Project Terrible: Track of the Moon Beast (1976)

Is it that time already again?! Oh, you betcha. Some of us just can't seem to get enough of those terrible, terrible movies so here we are with Project Terrible Round... oh, I forgot... 14? Something crazy like that. Anywho, I decided to with Maynard Morrissey's movie choice for me since he always seems to torture me the most. This time from him I got another obscure sci-fi movie from the 70s called Track of the Moon Beast. Goody. Let's get started.

So this movie has one of the best plots I've ever heard. Seriously. This hunky young mineralogist named Paul falls in love with a really boring chick named Kathy on the same night that he gets hit in the head by a meteor from an asteroid that hit the moon. Herein comes the "moon beast" part of this fantastic story because apparently, having a little bit of meteor in your brain turns you into... a lizard monster. I know you're anxious to hear how this turns out.

As hilariously stupid as the plot of Track of the Moon Beast is, it's really a shame that the rest of the movie is rather boring. There's just not enough Paul-monster-moon-beast action, too much talky-talky with all the other characters, and not enough of those whacky 70s sci-fi effects that I was looking forward to. Though it almost kills me to admit it, overall the movie isn't that bad. The production value - albeit minimal - is workable for the plot and the characters are not nearly as annoying as expected. Hey, you even get some musical entertainment in the movie. What more do you want?

If you're like me, your main question with this oh-so-magnificent plot is the relationship between some meteor shit (yay Creepshow!) and transforming into a lizard beast. Like, how are those two things related in any way at all? How does having a piece of meteor imbedded in your brain cause you to turn into a lizard creature that is closely related to the Tyrannosaurus Rex (I didn't say it - the movie did, I swear)? Paul's good friend is Native American and professor Johnny Longbow, who not only has the recipe for awesome stew, but also can give you the most minimal explanation for all of this possible. It's a Native American legend. I think. I wasn't really paying attention. However, no explanation could make this plot point make sense enough for anybody to take it seriously.

Paul only changes into the moon beast about three times in the whole movie and it all takes up about five minutes of the movie's run time. There's one really crappy dissolve transformation scene - which I can forgive because they did their best - and just what Paul transforms into is not at all what you would expect. He doesn't look much like a lizard and is instead this dark, bumpy headed Creature from the Black Lagoon type thing. He goes a little rampagey by killing some random guy outside his house and then some more random people in a tent where he rips one of their arms off... and that's pretty much it. At the the end, he runs around the desert some more before he's killed. Eh, boring.

Fan art for Johnny Longbow's famous stew

Just need to interject here another plot point that begs repeating: The piece of meteor in Paul's head disintegrates after a while and some NASA guys who come to help out tell Johnny Longbow that Paul will basically explode when the moon comes out. Awesome. Just awesome. Bad part is that you never get to see him explode. Johnny Longbow decides to kill Paul before that happens by shooting him with an arrow made of the meteor that hit him. The screen goes red filter and Paul's just kinda gone after that. Oh, you're breaking my heart.

There's some questionable dialogue in Track of the Moon Beast, and the actress playing Kathy is basically a blonde two-by-four, but everybody else does a relatively good job for what they have to work with. The goofy plot warmed me up to the movie quite a bit more than it should have but seriously - when have you ever heard of something like this before? The bad part is the painfully slow pace and way too many boring scenes of people just standing around and talking. I actually say give this one a shot, if only for nostalgia's sake - they don't make 'em like this anymore. Thank goodness.

Franchise Review: The Howling: Reborn (2011)

Ah, we have reached the end, kiddies. I have made it through eight - count 'em, eight - Howling sequels and come out relatively clean on the other side. There have good times and there have been bad times throughout this little adventure, wherein we have traveled to Australia, Budapest, and little dumpy towns like Drago and Pioneer Town. But now we've come to the conclusion with a straight-to-video sequel that came out 16 years after the last sequel. The Howling: Reborn is definitely light-years ahead of all the other films in terms of production value, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's any better.

