Werewolf News

Matthew Broderick was a year away from his signature role at the time, but there are many ways in which Phillipe Gaston — the pickpocket he plays in Ladyhawke who goes by the nickname Mouse — is Ferris Bueller transported back to the Middle Ages, substituting his one-sided conversation with God for Ferris’s fourth-wall-breaking asides to the camera. Phillipe talks so much, in fact, that his nickname should have been Motormouth, but that may have been too anachronistic, even for a film with a hard-driving synth-rock soundtrack produced by Alan Parsons.

Often cited as one of Ladyhawke’s biggest flaws, its score (composed by Andrew Powell, who did the orchestral arrangements for the Alan Parsons Project) is far from the film’s only problem. For starters, it’s the kind of medieval epic where all the soldiers’ tunics look brand new (or at the very least freshly cleaned) and their swords all gleam, a marked contrast with Paul Verhoeven’s down and dirty Flesh + Blood, which second-billed Rutger Hauer starred in the very same year. Hauer, incidentally, plays the film’s lycanthrope, a knight named Navarre cursed to live as a wolf by night while Isabeau, his lady love, is a hawk by day. In her human form, she’s played by Michelle Pfeiffer, whose sudden arrival on the scene stuns Phillipe almost as much as the wolf that makes its first appearance (and kills a peasant) the first night he is traveling with Navarre. “There are strange forces at work in your life, magical things that surround you,” he tells the knight the next day, but it is a while before he finds out precisely how strange.

The second night passes without any sight of the wolf (which is no great loss because it is, after all, just a wolf), but on the third day of their journey the hawk is shot with a crossbow bolt (did I mention that Phillipe and Navarre are being pursued by a tyrannical bishop played by John Wood who has dispatched his guards to capture/kill them?) and Phillipe is sent with the wounded bird to the ruined castle of a monk (Leo McKern) who knows all about their curse (“Always together, eternally apart”) and believes he knows how to break it. Alas, there’s a great deal of wheel-spinning to be done before that can occur, stretching the running time to two full — nay, overstuffed — hours.

Since Ladyhawke arrived in the midst of the decade when in-camera transformations were all the rage (even the music video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” indulged in them), it can’t help but be disappointing that director Richard Donner opts for simple dissolves or cuts between flashes of lightning to change Hauer into a wolf and Pfeiffer into a hawk and back again. That’s the difference between horror and high fantasy, though. No need to make the transition seem physically painful since Navarre and Isabeau are enduring the emotional cruelty of being kept apart.

By the end of the ’70s, werewolf movies were fairly thin on the ground and very much in need of new blood (or at the very least, a novel way of transforming men into monsters). There was one throwback, however, that managed to make a killing on the drive-in circuit without ever venturing north of the Mason-Dixon Line — and without breaking new ground in any other way. Written and directed by first-timer Worth Keeter and produced by Earl Owensby, 1979’s generically titled Wolfman has a vaguely Southern Gothic atmosphere (various reference books list its setting as 1910 Georgia, but the film itself isn’t so specific on that point) and stars Owensby as Colin Glasgow, the “worldly” cousin who’s called home for the funeral of his elderly father. Seems there’s a curse on his family and Colin’s aunt and uncle, Elizabeth and Clement Glasgow (Maggie Lauterer and Richard Dedmon), would much rather it fall on him than either one of them. Good thing for them that they have Satan-worshiping priest Reverend Leonard (Edward Grady) on their side.

Soon after his arrival at the estate, Colin starts having Vaseline-smeared nightmares which cause him to wake up in a cold sweat (and show off his naturally hairy chest and back). He also hooks up with old flame Lynn (Kristina Reynolds) and consults with family doctor Dr. Tate (Sid Rancer), who confirms there’s something strange going on. With all the repetitious dialogue and endless scenes of Colin riding around in his horse-drawn carriage (Owensby paid for it, so they obviously decided to shoot the hell out of it), it’s nearly an hour before he changes into the title character and goes on his first rampage which, when discovered, elicits the usual bewildered reactions from the authorities. (“It wasn’t anything human that killed them. Some kind of animal got them.” “I can’t say this looks like the work of any ordinary animal.”) It also produces the usual headlines about animal attacks, but I loved the ancillary story on the front page of the prop newspaper with the headline “CHURCH HOMECOMING DISRUPTED BY BEES.”

