Category: Full Moon Features

A recent film that may be off the radar for most werewolf aficionados is the Estonian-made November, an adaptation of the popular novel Rehepapp by Andrus Kivirähk. (Well, it’s popular in Estonia.) Written for the screen and directed by Rainer Sarnet, November contrasts its bleak, medieval landscapes (filmed in luminous black and white by cinematographer Mart Taniel) with the fantastical creatures its inhabitants come into contact with on a regular basis. The first, in fact, is a wolf that a young woman named Liina (Rea Lest) either turns into or merely has a deep psychological link with. (There’s sufficient evidence for either interpretation.) And she’s not the only one with such tendencies because later on a German baroness (Jette Loona Hermanis) found sleepwalking by her father is told she can’t help herself. “It’s your illness,” he says. “There’s a full moon tonight.” Perhaps she’s simply going out in search of her peasant counterpart.

At any rate, the two women are part of an unrequited love triangle since Liina believes she’s destined to marry the strapping young Hans (Jörgen Liik), about the only age-appropriate suitor for her in the village. (Liina’s father repeatedly tries to pawn her off on a much older man, an arrangement she forcefully shrugs off.) Meanwhile, once Hans catches sight of the baroness he’s instantly, hopelessly smitten, inspiring both him and Liina to resort to desperate remedies. While she goes to a witch to reclaim Hans and comes to believe her only option is to kill her rival, he meets the Devil at a crossroads and exchanges his soul for one for a snowman he has built that gives him advice (which, it turns out, is mostly unhelpful).

Far from being a figure of childlike whimsy, the snowman is but one of many beings in the film called kratts that are made out of farming equipment and imbued with life (or at the very least locomotion) so they can perform menials tasks for their masters. Unnervingly enough, the first one Sarnet shows us is three scythes fastened together with an animal skull at the center, and the first thing it does is steal its master’s cow and take flight, ferrying the bewildered animal through the air like a helicopter until both come crashing down. You know the saying idle hands do the Devil’s work? Well, idle kratts are pushy about asking for jobs (“A kratt needs to work” is their mantra), and if one’s master is slow to find things to occupy them, they’re liable to have their throat slit in the middle of the night.

In addition to witches, werewolves, kratts, and the Devil, November also features ghosts that come visit their families on All Souls’ Day. Instead of being formless spirits, though, they’re strangely corporeal, capable of eating, sleeping, and using saunas, all of which are prepared for them by their dutiful living kin. Even stranger, when the beasts (as Liina’s father calls them) enter a sauna, they become human-sized chickens, an amusing effect Sarnet accomplishes by placing regular-sized chickens in a model set. That kind of lo-fi approach to realizing the supernatural serves the film well, giving its most outlandish conceits a necessary grounding. By the time the plague arrives in town (first in the form of a beautiful woman before changing to a goat and a pig) and the proscribed remedy is for everyone to gather in a barn, take off their pants and wear them on their heads (because, as the village elder says, “The plague will think we have two asses and won’t dare to touch us”), it sounds downright reasonable.

The past couple years have seen a sharp uptick in the number of Paul Naschy films getting Blu-ray upgrades, along with some that had never even seen the light of day on DVD in the States. (Such was the case with 1975’s The Werewolf and the Yeti, a.k.a. Night of the Howling Beast, put out as part of Scream Factory’s The Paul Naschy Collection II set last year.) So it seems like it’s only a matter of time before a company like Mondo Macabro or Scream Factory does the same for the elusive The Beast and the Magic Sword.

Made in 1983, the Spanish/Japanese co-production was Naschy’s last hurrah as Waldemar Daninsky — at least for the next 13 years — and found him sending the cursed Polish count to feudal Japan in search of a cure for his condition. As usual, how he came by it is completely different from how he got cursed in any of the previous installments, but Naschy (who wrote and directed) dispenses with the particulars rather quickly, so I will, too.