Will Kidman is your typical teenager who is about to graduate high school without a clue as to what he is supposed to be in his life. He only has one good friend, his father is distant, and he has trouble expressing his feelings to a girl he's liked for years. All that changes after an attack by a creature causes him to realize the unbelievable changes in himself - that he is, in fact, a werewolf. Now he has to decide what to do with his new life, as a pack of powerful werewolves have moved in to take over. The credits claim that this one is based on the book "The Howling II" but I seriously doubt that the book could have been more than just a basic inspiration for the story based on the outcome here.

The whole movie is really about as generic, formulaic, and cliched as they come, mostly when it comes to the characters. Will, although quite well-played by Landon Liboiron, is not nearly as sympathetic as they try to make him - he needed something more to his character to make him different than every other loser-turned-awesome-person-of-circumstance. His goofy friend Sachin has made his own horror movie, and therefore is Will's go-to person when he wants to know all about werewolves (and they always seem to be right about that particular movie's werewolf lore as opposed to the others, you know?). Eliana is the outgoing, wild, but still vulnerable girl that seduces Will through the whole movie even though they make it seem like the two have never talked until a couple of days ago.

The high school portrayed in this movie is just atrocious. The comparison of high school to a prison is entirely appropriate in this instance because this place is some kind of very high tech Fort Knox. It is ridiculously unbelievable. Maybe in 20 or 30 years high schools will be able to be this secure (why, though, is still my question) but it doesn't even seem necessary where these kids are. Get this: they are actually able to completely lock down the entire school - with like metal gates over all the windows and such. Seriously, they're a bunch of middle class, snotty white kids. I'm not seeing the immediate danger to make this worthwhile of the taxpayer's money. The lockdown thing does end up making for a good plot point when Will and Eliana get trapped inside with all the werewolves at the end, but still. Come on.

The werewolves? They're actually pretty good once they (again) finally show up at the end. They're super-strong with weird acrobatic abilities, and they're probably the best looking werewolves of the series. A lot like the Dog Soldiers werewolves. Will's mom is the alpha wolf of her little pack and there's lots of crap talk about her wanting Will to give into his animal side and join the family, blah blah blah. Then Will finds out that he "accidentally" made Eliana into a werewolf (which is actually good because she saves him) so then they have to do another kind of emotional scene where he, like, talks her back into being a human because they love each other so much. Ugh, too much emotional stuff going on. Will's voiceover by the end gets a mite cheesy when he's getting all philosophical about basically the whole meaning of life, as well. It's nice writing but it's the same kind of stuff you've always heard about the dual nature of man and what it means to be human, BLAH BLAH BLAH.

Despite any overall lack of ingenuity here, I must say that this movie is still a hell of a lot easier to watch than any of the previous Howling movies. It's updated and snazzy looking, with a younger cast and a lot more in the action department which is something this series was seriously lacking. Not a terrible movie, really. Just kinda... meh. The ending is similar to the original's - Will broadcasts his transformation to warn people of the werewolf threat - and I only hope that it is some kind of ambiguous ending and not the beginning of yet another Howling movie. This Howling adventure has been fun, friends, but there's only so much I can take.

Franchise Review: The Howling [7]: New Moon Rising (1995)

Given the general, overall suckiness of all these Howling movies, I wasn't in the least bit fazed when everybody tried to tell me that The Howling: New Moon Rising was the absolute worst of the series. They're all bad! Why should this one be any different, you know? Well, it turns out that this one is possibly a new kind of bad.

Long-haired Australian biker boy Ted Smith rides into tiny Pioneer Town and gets a job at the local bar. He's related in some way to three previous Howling movies, but I didn't really remember how until they told me. Anyway, the usual starts to happen - disappearances and murders start to occur and seems to be the work of a "large animal," and as the new kid in town, townspeople start to suspect Ted as the culprit. Meanwhile, a priest and an inspector are hot on the trail of missing werewolf Marylou (from Howling 5) and it leads them right into Pioneer Town.

The movie actually sets itself up for the audience quite nicely. The opening scene is three guys standing around a skeleton found in the desert, and they all say, respectively, the best-slash-worst first lines of any movie I've ever heard - "Jesus Christ!" "Holy shit!" "Mother of God!" So appropriate for the reactions everyone will probably have while watching this movie. It doesn't get any better after this first scene, it just gets more stupid and boring.

