeon for several years. The whole set-up is a major change from the novel, but the boy’s dubious parentage — as well as the fact that he was born on Christmas Day, which is considered an ill omen — is not. That doesn’t come to pass, however, until after Romain has escaped from the Marques and been taken in by a nobleman (Clifford Evans) and nursed back to health by his servant (Hira Talfrey), who is the first to voice concern about her impending due date. She’s also the one who has to take care of the child after his mother dies in childbirth, which is only fair since his father died right after conceiving him.

The next part of the film pretty much comes straight out of Endore’s novel as the child, who has grown into a young boy (Justin Walters), begins changing into a wolf (which he believes is just bad dreams) after he gets his first taste of blood. Evans puts bars on his windows to prevent him from getting out at night and consults a priest whose knowledge of lycanthropy is pretty shaky, but the holy man’s diagnosis that what the boy needs is extra love to counteract his wolfish nature seems to do the trick until he grows up to be Reed and is ready to go out into the world. As befits a young man who needs to stay on the straight and narrow, he goes to work at a winery where he falls in love with the boss’s daughter (Catherine Feller), despite the fact that she’s already engaged to a priggish fop. Their relationship is further doomed when he abruptly resumes his beastly ways after being dragged by a co-worker to a house of ill repute for a night of debauchery. Sure enough, it isn’t long before he’s begging to be put out his misery, but first he has to have one last night on the town — literally.

Unsurprisingly, a great deal of the film goes by before we see Reed in his wolf form. (Then again, Reed himself doesn’t even show up until the film is half over, but he takes command of it once he does.) When we finally do get a look at it, though, it’s quite a stunner — unlike any other werewolf design I’ve ever seen. It’s a pity this film wasn’t a financial success for Hammer, but in a way I’m glad they didn’t drain the life out of the concept, as they did with their other, long-running monster series. This also left the door open for another British company — the short-lived Tyburn Film Productions — to take another stab at Endore’s novel 14 years later.

Not only does 1975’s Legend of the Werewolf have the feel of an old-school Hammer film (the period setting, decent production values on a limited budget, the emphasis on sex and blood), it was even made by a number of Hammer vets, from director Freddie Francis and screenwriter Anthony Hinds (again using his John Elder pseudonym) to star Peter Cushing and supporting player Michael Ripper (who also appeared in The Curse of the Werewolf). It’s no mere retread, though. Rather, Hinds used some of the story elements that hadn’t made it into his previous adaptation and even moved the setting back to Paris (which doesn’t prevent most of the cast from speaking in British accents, but there’s nothing unusual about that).

Cushing gets top billing, but he doesn’t appear until the story is well underway. Instead, the film opens with an orphaned baby being adopted by a pack of wolves and growing into a feral child who is taken in by professional swindler Hugh Griffith, who makes the wolf boy the star attraction in his decidedly low-rent traveling show. Eventually the boy grows up to be a strapping young lad (David Rintoul) who transforms into a hairy beast under the full moon one night and, after making his first kill, hightails it to the city whereupon he immediately lands a job as assistant to grubby, raspy-voiced zookeeper Ron Moody. He also promptly falls in love with prostitute Lynn Dalby, who tries to keep her profession a secret from him with predictable results. Meanwhile, forward-thinking police surgeon Cushing takes an interest when bodies start showing up at the morgue with their throats torn out and investigates the attacks on his own initiative, despite being warned off the case by inspector Stefan Gryff (one of the few actors who even attempts a French accent). As for Ripper, he’s one of Rintoul’s victims, who’s so unfortunate I don’t even think he gets to be discovered by the police.

Since Legend of the Werewolf predates The Howling and An American Werewolf in London by half a decade, its makeup and transformation effects aren’t groundbreaking in any way, but the werewolf does have a great look that holds up well even at the end of the film when the camera settles down and holds on him long enough for us to really study it. And speaking of the ending, this may very well be the first werewolf film on record where the fully transformed creature is still able to speak and be reasoned with. I know there are a number that have come out since where that is the case, but it’s nice to see a werewolf on film that isn’t entirely bestial, that hasn’t completely lost touch with its humanity.

It’s tantalizing to think about The Wolfman that might have been. Mark Romanek’s music videos are so distinctive that it’s pretty much a guarantee that his treatment of the material would have been, too. Just take a gander at “Closer” or “The Perfect Drug” by Nine Inch Nails, or Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” or even Michael & Janet Jackson’s “Scream” and you’ll see what I mean. The man knows his way around striking — and frequently disturbing — imagery.