Back in 10th-century Germany, one of Waldemar’s heavily bearded ancestors (also played by Naschy) defeated a fierce Magyar warrior (who was said to be the devil, a shapeshifter, and a vampire) in single combat and was allowed to marry the king’s youngest daughter. Unfortunately, this pissed off the warrior’s mistress, a witch who puts a very specific and easily avoidable curse on his family since it only affects the seventh-born son and only if they’re born during the first night of the full moon. “The Daninskys will be a race of murderers, hated and persecuted forever!” the witch cries, not taking into account that they could simply stop having children when they get to six.

Anyway, when we pick up in the action in the late 16th century, Waldemar and the love of his life, Kinga (Beatriz Escudero), are in Toledo, Spain, consulting with Jewish occult expert Salom Yehuda (Conrado San Martín) and his blind niece Esther (Violeta Cela) when the townspeople denounce the lot of them for practicing witchcraft. Even worse, some of the locals decide to save the Grand Inquisitor a trip, throw some makeshift hoods on, and descend upon Salom’s home, mortally wounding him before Waldemar (still in human form) can fight them off. It is at this point that Salom sends them on to Kyoto, making Waldemar Esther’s protector in the bargain.

Once the action shifts to Japan (about 23 minutes in), things pick up considerably, especially in the werewolf attack/transformation department. (There are eight of them, but the first one doesn’t really count since it’s entirely shot from Waldemar’s point of view.) Curiously enough, we meet Kian (Shigeru Amachi), the man Waldemar is trying to find, before he does, and it is Kian who tracks the weary werewolf back to his den. Instead of turning him in to the authorities, Kian agrees to help him find a cure, but his first formula, which uses the leaves of a certain Tibetan snow flower, fails to do the trick. In desperation, Waldemar goes to sorceress Satomi (Junko Asahina), who gives him a potion and locks him in a chamber where he transforms in the most low-tech way possible (in the wake of The Howling and American Werewolf, I guess Naschy decided he just couldn’t compete on that level) and does battle with a tiger named Shere Khan. (This is the image that’s on the poster, so I’m glad the film delivers on the promise of a werewolf in paw-to-paw combat with a tiger.)

As for Satomi, she threatens to do nasty things to Kinga and Esther and keeps Waldemar at bay with a silver katana (the magic sword of the title), which Kian later retrieves so he can be put out of his misery. However, it’s up to Kian’s sister Akane (Yôko Fuji) to do the deed because the killing stroke has to be delivered by somebody who loves Waldemar or else it won’t take. Not that I really believe it will. I’ve seen enough of these pictures (ten of the eleven that are extant) to know a dead Waldemar Daninsky is only a few keystrokes away from getting resurrected at will. It’s the nature of the beast.

Since the full moon falls on Thanksgiving this year, I figured I’d highlight a slightly different kind of movie in this month’s column. While there’s no such thing as a movie about a wereturkey, there is 1972’s Blook Freak, which TCM’s Robert Osborne once sheepishly described as being about “a motorcycle enthusiast who’s turned into a blood-crazed turkey man.” Written, produced and directed by the dream team of Brad F. Grinter (who did the same jobs on 1970’s Flesh Feast and Devil Rider!) and Steve Hawkes (a Croatian-born actor who made this in between stints in a couple Tarzan knock-offs), Blood Freak presents itself as a cautionary tale about the dangers of taking illegal drugs and eating non-FDA-approved foodstuffs.

Hawkes plays Herschell, a ramrod-straight Vietnam vet who finds himself torn between a Bible-quoting drug counselor who gets him work doing odd jobs at a poultry ranch and her hedonist sister who gets him hooked on weed that has been laced with something to make it addictive. That would be bad enough, but since one of his odd jobs at the turkey farm involves eating what the guys in the laboratory cook up, the end result after one of the tests is Herschell’s transformation into a man wearing a rubber turkey mask and a ruff of feathers around his neck. Oh, yes. And he craves blood, which he gets by waylaying drug addicts and pushers and killing and mutilating them. These scenes are accompanied by a repetitive musical sting and one scream that is looped over and over. (Actually, there are two: one female and one male. Neither is particularly convincing.) Meanwhile, the sister who got him hooked feels guilty about what she’s done and worries needlessly about what their children would look like (as if she’s actually contemplating taking Mr. Turkey to bed).