The bar that Ted gets a job at - Pappy and Harriet's Pioneer Town Palace - is where everybody in town hangs out all the time. And this where a good chunk of the movie takes place, with some very uninteresting, inane, and unfunny scenes that have no relevance or importance whatsoever. This includes the most unenthusiastic line dancing I have ever seen, lots of drinking by the menfolk at all times of the day, lots of bad joke-telling, and far too many musical interludes for me to be comfortable with. My goodness, all those shitty montages with that shitty country music playing over them? All the random scenes of Harriet and Pappy singing with the band at the bar? Singing around the campfire? Ugh, stop it! Stop it now! This movie is certainly a first because it seems to be the first werewolf country western musical movie. And that's a horrible thing to be. Also, fuck George Jones and the number of times they mention him.

New Moon Rising infamously strings together its own flimsy plot by saying that it's all connected to the three previous Howling films, and actually includes scenes from all of them. I never would have guessed that Ted was the same guy who survived the castle in Howling 5 but apparently he is. Shows how memorable that movie was. Ted was also a guy in Drago that Marie Adams (who actually has a few scenes in this movie, too) supposedly killed in Howling 4, and they totally made that shit up. Anyway, by the end, the plot gets twisted up so much that it gets really ridiculous. The priest and inspector are talking the situation out and they bring up things that the audience never saw happen so it's incredibly confusing. Three dead guys all lead to Ted, but apparently it was the work of Marylou the werewolf who was somehow able to assume the form of another person (not possible, by the way!) in the town, this chick named Cheryl. It's anybody's guess as to why she was trying to frame this guy in the first place or what her ultimate plan was. Whatever it was, she failed miserably.

Here we are with the seventh Howling movie, and while there is plenty of werewolf talk throughout, we again don't actually see any werewolves until the very end. Very briefly. Like about 15 seconds. The red filter werewolf POV shots were more exciting than Cheryl's lame transformation and her equally lame demise that occurs off screen when she's shot by the townspeople after bursting through the door. The end.

And not a moment too soon. The Howling: New Moon Rising is simply a pointless movie. It sucks, and it's pointless and irritating with how horrible it is. All the actors, including writer-producer-director-actor Clive Turner, are terribly lifeless and boring, much like the rest of the movie. It's not even funny though it tries very hard to be and those attempts just turn out to be really pathetic. Ugh, bad movie. Do yourself a big favor and avoid this one at all costs.

Check This Out! "Why Horror ?" Documentary Trailer

If you're a horror fan, you've probably asked yourself at one time or another just why you are so attracted to the genre. Maybe you've even felt bad about yourself because of it. I even wrote a college paper and later a blog post about the subject and that really helped me come to terms with it and be okay with my obsession. 

The filmmakers for this documentary "Why Horror?" are also looking to explore the subject and while they seem to have a great start so far based on this Kickstarter trailer, they still need some help getting the word out there! So check out this trailer and share it with every other horror fan you know. 

More information on the filmmakers and the docu itself can be found at the Kickstarter link HERE. This looks to me like it's going to be a very fun and informative docu and I can't wait to see how it turns out. They've already got interviews with such greats like George Romero, Don Coscarelli, Eli Roth, and Alexandre Aja, so you know how serious the filmmakers are about the project, and that's something I can really respect.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/whyhorror/why-horror-a-new-documentary

Franchise Review: Howling 6: The Freaks (1991)

In the palindrome year of 1991, somebody decided that after four bad Howling movies, they might be able do it right for once. And surprisingly, they kind of do. Don't get me wrong. I will probably never watch any of these movies willingly again (except maybe for Howling 2 because that one was a freaking hoot), but Howling 6: The Freaks is strangely okay, if your standards are fairly low like mine usually are.

Ian Richards is a quiet drifter who comes to the dying town of Canton Bluff looking for work. Local man Dewey man gives him a job helping to fix up the church, while Ian makes nice with the man's pretty daughter Lizzy, and tries to hide the fact that he is a werewolf. However, the owner of a traveling circus, Harker, learns Ian's secret and kidnaps him to make him a part of the rest of his freaks.