Without much further ado, Colin transforms a second time with the aid of quick lap-dissolves and, after chomping on his greedy relatives, is pursued by a trigger-happy posse. That doesn’t prevent him from picking a few of them off and evading capture until sunrise, when he transform back into a man. While Colin languishes in jail, Lynn and Dr. Tate confront Reverend Leonard, which immediately puts Lynn in peril (and leads to a foot chase through a cemetery over which some unmistakably modern electrical wires are strung). Will Colin escape in time to save her? And will he get to transform one last time while doing so? I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the ending of a good movie, but yes, he does both of those things.

Just as having a sizable budget is no guarantee of making a good werewolf movie, having a miniscule one doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to turn out a bad one. If you make the right creative decisions and spend what little money you have wisely — and make sure your script is good enough to compensate for any shortcomings in the effects department — it’s possible to make a werewolf movie on a shoestring that isn’t a complete embarrassment. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what Adam R. Steigert’s FANG is, which is doubly baffling because it’s not his first feature (which would be understandable), but rather his seventh (with a few shorts thrown in for bad measure).

Based in Buffalo, New York, where FANG (yes, the title is in all caps) had its premiere last October, Steigert has been pumping out low-budget genre flicks at a rapid clip for the past decade, often acting as his own cinematographer and editor in addition to his writing and directing duties, which he frequently shares with others. From the start, he’s set most of his movies in the same fictional town known variously as Metzburg, Metsburg, Metzburgh, or Metsburgh. However it’s spelled, the town figures into FANG since it’s the destination of strung-out junkie Joe (Theo Kemp) and his equally strung-out but not strung-out-looking girlfriend Chloe (Melodie Roehrig), who knows of the proverbial house “in the middle of nowhere” where they can hide out after murdering a stranger for drug money. While walking to Metz/sburg/h, Joe and Chloe encounter Chris and Shelly (Jason John Beebe and Jennie Russo), a bickering couple on their way to a wedding whose vehicle has broken down and who grudgingly tag along with them until they get to Chloe’s relatives’ house, which is when things really start going sideways for all concerned.

For starters, creepy caretaker Harold (second-billed Gregory Blair, whose character’s last name is never spoken, but is listed in the credits as Pinter, an in-joke that makes next to no sense since there’s little about his character that is Pinteresque) informs them they can’t call anyone for help because “The Crowleys don’t really believe in phones.” They do, however, believe in having every door in their house locked at all times, a plot point Steigert immediately bungles because the set of clanking keys Harold carries around are too large to fit the one door we see that has a lock, and none of the others even have keyholes. Since that’s a detail that figures heavily into the script (which Steigert wrote with his wife Kristin), that definitely should have been caught during the location scout.

After the interminable build-up, Doris and Roy Crowley (top-billed Melantha Blackthorne and “and ____ as” Patrick Mallette) arrive on the scene 23 minutes in and proceed to up the eccentricity factor significantly with their mannered performances and theatrical old-age makeup. Once they’ve thoroughly grossed out their reluctant guests during dinner and sequestered Joe in his room — which apparently leads to the basement, where he eventually finds editor Christopher Burns Jr. chained up in his underwear and being force-fed human remains — the Crowleys show their true colors and begin picking the interlopers off. Any viewers hoping to get a good look at their transformed state had better have the pause button handy, though, because they’re the “blink and you’ll miss them” kind of monsters.

Periodically, Steigert cuts away from the Crowley house to the half-assed police investigation of the opening murder, which leads the portly sheriff to consult with retired beat cop and full-time crackpot William Sanders (Michael O’Hear, reprising his role from Steigert’s sophomore feature, 2009’s Gore), who’s remarkably active for someone with stage-three cancer and three months to live. His cancer-rich blood turns out to be a better weapon against the Crowleys than silver bullets, even, although he has to be bitten by one of them for this to be discovered, and anyone who’s seen a werewolf movie before knows what that means. Oh, and did I forget to mention the part where he and Chloe go to Joe’s dealer (whose name, I shit you not, is Christmas Eve) for backup and he just happens to know a guy who knows how to make silver bullets? Yeah, FANG is that kind of movie. It’s also the kind of movie that closes with the message that two of its characters “will return in The Horrific Evil Monsters,” which is currently filming. Based on the evidence of this one, that’s more of a threat than a promise.