The Howling franchise has been one of the most strangest franchises in movie history. Along with the Hellraiser and Amityville movies, they seem to be trying to bank on name recognition. However, the first Howling movie divided people in 1981 but has received better recognition over the years.
Directed by Joe Dante and a script co-written by John Sayles, it was a friendly rival to John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London. Even special effects/make-up wizards Rob Bottin and Rick Baker had a nice little rivalry on who could make the better werewolf. Baker won the Oscar that year for American Werewolf with its quadrupedal creature but I always found Bottin’s bipedal werewolf creation to be a little superior that wasn’t matched until Dog Soldiers.
Sadly, people going into The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf might have been expecting a better movie. It even had Christopher Lee in a lead role. And Gary Brandner, who had wrote the novel on which the first is loosely based, is credited as a co-writer. He was never a fan of the first movie. But his script for this movie wouldn’t be used much either.
Production of the sequel was troubled. Mainly it’s because AVCO Embassy Pictures which distributed the first movie had used “Hollywood accounting” to keep producer Steven A. Lane and others from ever getting a cut of the movie’s box office total which is reportedly $18-20 million. However, Lane still owned the rights to a sequel. Yet, he couldn’t make a direct sequel to The Howling as the studio still had the film rights. Embassy would later be sold to The Coca-Cola Company which owned Columbia Pictures at the time in 1985 and it would then be sold to mogul Dino De Laurentiis who folded the company into his newly formed independent studio De Laurentiis Entertainment Company.
It’s probably best that Lane and Brandner just gave up early on. Howling II feels like it was cobbled together from a lot of other scripts that had been scraped or put in turnaround. The movie is set mostly in eastern Europe and feels more like he should be a vampire movie. Even the villain Stirba Crosscoe (Sybil Danning) has a bat-like creature. Also Lee who plays her brother, Stefan, is a werewolf hunter who must stab werewolves in the heart with a knife made out of titanium.
Yes, it sounds ludicrous because it is. Dee Wallace played Karen White in the first one as a TV reporter who is shot live during a broadcast as she turns into a werewolf. But Stefan tells her brother, Ben (Reb Brown), since the silver bullet was removed during the autopsy, Karen isn’t really dead. She’s replaced by Hana Ludvikova. Of course, Ben doesn’t believe his sister was a werewolf despite being shown footage.
As for the werewolf make-up itself, well, neither Bottin nor Baker would step within 100 miles of this production. The producers actually received masks from 20th Century Fox that had been used in the Planet of the Apes movies, which explains a lot. Most of the special effects look terrible and like they were being worked on over a weekend in post-production. As for the ape masks, you can tell it just looks like someone just glued hair from store-bough wigs to it.
Sometimes the cheapest special effects are the best. Take Terminator 2 where the T-1000 reassembles from liquid metal. All that was used was liquid mercury, hair dryers and colored lightbulbs. But this is just cheesy. While the special effects are practical, you can tell they were filmed when the actors weren’t on set. This looks like one of those movies where they filmed every actor they could talking to someone off-camera.
When Stirba sends lasers to kill some dwarf whose face melts, you just see her looking down and extending her hands. And considering how Stefan talks about her as being totally dangerous, she seems to appear very little in the movie. Her costume looks like some it belongs in a BDSM porn from the era. Mostly, her and fellow werewolves, Vlad (Judd Omen), and Mariana (Marsha Hunt) spend more time engaging in a weird menage a trois. This is obviously a one-up of the scene in The Howling where the two werewolves do the nasty near a campfire.
The plot is just Ben and Karen’s colleague, Jenny Templeton (Annie McEnroe), following Stefan to Transylvania to battle Stirba and the werewolves. You might know Brown from his appearances as Steve Rogers/Captain America in those cheesy Captain America TV movies from the 1970s or as Yor in Yor, the Hunter From the Future. He was also in Space Mutiny which was hilariously lampooned on Mystery Science Theater 3000. His range as an actor is on full display today. The man must’ve had one hell of an agent because he also appeared in the critically acclaimed movies Hardcore and Uncommon Valor.
As for McEnroe, she does what can with the role. You may best remember her as Jane, the sister of Geena Davis’ character in Beetlejuice. The problem is that Jenny is just in the movie as a love interest to Ben and then as a damsel in distress as she is kidnapped by the werewolves, bound and covered in blood. At least she gets to keep her clothes on during a sex scene with Ben.
As for Danning, she had become known for showing off her assets in movies and model. She had it worked into her contract where she only had to do one nude scene. However, the filmmakers used a shot of her taking off her top to expose her breasts 17 times during the end credits as the band Babel performs. It’s used at the right times during the music it’s very comical. You’d think the movie was directed by middle-school boys instead of a trained filmmaker.
Actually Phillippe Mora would go on to write and direct the third Howling movie, which is the only one rating PG-13, and has the werewolves as marsupials down in Australia. It was played with more comedy but not in the way Sayles and Dante brought to the first movie. He would also make that Communion alien abduction movie with Christopher Walken.
As for Lee, you can tell some scenes he’s getting into it, especially where he shows up at a nightclub looking all hip with 1980s New Wave sunglasses. He later admitted he only did the movie because he hadn’t done a werewolf movie. However, he later apologized to Dante when he was cast in Gremlins 2: The New Batch.
It’s not a great horror movie but it’s a nice cheesy movie for a wet weekend afternoon. Considering how worse the sequels got, it’s actually not too bad. I mean, Howling: New Moon Rising just had clips of previous movies as people talk in a honky-tonk bar and tell jokes. At one point, an older man just lead the patrons in a sing-a-long to “Stand Up” by Mel McDaniel. Compared to that movie, this one is The Godfather Part II.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 