Once slated to be his follow-up to the well-regarded One Hour Photo (which starred the hirsute Robin Williams — how is it possible that he never made a werewolf movie? Or did his nude scenes in The Fisher King render that redundant?), Romanek’s Wolfman was scuttled when the director reached an impasse with Universal over the budget. Which is ironic considering the way it swelled from $100 to $150 million thanks to all the reshoots and retooling the film underwent after it wound up in the hands of Joe Johnston, whose experience with special effects-driven films made him, if not ideal, at least a suitable replacement. (I don’t even want to contemplate what a Brett Ratner-helmed Wolfman would have looked like.)

Even with a steady hand at the tiller, Universal did little to inspire confidence when, barely a month into principal photography, The Wolfman‘s release date was bumped from February to April 2009. Not that much of a leap, really, but that wasn’t the first time it had been pushed back. After all, the film had originally been scheduled for a November 2008 release and, in fact, would get punted around the studio’s slate several more times before ultimately landing on Valentine’s Day weekend, 2010. This put it in direct competition with the romantic comedy Valentine’s Day, which may have seemed like shrewd counter-programming on paper, but wound up hobbling its commercial prospects (which, to be perfectly frank, weren’t helped by the critical pummeling the film received once it finally limped into theaters).

One thing that definitely didn’t help matters was the decision to cut out a sizable chunk of the first hour in order to get to Lawrence Talbot’s first transformation that much sooner. Not only did this destroy the flow of the story (and completely drop Max von Sydow’s cameo as the man who gives Talbot his silver wolf’s head cane), it also inspired the studio to scrap Danny Elfman’s already-recorded orchestral score and substitute an electronic one by Paul Haslinger, which he composed in the style of his work on the Underworld series. When that proved to be a bad fit they went back to Elfman’s music, but the job of reshaping it to fit the studio cut had to be left to others since Elfman had other commitments.

When I think of how The Wolfman turned out, I can’t help but wonder how it would have fared with critics and audiences if Universal had released Johnston’s cut to theaters instead of the version they allowed to be test-marketed to death. I know when I finally got to see the director’s cut months later on DVD, I thought it was such a marked improvement across the board that even some of the things that rankled me when I saw it in theaters — like all the CGI and quick cuts in the action sequences — didn’t bother me so much the third time around. (And yes, this does means I saw it twice on the big screen. I was lucky it hung around until the end of the month so I could see it at the next full moon.)

I won’t enumerate all of the differences between the two versions, but I did like the extension of the opening sequence and that we got to see Benicio Del Toro on stage briefly. (In the theatrical cut, we had to take it on faith that he was a renowned Shakespearean actor.) And Emily Blunt coming to see him at the theater was a much stronger choice than simply having her write him a letter telling him about his missing brother. There’s also more about his gypsy mother and the villagers’ superstitious nature and so forth. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no question that these cuts were harmful to the film. Sure, an hour of screen time elapses before del Toro wolfs out, but in the director’s cut the first half of the film no longer feels rushed and the second half doesn’t seem so lumpy and misshapen. Maybe if it had been left alone, the film would have done well enough at the box office to merit a direct sequel following Hugo Weaving’s Inspector Aberline as he comes to terms with his own lycanthropy problem (a prospect clearly set up in the film’s closing moments). As it is, we’re left with the reboot Universal supposedly has in the works. If only they’d gone to the trouble of getting the first film right, that wouldn’t have been necessary.

On December 12, 1941, a horror legend was born, and it couldn’t have come at a better time for Universal Studios, which had ruled the roost in the first half of the ’30s with such iconic monster movies as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy and The Invisible Man. It wasn’t until the success of 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein, though, that the studio caught the sequel bug, resulting in the production of Dracula’s Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Mummy’s Hand and The Invisible Man Returns — films that may have looked good in the ledger books, but lacked the spark of originality that a wholly new monster would create. Enter Curt Siodmak.

Along with his brother Robert, Curt Siodmak had been part of the mass exodus of talent from the German film industry during the ’30s, and the fact that they ultimately landed in Hollywood was no accident. Robert found steady work as a director, most notably on some of the signature noir films of the ’40s, but Curt primarily earned his keep as a screenwriter, getting his start in horror with 1940’s The Invisible Man Returns, which he tailored to Vincent Price’s talents, and a pair of films for Boris Karloff — Black Friday and The Ape. It was with The Wolf Man the following year, however, that he struck pay dirt, creating the iconic character of reluctant lycanthrope Larry Talbot and inventing much of the mythology that comes to mind when people think of werewolves today.