Finally Herschell is put out of his misery by being beheaded (which Grinter and Hawkes depict by cutting to footage of an actual turkey with its head cut off), but it all turns out to be a dream (“My God,” Herschell moans, “I’ve been hallucinating. After eating that turkey, I went through hell.”), which is even more of a cop-out ending than it sounds. As if to further illustrate their contempt for the audience, Grinter and Hawekes periodically cut away to a narrator (played by an uncredited Grinter, obviously reading from a script) who recites deathless lines like “You ever think about this fantastic order of things? And how far does it go?” between drags on his cigarette, and actually goes into a coughing fit right before the final fade-out. Because why would you bother with a second take on something like that? It would only be a waste of film.

Note: This movie is real. I swear I did not make it up. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Typically, when the director of a low-budget werewolf film is presented with a naff-looking monster suit, they compensate by keeping it in the shadows and showing it as little as possible. This, however, was not the tack taken by Simon West, the writer, producer, director, and editor of 2017’s Carnivore: Werewolf of London, in which said carnivorous beastie first shows itself 32 minutes in and keeps on showing itself until the credits roll 48 minutes later. And even then it’s not a werewolf “of London” so much as it’s one that lives about an hour outside of the city in the vicinity of an isolated cottage with few amenities that a British bloke unwisely chooses for the romantic getaway where he plans to propose to his girlfriend, an American actress played by a London-born actress whose accent slips occasionally, but that’s really the least of Carnivore’s problems.

Following the traditional pre-credit kill in which an anonymous girl running through the woods is stalked and slayed by… something, West introduced Dave (Ben Loyd-Holmes, his co-producer) and Abi (Atlanta Johnson), who take a taxi to the aforementioned cottage, which has been let to them for the weekend by Sam (Gregory Cox), who shows no sign of actually leaving them alone to have some privacy. West also throws in a number of POV shots of something watching the couple from the woods, and we know it isn’t Sam because at one point it kills and eats a rabbit. All the while, West pads out the preliminaries with two separate sex scenes, Dave’s ill-timed proposal, and an interminable search for Abi’s phone, all of which plays like a warmed-over variation on the relationship issues in Bryan Bertino’s home-invasion horror film The Strangers. Then comes the first of many, many window scares, which become tiresome and predictable in a hurry but still somehow manage to get a scream out of the protagonists.

With no way of calling for help or keeping the monster at bay indefinitely (although it pointedly never breaks through the cottage’s many unprotected windows), Dave and Abi put aside their personal problems and try to figure out how to make it through the night in one piece. Dave even gets proactive, hatching a plan to lure the werewolf inside the cottage and burn it down, which goes about as well as his marriage proposal. As for Sam, he eventually reveals what he’s up to and why he’s able to tell the werewolf that it’s dinner time without being on the menu himself.

Viewers looking for gratuitous nudity and gore to compensate for Carnivore‘s unconvincing werewolf will feel somewhat slighted on the former front as West holds off on it about as long as he keeps the monster off-camera. (Loyd-Holmes and Johnson are both seen in the buff for their second sex scene, though, which comes right before the big reveal.) As for the gore quotient, this gets upped by the random driver who pulls up to the cottage and has his hand bitten off, as well as a later scene where one of the characters is mauled and their intestines removed. It’s doubtful even the most forgiving gorehound will be satisfied, however, by the epilogue which circles back to London (where this carnivore is supposed to be from, remember) and perfunctorily introduces a group of club kids who exist purely to be werewolf chow. But hey, at least they don’t have to hang around for an hour waiting to be devoured, which is a lucky break for them. Pity that doesn’t hold for anybody unfortunate to call up this film.

Much like a fairy tale, 2018’s Wildling opens with a man (played by reliable genre stalwart Brad Dourif) telling a little girl about the title creature — which has long, sharp teeth and nails, and long, black hair all over its body — as a way of explaining why he has to keep her locked in a room with bars on the window and an electrified doorknob. “Do you want to hear more?” he asks and she shakes her head, but it won’t take long for the astute viewer to catch on to the fact that these precautions aren’t in place to keep the wildling out, but rather to keep the girl, whose name is Anna, in. (Some other clues that she’s far from ordinary: her incredibly acute hearing and the all-vegetable diet the man has her on, as if he’s afraid what would happen if she ever ate meat.)