What's missing from Howling 6 - and not in a bad way - the comedic element that sometimes very prominent in the previous films. The sixth entry takes its idea very seriously with hardly a hint at anything funny, even when it comes to the freaks in Harker's World of Wonders. That doesn't mean that the movie is magically any better than first four sequels, but heck, I have to give them an A for effort for not making this a total shitfest like it very well could have become.

Speaking of Harker's World of Wonders... that was interesting. When Lizzy and Ian go through the unusually large space where the main freaks are held, Harker gives them a personal tour while they view the half man-half woman, the midget with a third arm, the newbie freak Alligator Boy, and a clown that... bites the head off a chicken? Whuh? How is that supposed to be an "oddity"? Well yes, it's odd and very disturbing, but not your normal freak fair at these things. Harker is very good at running the show. He is very creepy in his looks and demeanor, but also seems strangely respectful of all his freaks. So he can't be all bad, right? The Funhouse and now this movie keep making me wonder whether or not it would be cool if they still had shady sideshow circuses like this anymore. There would be outrage from the community, for sure, but who doesn't want to see a mutated pig fetus or something?

The special effects, while well done, are just not to my liking aesthetically for the particular monsters they are trying to portray. Ian's transformation into a werewolf is one of those typical, really painful-looking transformations where we see fingernails growing, feet lengthening, etc. until they do the full shot at the end. I hate the look of this werewolf, mostly because he has no snout and his face is mostly hairless. How can you call something that looks like that a "wolf" of any kind? The rest of the body is good (even if the hair on top of his head was way too long) but doesn't make up for that awful face. One of the worst werewolves out there. There's also a bit of a change with the werewolf lore in that not only can the full moon change Ian, but he can also transform by use of an amulet and certain magic words that Harker recites.

The big reveal - oh no! a spoiler! - near the conclusion of the film is that Harker is a vampire. Kind of. Actually, he's a bald, purple vampire with no nose and pointy, chewed-up ears. WTF. And the first thing that came to my mind when I saw him was that Buffy, the Vampire Slayer of all people ripped off his look for the ubervamps in season seven of that show.

The ubervamp look didn't bother me there, but the fact that Harker was a weird purplish, blue color really threw me off. I wouldn't have even known that Harker was supposed to be a vampire if it weren't for the coffin full of dirt (disguised as a couch) in his trailer or the fact that Ian staked him at the end and ultimately killed him by exposing him to sunlight.

I didn't love any of the actors, but I didn't hate any of them either. The girl playing Lizzy had a really annoying voice and no awareness of her physicality, and other than that, these guys did an okay job for the caliber of movie they were in. Nobody stands out except maybe for Bruce Payne as Harker, and that freak who played the half man-half woman. He/she could have had a real career at that. The lead actor playing Ian is easily forgettable, even after his semi-sweet moments of not eating the kitty and walking off into the sunset at the end with Alligator Boy (they became buds).

All in all, really not a bad flick. It's not blatantly retarded like some of the earlier Howling films were and that gives it some major points in my book. The plot could have used a bit more work and there could have been more character development - but then the film could have been a bit too serious for its own good. Strangely I didn't miss the lack of werewolf attacks in Howling 6. The fight scene at the end between Ian and Harker made up for it and then the movie ends quickly after that, as it should have.

Oh my gosh, you guys, I am so freaking close. Only two Howling movies left. I think I might actually make it through okay.

Franchise Review: Howling 5: The Rebirth (1989)

Aye-yi-yi. I keep torturing myself over and over again with these wacky Howling movies. So most of these are (loosely) based on The Howling series of books, right? My question is: Where is the connection? Are the books all this disjointed from each other, too, because it's really starting to annoy me a little bit. Aside from the first two movies, all of these Howling movies are just shitty 80s things that have werewolves in them sometimes. Howling 5: The Rebirth is no exception.

In Budapest, a group of people visit an old castle that no one has set foot in for the last 500 years. The castle has a bloody history, as the last people who lived there were massacred, and once members of the new group start disappearing - found later with their throats ripped out - some begin to wonder if they were brought there for a reason.