For the benefit of audiences who weren’t up on their werewolf lore (after all, Universal’s previous man-beast yarn, 1935’s Werewolf of London, had pointedly failed to become a hit), The Wolf Man helpfully opens with an encyclopedia entry on lycanthropy (or “werewolfism”) before establishing the “backwards” old-world locale where such superstitions are still whispered about in earnest. We’re then introduced to the unmistakably American Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr. in his defining role), the prodigal son and heir to Talbot Castle who has been away in America for 18 years and only returns after his older brother has been killed in a hunting accident. Chaney’s father (Claude Rains), a noted astronomer with a rigidly scientific mind, encourages him to get to know the people of the town, but the only one Chaney wants to make time with is antiques shop proprietress Evelyn Ankers, who just so happens to be engaged to Rains’s pipe-smoking gamekeeper (Patric Knowles). That, however, doesn’t prevent Chaney from pressing his suit and taking Ankers to visit the gypsies who have rolled into town to tell people’s fortunes.

At the gypsy camp they meet Bela (Bela Lugosi), the afflicted son of old gypsy woman Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya), who sees tragedy looming but has no way of preventing it. In short order, Chaney kills Lugosi while he’s in wolf form, but Chaney is bitten in the process and becomes the prime suspect when Lugosi’s body (returned to human form and also with clothing on, but strangely no shoes) is discovered along with Chaney’s recently purchased wolf-headed walking stick. The curious thing about the murder investigation is the way the chief constable (Ralph Bellamy, another pipe smoker) actually leaves the murder weapon behind when he questions Chaney. Bellamy is also saddled with a bumbling assistant named Twiddle (Forrester Harvey), who provides the excruciating comic relief. One can only assume this character was foisted upon Curt Siodmak and producer/director George Waggner. After all, the Universal horror films of the ’30s had their over-the-top characters — why not this one, too?

Anyway, it takes a while for Chaney to come to terms with what he’s become (thanks to Jack Pierce’s incredible makeup job), reconciling his supernatural plight with his rational mind. (He also has to figure out how he can sit down in a chair in an undershirt, transform into a wolf man, and then be wearing a dark, long-sleeved shirt without having had time to put one on — or the dexterity necessary to do up the buttons.) And he isn’t helped much by his skeptical father, who dismisses lycanthropy as “a variety of schizophrenia” and refuses to send Chaney away despite his doctor’s recommendation. The sad thing is Rains has to lose both of his sons before he is able to accept that there are some things that can’t be explained away by science and reason. The look of devastation on his face at the end of the film tells the whole story.

It didn’t take long for Universal to realize it had a major hit on its hands. (I’ve often wondered whether its release less than a week after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent declaration of war helped propel audience into The Wolf Man’s escapist fantasy set in a Europe completely untouched by military conflict.) Eager to capitalize on it, and prove that you can’t keep a good (or even a conflicted) werewolf down, the studio resurrected Larry Talbot two years later — with the help of Curt Siodmak, now their go-to monster man — for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. After 1942’s The Ghost of Frankenstein, it was clear that Frankenstein’s Monster needed a playmate if it was going to continue to be a viable property. This led to further monster match-ups with Dracula and others in House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula, until the end of the line was reached in 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which rather surprisingly managed to be more respectful to all three of them than either of the House films had been.

After that, six decades went by — and countless werewolves loped across movie screens — before Lawrence Talbot’s tragic story was revived with Universal’s 2010 remake The Wolfman (which has once been slated to be its 2008 remake, and then its 2009 remake). But that, my fine, furry friends, is a story for another time. For now, in this festive holiday season, take a moment to let out a howl for the most famous wolf man of all.

When last we left the Howling series, director Phillipe Mora had just made a complete hash of the first sequel, 1985’s Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf, yet somehow felt qualified to take a crack at another one. How he was able to convince novelist Gary Brandner that he was the man for the job I have no idea, but once he had secured the sequel rights Mora set about writing a script that had no connection whatsoever to the earlier films and, in fact, took place in Australia, the land of kangaroos, koala bears and a once-thriving exploitation film industry (lovingly eulogized in the 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood). And that, for better or worse, is how 1987’s mind-bogglingly bizarre Howling III: The Marsupials came to be.

I knew going into it that Howling III wasn’t exactly going to be a work of high art. (As one of the interview subjects in Not Quite Hollywood put it, “We all knew it was rubbish. We knew everything was a joke.”) In this regard, it helps that Mora always intended it to be a comedy, as evidenced by the over-the-top characters and dialogue, but that still doesn’t excuse how slapdash the whole enterprise feels pretty much from the word dingo. And even if there are no actual dingoes in the film, its lycanthropes are descended from an extinct species of Tasmanian wolf, which explains why they have pouches. (Unsurprisingly, this is the only Howling film where this is the case.)