Thankfully, director Fritz Böhm (making his feature debut) doesn’t make the viewer wait long for their first glimpse of a wildling, even if it’s only in Anna’s dream. While it’s debatable whether it qualifies as a werewolf, it lives up to its billing, ravenously devouring its victim while Anna watches, at once repelled and attracted by the bloody sight. This confusion carries over to the next morning when it’s revealed that Anna has had her first period, prompting Dourif’s conflicted Gabriel to start injecting her with “medicine” to halt her development. By the time Anna has reached her 16th birthday (and is played by Bel Powley from The Diary of a Teenage Girl), the “medicine” has taken its toll on her health in general, but instead of putting her out of her misery like she asks, he attempts to put himself out of his, a desperate act that lands them both in the hospital.

Suffice it to say, this is an extremely disorienting place for Anna to wake up since she’s spent her whole life in a single room with a bed frame made out of tree branches. Instead of being packed off to the sinister-sounding Bellington House, though, she goes home with kindly sheriff Ellen Cooper (Liv Tyler, also one of the film’s producers) and makes the acquaintance of her jerky younger brother Ray (Collin Kelly-Sordelet), who’s a pussycat compared to the real bullies at the high school where she’s enrolled, the payoff for all those years of home-schooling. From there, Böhm and co-writer Florian Eder trace Anna’s integration into society as she eats her first hamburger, is given her first feminine hygiene product, and (continuing the Carrie parallels) spends an awful lot of time in the library researching predator behavior and the Aurora Borealis, which she’s mysteriously drawn to. She also attends her first party where she has her first taste of alcohol and her first close encounter with a would-be rapist, who doesn’t get to live long enough to truly regret his choice of target.

After that, things start moving pretty fast, which is a good thing because Anna’s started losing her human teeth (shades of Cronenberg’s The Fly) and growing the clawed hands and feet that have been her birthright all along. Speaking of which, she finally learns some things about her real parents from a fur-clad hunter (James Le Gros, listed in the credits as “Wolfman”), who tells her he hasn’t seen one of her kind in “16 years, since the last purge.” Seems these things have a way of going in cycles.

Were one to stop watching the Korean drama A Werewolf Boy at the 58-minute mark, it would be easy to come away with the impression that it’s been mistitled for the English-language market. Sure, there’s a kid in it who’s pretty feral, but a werewolf? Pull the other one. A funny thing happens 58:45 in, though. The kid actually turns into a werewolf, growing hair all over his body, his bones shifting to increase his size. (He also gets a fright wig in place of his regular hairdo.) The thing is, writer/director Jo Sung-hee plays coy for so long that it’s possible to imagine a version of this film where this transformation doesn’t occur and he’s just a super-strong teenager that was apparently raised by wolves, hence the lousy table manners.

Made in 2012, the box-office smash (it was South Korea’s third-highest-grossing domestic release that year) opens with retired grandmother Sun-yi (Lee Young-lan) returning to the dilapidated country house where she spent a few formative months in her late teens. “It was like that even back then,” she tells her distracted granddaughter, Eun-joo (Park Bo-young). “It seemed like a monster would appear at any second.” Naturally, this triggers a 100-minute flashback to when Sun-yi (now played by Park) moved there 47 years earlier for her health — as her mother (Jang Young-nam) reveals to their new neighbors, she has lung problems — and befriended an orphan boy (Song Joong-ki) who is eventually given the name Chul-soo because the family has to call him something.