So I don't get to say this too often, but I love castles. Whenever I see an honest-to-goodness castle in a movie, I can't help but wonder how awesome it would be to live in one. Candlelight and torches, big doors, and maybe a secret passage or two. Love that shit. It was good for the Howling movies to make a leap like this and do things a little different, maybe attempting to go back to the werewolf origins or something. The castle set here is used fairly well, and the overall production value of the movie actually looks good and maybe a bit more professional than some of the other Howling films. The direction is merely average, with nothing all that inventive with camerawork or lighting.

A few nitpicks about the castle, though: Any outside shots of the castle in the blizzard just looks like very thick television snow (how appropriate) playing over a still shot of the building so we never really get that great a view of what this one looks like. On the inside, it seems to have aged well in 500 years, with hardly a cobweb to be seen, especially in the main areas - considering what we are told before that this is the first time the castle has ever been opened since the massacre in the 1400s.

One thing that becomes very fun to look forward to in Howling 5 is the song of death, as I came to call it. Whenever a character finds him or herself all alone in the castle, you know that a werewolf is going to come along soon to gobble them up or whatever. Once that happens, the scene cuts with the same repeated Omen-type scary religious music. The creepy chorus is shouting something like "SANCTUS!" and it made me laugh and sing along every single time it happened.

The characters are quite stupid. I mean, the whole setup for the movie is a little hard to swallow to begin with. All of these random people - a ditzy girl, a Scandinavian actress, a photographer, a tennis player, etc. - have all been invited to the same castle opening with no real reason as to why they were even picked in the first place, as far as I could tell. And they never question that until things start going bad. Then once they get there, the "opening" consists of all of them just sitting around drinking and eating.

The actors are not completely terrible, but they definitely could have done a better job. A lot of the dialogue is stilted and doesn't sound natural at all. Elizabeth She is of course the highlight of the piece, playing stupid and naive Marylou probably a little bit too well. Every word out of her mouth screams "Valley Girl." Such a hoot. She really should have just been running every scene to make it that much easier for the audience to watch this thing. The blonde actress says it best when she tells Marylou that she has a, uh, "way with words."

I'm actually not really saying that Howling 5: The Rebirth is a bad movie - it's not good, but it's not complete dreck, either - I think I'm just frustrated that they still hide the werewolves for so long. This is the fifth Howling movie. We know there are probably going to be werewolves in here at some point, and yet these movies and especially this one, make it seem like some big mystery ("Oh, maybe it's big dogs!") until the wolves are finally revealed in the last fifteen minutes or so. I'm also frustrated that all of the movies have been so boring so far. There's a fairly nice attempt at a whodunnit mystery with this one, but most of it is dull. I had it figured out who the werewolf would turn out to be early on, so the reveal is not as cool as it should have been. There isn't even a big reveal sequence, just that last shot of the movie. They could have made that a lot more interesting.

Ugh, still three more Howling movies to go. Wish me luck.

Franchise Review: Howling 4: The Original Nightmare (1988)

Instead of getting better, these Howling films are getting just a little bit worse with each new one. Howling 4: The Original Nightmare is not nearly as terrible or schizophrenic as the previous two installments, so that means that it's also not as entertaining. Howling 4 is more of a retelling of the first film-slash-more faithful adaptation of the original book (or so I've read), and though it's not a bad film, it seriously lacks in the werewolf action and is more of a mystery tale that sorta has werewolves in it.

After having strange hallucinations, Marie Adams and her husband Richard decide to get away from the stresses of her life by renting a cottage for a few weeks in the small town of Drago. Once there, though, Marie's apparent overactive imagination causes her to hear howling in the woods at night and have visions of people who are dead. When a woman, Janice, comes by looking to find out what happened to her friend in Drago, she and Marie start to investigate just what is going on in the mysterious and secretive town.

While Howling 2 and 3 had almost no character development or setup and were mostly just a lot of werewolf nonsense, Howling 4 is pretty much the complete opposite. There is a much more involved storyline here, although some of it is not explained very well. The hallucinations that Marie has at the beginning of the movie - which in fact turn out to be premonitions of a sort - aren't explained at all. She's having some kind of nervous breakdown and seeing these things because of... I don't know. She keeps having these hallucinations after they get to the cabin and it only serves to move the plot along and give Marie and Janice more clues to the mystery of Drago.

