"A writer and her husband head to a pastoral town for a relaxing holiday, only to discover a populace of satanic werewolves."
In Howling IV: The Original Nightmare, a writer lady has nightmares about werewolves in a burning church, and takes an extended vacation in the charming village of Drago (no relation to Billy Drago, unfortunately) to relax for a little while, because the poor dear is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Her oily, denim-covering husband (The Pretender) is fine with this idea, because he immediately finds a creepy local girl with an unfortunate hairstyle willing to help him commit adultery after she falls in love with his bold "denim vest over denim shirt" fashion choice.
The writer lady's cute little dog wanders off and gets killed by a werewolf (SPOILER!) minutes after they arrive in town, because people only ever have dogs in movies like this so that they can die for a cheap shock.
I guess a nun used to be a resident, but she went crazy and died before the writer lady arrived, repeating the phrase "we all live in fear" as she passed on to that great big nunnery in the sky. One of the dead nun's ex-nun friends pops up in town to investigate the circumstances of her death, but she mostly stands around and stares blankly into the middle distance.
So all of the residents of quaint Drago are werewolves, and they also worship Satan, because that's what werewolves do. The writer lady's husband catches the werewolf bug from that unclean woman he boned, and he melts before his wife's oddly bored-looking gaze. I guess she sees guys melt all the time back home.
The husband-puddle reforms into a devil worshipping werewolf, and the ex-nun rings a big bell in the local church, which is like catnip for devil worshipping werewolves, so they all crowd into the church, hungry for nun flesh.
Then the writer lady blows up the church, and this is a terrible movie and I hate it so much. You'd think a movie about a town full of devil worshipping werewolves might be fun to watch, but the entire movie is so boring, it made me want to cry.
It is said that the actors in Werner Herzog's film Heart Of Glass performed their every scene under hypnosis because Herzog wanted to capture an otherworldly, trancelike atmosphere on celluloid. Howling IV: The Original Nightmare is a little like that, except I think these actors were all just really, really tired. The fact that the movie was filmed in South Africa and nearly every actor had a thick accent, necessitating extensive ADR work to give all the characters flat American voices (the story takes place in California) doesn't help matters.
And the werewolf prosthetics are on par with the head-scratchingly lazy work found in The Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf. But at least that movie is so memorably goofy that it never finds the time to be dull. Never mind the fact that it's really a barely-rewritten vampire script with a plot that makes absolutely no sense when you try to figure it out after the fact. Christopher Lee, Reb Brown and Sybil Danning are in The Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf. Who's in this movie? That dull-as-dishwater guy from The Pretender? A woman who maybe looks a little like Helen Slater if you squint really hard?
There really didn't need to be any sequels to The Howling. It was a perfectly fine standalone experience. But there are so many The Howling movies. How did that happen? And why are rey all so bad? You'd think that by simple virtue of there being so many sequels, somebody would have eventually made a good one, even accidentally.
But we don't live in a world where that's possible. No, we live in a world where Howling IV: The Original Nightmare exists, and it is a cruel world, indeed.
And now I'd like to introduce the 75th installment of the podcast that refused to die, Victor Crowley's Hatchet-Fest! In this stupendous episode, I am joined by my pal Titus for a conversation about one of our favorite movies, Clive Barker's Nightbreed. Recently restored and released in a director's cut by the fine folks at Scream Factory, this movie holds a very special place in both our hearts, and we talk both about the film itself and what it means to us. I think you're going to love it. Actually, you'll probably hate it. But it's here, anyway. So just listen to it:
Chapter 75: The Tribes Of The Moon
Tomorrow I will return with another embittered rant about another terrible movie. Until then...
YOUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT!
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