Sun-yi’s first nocturnal encounter with the boy spooks her something fierce, but in the light of day he’s not nearly as scary, even with his ragged clothes and gnarled fingernails. Besides, he cleans up nice and responds well when she consults a dog-training manual to curb his more anti-social tendencies. What Chul-soo doesn’t take kindly to is her late father’s business partner’s rich asshole son Ji-tae (Yoo Yeon-seok), who treats it as a foregone conclusion that Sun-yi will be his wife someday. That’s enough to inspire some growling, but it isn’t until Ji-tae physically threatens Sun-yi that Chul-soo’s bestial nature asserts itself in a big way. Since this development requires an explanation, Ji-tae tracks down a scientist who reveals that Chul-soo was part of an experiment to create a super-soldier by combining the traits of man and wolf. (Hey, just like Project: Metalbeast!) Normally, I would call that a bad idea (after all, I’ve seen Project: Metalbeast), but all the military had to do was hire Sun-yi to train their wolfman army and they would have been in the pink. Too bad they’re so intent on putting their lone werewolf boy down.

Just as the 1987 Richard Dreyfuss/Emilio Estevez buddy-cop comedy Stakeout begat Another Stakeout in 1993, adding Rosie O’Donnell to the mix for some reason, lowbrow Canadian horror-comedy WolfCop has sired Another WolfCop, which premiered as a work-in-progress at Austin’s Fantastic Fest in 2016 before making its proper debut one year ago at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal. To make up for its Rosie O’Donnell deficit, returning writer/director Lowell Dean cast an uncredited Kevin Smith in a glorified cameo as Bubba Rich, the interim mayor of Woodhaven, which is still reeling from the severe power vacuum it suffered following the events of the first film. Dean even contrives to let Smith perform his scenes in a hockey jersey since the supernatural threat facing Woodhaven in the sequel is personified by transparently evil tycoon Sydney Swallows (Yannick Bisson), whose plan to reopen the town’s long-defunct brewery (the ominously named Darkstar) and hockey arena smacks of Brewmeister Smith’s world-domination scheme in the 1983 Bob and Doug McKenzie vehicle Strange Brew.

Unlike that film, Another WolfCop skips the Hamlet allusions, and even eschews the fairy-tale references that littered the first film. It does, however, appear to take a page out of the Bubba the Redneck Werewolf playbook by having Leo Fafard’s Lou Garou hole up at the town animal shelter on the nights of the full moon. Even so, his hairy alter ego (which has become the “official” mascot of Liquor Donuts, naturally) is in the habit of defying recently installed police chief Tina (Amy Matysio) by going out on patrol whenever the mood strikes him. As a matter of fact, WolfCop is introduced in hot pursuit of four miscreants in a truck (three of them played by members of Canadian film collective Astron-6) making a special delivery to Swallows that turns out to be Lou’s buddy Willie (Jonathan Cherry), who was merely being impersonated by one of the Shifters in the first film. Willie’s return to the fold is not without complications, though, as he has been seeded with an alien that spends a good part of the film sticking out of his torso like Kuato from Total Recall.

In addition to the alien-impregnation plot, which is reminiscent of the Roger Corman-produced Carnosaur from 1993, Swallows throws in a cyborg named Frank (Alden Adair) for good measure and sends it on a killing spree at the local strip club to draw WolfCop out. Frank’s defeat comes at a cost, though, prompting Willie to drive the injured Lou all the way to Regina so he can get patched up by Willie’s estranged sister Kat (Serena Miller), who has just the thing for him: a piece of moon rock from one of the Apollo missions. This not only does the trick, it leads to Another WolfCop’s requisite bestial sex scene, in which the roles are reversed this time. The moon dust also comes in handy since Lou needs all the help he can get for his showdown with Swallows at the Darkstar Arena, where the whole shebang comes to a head — and the film ends with a bang.

This probably goes without saying, but fans of the first WolfCop will find plenty to like in Another WolfCop, from the hard-rocking score by Shooting Guns to Emerson Ziffle’s gruseome makeup effects to the committed performances by Fafard, Matysio, Cherry, et al. And they will likely greet the closing promise of WolfCop’s return with a cheer. If I may, I humbly suggest Dean and company consider sending Lou Garou (and whoever wants to tag along with him) overseas next time. How does A Canadian WolfCop in London sound?

After its twin successes with 1957’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, it’s only natural that AIP would want to pair up its two monstrous creations, Universal-style. And it did so the following year in How to Make a Monster, released 60 years ago on July 1, 1958. The form that monster summit took, though, was the fictional (and generically titled) Werewolf Meets Frankenstein being produced (in self-reflexive fashion) by American International Studios, which not only has its own lot, but also a proud history going back 25 years.