In an odd way, the film suffers from an overabundance of ideas. For starters, there’s the story of a rebellious young werewolf (Imogen Annesley) who leaves her tribe and resettles in Sydney, where she almost immediately meets an ambitious assistant director (Leigh Biolos) who casts her in a horror film called Shape Shifters, Part 8 (a joke that the series has actually caught up with thanks to this year’s The Howling: Reborn). To this, Mora adds a subplot about a Russian ballerina (Dasha Blahova) who defects to Australia in order to find her werewolf mate. (Her transformation in the middle of a rehearsal provides one of the film’s highlights.) Then there’s the college professor (Barry Otto) who’s eager to study the creatures and eventually develops something of an affinity for them. If only people could understand them, he believes, we wouldn’t be so afraid of them.

Even if the whole thing falls apart well before the climax (at a tacky-looking awards show hosted by Dame Edna Everage, of all people), Howling III is almost worth seeing for the early scene where Biolos takes Annesley to her first horror film (she’s lived a sheltered life in her remote hometown of Flow — yes, that is “Wolf” backwards) and she is decidedly unimpressed by the lengthy transformation sequence. Of course, since it was done for the movie within the movie, Mora and his crew deliberately set out to make it look as ridiculous as possible, which is not a claim that the makers of the next sequel can make — at least, not credibly.

Having reached a narrative dead end in the Australian outback, the Howling series was given a pointless reboot with 1988’s Howling IV: The Original Nightmare, which harkened back to Gary Brandner’s source novel. Actually, according to the opening credits, it’s based on all three of the Howling books, but for the most part the screenwriters stick to the story of the first one, save for the fact that the main character is no longer the victim of a savage rape. Instead, Marie (Romy Windsor) is a bestselling novelist who’s having such disturbing dreams and visions that her doctor prescribes a liberal dose of rest and relaxation. This prompts her bearded husband Richard (Michael T. Weiss) to rent a rustic cabin up in the mountains so she can get away from the big, bad city, but the peace and quiet is shattered their first night there when Marie hears a wolf howling nearby and stupidly asks, “What was that noise?” (Just once I’d like a character to hear a wolf howl in a movie and immediately know what it is.)

To his credit, director John Hough manages to bring a sense a menace to the scenes that take place in the nearby town of Drago, but his efforts are hampered somewhat by the barely passable American accents on most of the townspeople (not much of a surprise considering the film was shot in South Africa). This problem also extends to Marie’s agent, who mostly exists so Richard can have someone to be jealous of after he’s been seduced and bitten by she-wolf Eleanor (Lamya Derval), an artist who runs the local knickknack shop. The other major character is an ex-nun named Janice (Susanne Severeid) who helps Marie investigate the strange goings on in town, but their sleuthing skills are amateurish at best. In fact, it takes them so long to put things together that nearly an hour elapses before somebody says the word “werewolf” — and that’s a hell of a long time to keep your monster off-screen.

Then again, that was probably entirely by design because the werewolves in Howling IV are pretty pathetic. The main problem appears to be the makeup department’s inability to pick one design and run with it. Instead, there are at least half a dozen werewolf concepts ranging from ordinary wolves with glowing red eyes to an upright wolf man on two legs. Then there’s the matter of Richard’s ludicrous transformation, during which he dissolves into a puddle of goo and then reforms as a wolf-like thing. Meanwhile, all the other werewolves just sort of tease their hair out and glue on fangs and claws so they can swipe at Marie when she attempts to escape their clutches. It’s all pretty half-assed, which is why it’s not too surprising that the filmmakers can’t even be bothered to stick a proper ending on the thing.

Given its tiny budget and poor production values, it’s not surprising that Howling IV was the first sequel to go direct to video. And it was soon joined on the shelves by the likes of Howling V: The Rebirth (1989), Howling VI: The Freaks (1991) and Howling: New Moon Rising (1995). The last one even tried to tie together the events of the previous three, and topped Howling III‘s marsupial werewolves by adding line dancing into the mix. More an act of desperation than a legitimate film, New Moon Rising sounded the death knell for a series that had been thoroughly run into the ground in the space of a decade and a half. No wonder it took just as long before the time was ripe for it to be Reborn. (The fact that a little something called Twilight came out in the interim may have something to do with that, but that’s a discussion for another time.)