Category: Film, Television & Music

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.)