Much of the credit for American International’s longevity is due to the work of its tireless makeup man Pete Dumond (Robert H. Harris), but when he’s given the shove by the new regime that has taken over the studio, he fights back by adding a special ingredient to his foundation cream that gives him influence over Larry Drake and Tony Mantell, the young actors playing the Teenage Werewolf (Gary Clarke, taking over for Michael Landon) and Teenage Frankenstein (Gary Conway, reprising his role from the earlier film). They are then dispatched to murder the new studio heads, who only want to make (ick) musicals. Naturally, this attracts the attention of the police, who turn the heat up on Harris’s nervous assistant, Rivero (Paul Brinegar), after the monstrously made-up Tony is spotted running from the scene of one of the crimes.

The funny thing about the film, which was shepherded by Teenage Frankenstein director Herbert L. Strock, is while Pete starts out extremely mild-mannered, over time he becomes more and more of a raving lunatic, taking on the mad scientist role previously played by Whit Bissell in the earlier films. And things take a definite turn for the macabre when he creepily invites Larry and Tony over to his house (where the film abruptly switches from black and white to color) so he can immortalize them as he’s done with his other creations, which are displayed in a room populated by props from previous AIP films. Suffice it to say, whatever his actual plans are (the dialogue is vague on that point, but I think it’s something along the lines of what Vincent Price does to his victims in House of Wax), the boys are right not to want any part of them.

By the time the ’70s rolled around, the biker movie explosion that followed Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels had just about fizzled out. There was still time, however, to squeeze in a few outliers, like 1972’s Pink Angels, about a group of gay bikers riding to Los Angeles for a drag ball, or 1971’s Werewolves on Wheels. Co-written and directed by Michel Levesque, who directed one more feature before becoming the art director for Paul Bartel’s Cannonball! and a number of Russ Meyer films, Werewolves on Wheels is about a motorcycle gang called the Devil’s Advocates (meaning, I suppose, they’re in favor of him), which is made up of a dozen or so interchangeable hairy, bearded savages (who, let’s face it, are halfway to being werewolves before the story even begins) who decide they want to meet the big man himself and go on a field trip to the local Satanic monastery.

Turns out this is a bad idea because soon after their arrival some hooded monks surround them and offer them an unholy communion of drugged wine and bread, which the gang readily partakes of. Once they’ve all conked out, high priest One (Severn Darden, late of The President’s Analyst and Vanishing Point) invokes his master with the sacrifice of a black cat and calls the leader’s old lady Helen (D.J. Anderson) to be the Bride of Satan, which apparently involves her seductively wrapping a snake around her naked body and playing with a skull while One gestures lewdly with a phallic statue. Just in time her man Adam (Stephen Oliver) comes out of his drugged stupor, rouses a few of his fellow bikers and they interrupt the ceremony and bust some heads, but not before having their faces marked by the falling monks.

With a stark naked Helen in tow the gang hightails it out of there, but soon enough their resident mystic Tarot (Duece Berry), whose name gets pronounced every which way but the right one, realizes something is amiss with their vibes or something. This is confirmed over the next couple nights as various gang members (and their old ladies) start getting picked off one by one by vicious killers with hairy paws and a penchant for hiding in the shadows until the final reel. When they finally do show themselves it’s no surprise who they turn out to be (after all, this isn’t a film about lycanthropic unicyclists) and the remaining human members of the gang decide fire is the best weapon available to them. This provides an important lesson to all would-be werewolves: if you’re ever set on fire, “Stop, Drop and Roll” doesn’t really work if you insist on rolling over a roaring campfire while trying to put yourself out.

Their furry former compatriots dispatched, Tarot leads the surviving Devil’s Advocates back to the monastery to get their revenge, but in an incredible twist it turns out they’re the monks they were planning on attacking! Or something! I don’t know exactly, the ending is all kinds of confusing. All I know is the gang rolls on under the closing credits and maybe the rest of them have been turned into werewolves and maybe they haven’t. That’s something that may have been cleared up in the sequel had there been one. As it is, Werewolves on Wheels exists in exploitation isolation.

Over the course of its initial, decade-long run on cable, Mystery Science Theater 3000 tackled werewolves exactly twice. The first time was in the show’s third episode for the Comedy Channel (later renamed Comedy Central) when Joel Robinson, Crow T. Robot, and Tom Servo riffed on 1942’s Poverty Row Wolf Man knock-off The Mad Monster, which starred George Zucco as the requisite mad scientist who tampers in God’s domain by injecting wolf blood into a farm hand with predictably hair-raising results. After that, they waited until they were deep into both the Mike and Sci-Fi Channel eras to take down 1995’s Werewolf, one of the freshest examples of cinematic roadkill they ever sank their teeth into since its comedic evisceration premiered on April 18, 1998, in the midst of the show’s ninth season.

By that time, the folks at Best Brains had settled into a definite groove and, after much flitting about in time and space the previous season, the show’s trio of villains — Pearl Forrester, Observer, and Professor Bobo — had settled into Castle Forrester for the long haul, or at least until the plug got pulled the following year. Suffice it to say, compared to their first such effort, made while the writers were still finding their feet, the crew of the Satellite of Love was a well-oiled joke-delivery machine when Mike Nelson and his robot pals gave Werewolf the business. Then again, Werewolf offered up plenty of material for them to work with, alongside the ability to make then-contemporary references to the band Hanson, Janet Reno, rejected Supreme Court Justice Robert Bork, and Eddie Vedder.

Your standard cheapjack lycanthropic doggerel, Werewolf (also known as Arizona Werewolf) is comparable in quality to one of the later Howling sequels. Its Flagstaff setting even recalls the same year’s New Moon Rising, but thankfully this one features less line dancing. In its place, co-writer/producer/director Tony Zarindast presents the unwary viewer with a borderline nonsensical plot about a werewolf skeleton unearthed during an archaeological dig and the trouble this causes various actors for whom English is clearly not their first language.

Chief among them is top-billed George (actually Jorge) Rivero, a Mexican actor whose career stretched back to the mid-’60s, when he divvied up his time between westerns and wrestling pictures in which he was often teamed with legendary luchador Santo. Here he’s Yuri, an opportunistic foreman who uses the werewolf skull to infect multiple people with lycanthropy, including one of the dig’s Native American workmen (who’s subsequently shot and killed by two of his buddies), an unsuspecting security guard (who transforms while behind the wheel of a car, a true recipe for disaster), and a self-proclaimed “struggling young writer” who moves to Flagstaff following the death of his mother and takes up residence in her attic. This is Paul Niles, who’s played by Fred (actually Federico) Cavalli, starring in his one and only feature film. Similarly inexperienced is Adrianna Miles, who plays his love interest Natalie and whose pronunciations of the word “werewolf” are a wonder to behold. (Weirdly, whenever Mike imitates her, he sounds like Tommy Wiseau.)

Rounding out the cast are Joe Estevez (“one of the lesser Estevezes,” per Crow) as Joe, one of the skinwalker-averse workmen, and Richard Lynch (a genre veteran with credits going back to the late ’60s) as lead archaeologist Professor Noel, who absents himself from the plot partway through the MST3K edit, leading me to believe he may have more scenes in the uncut version, which runs a full 22 minutes longer. I’m not about to seek it out to test that theory, though.

Besides, anything that fell by the wayside was for a good cause since it made room for host segments like the one where Mike, having tripped and cut himself on Crow while leaving the theater, abruptly turns into a were-Crow, a two-step process that mirrors the discrete stages of lycanthropy Paul and his fellow werewolves pass through in the film. At first they merely have extra hair plastered to their faces. Then the actors are given a heavy makeup job that makes them look more ape-like than wolfish. The final stage, though, is a barely articulated wolf head puppet, which is seen in extreme close-ups, along with fleeting glimpses of a stuntman in a gorilla suit with a wolf’s head for the long and medium shots, none of which are remotely convincing. Late in the film, at a point where Paul is in the second stage, Tom Servo quips, “Oh, that fiend Rick Baker tackled him and did this to him.” He wishes.