The cast of characters is okay, although not really interesting. Marie's husband Richard is all rugged and handsome, but soon goes full douche when he gets sick of hearing Marie's crazy talk about howling in the night. Marie herself is pretty blah, Janice is not at all believable as a former nun, and the only cool people around here are the husband and wife who own the general store. Eleanor, the eccentric local artist with unnaturally pointy boobs, reminded me a bit too much of Gozer. Anybody else see a resemblance? Maybe it's just the 80s.

So there are eventually going to be some werewolves in this werewolf movie, right? Unfortunately you have to be patient here because none of the really good stuff that horror fans are expecting come until literally the last ten minutes. There are some mild werewolf attacks on a pair of hikers, but it it done in POV so you don't really get to see anything. The awesomeness is short-lived and only barely saves the movie from how boring it was in the first hour and twenty minutes. When we first actually see a werewolf it is when Richard goes out to meet Eleanor in the woods to get it on again, and she changes - only for a second, mind you, but it's there.

Even better than any of the werewolf shenanigans is the fact that this movie has one of those scenes that makes me want to vomit. Melting bodies. I have a love/hate relationship with any movie or scene that contains a prolonged shot of an entire human body or just a part of the body that is melting. After Richard has been bitten by Eleanor, on a night of a full moon, we see Richard running in the woods when he suddenly appears to be in pain. You think he is going to transform like any normal werewolf movie would do, but these sick fuckers here decide to show us a very long scene of Richard's body just melting into nasty goop that puddles around his feet. Absolutely vomit-inducing. Thank you for that. The effects are really amazing in this scene

In the end, Janice and Marie get rid of all the werewolves a little bit too easily and then it's all over. Again, Howling 4: The Original Nightmare is not a bad movie, but it's also one that's not very exciting until it's almost too late. The climax is fun, way more gory and disgusting than I expected from the rest of the movie, and since none of these Howling movies are even connected to each other in the first place, there's always room to grow! More werewolf fun to come!

Franchise Review: Howling 3: The Marsupials (1987)

What have I gotten myself into with these Howling sequels? So far, they are beyond words bad. All I can say is that Howling 2 is damn near Gone With the Wind next to this ungodly ridiculous sequel, Howling 3: The Marsupials. I'm actually quite flabbergasted at the suckiness of this movie, but it is most definitely one of those movies that if you're in the right mood when you watch it, you can have a most interesting time.

I don't even know how to synopsize the movie like I usually try to do. Let me give it a go: Okay, there's a professor named Beckmeyer whose grandfather got footage of apparently a real werewolf being killed in Australia in 1905. Wanting real proof, Beckmeyer travels to Australia and it surprisingly doesn't take him that long to find a bunch of werewolves just all over the fucking place. He studies them with some other eggheads. We also meet the young, beautiful werewolf Jerboa, who escapes her werewolf tribe and falls in love with an American, and they have a little marsupial rat baby together. A lot of other insane stuff happens too but I don't have the brain power to work it all out right now.

Similar to its predecessor, Howling 3 is a movie that makes no sense from one scene to the next, and instead of having an actual, you know, plot or something insane like that, the "filmmakers" instead choose to just throw into the movie every bad or crazy idea they could come up with. Then they apparently just edited the scenes together - probably while drunk - hoping that everything turns out all right in the end. It doesn't. There are a lot of different subplots going on and they never mesh together right. There is a serious lack of exposition for pretty much all of these subplots, and instead the audience is expected to just jump right in and immediately know what the hell is going on and who these characters are. In a way, the movie at times does seem to take itself rather seriously, and other times it seems to revel in its own absurdity. So many things are going on with Howling 3: confusion, hilarity, bewilderment. I was laughing hysterically by the end credits making me wonder if I was going crazy or not.

Again, I'm stuck on where to begin with the specifics. The dialogue? The schizophrenic plot? The three werewolf chicks dressed as nuns? Let's start with a few things that weren't all that terrible. I liked the actress playing Jerboa, even though she was really bad at playing an actress for the "Shape Shifters Part 8" movie within the movie. I loved the little clips of the movie that Jerboa and Donny go to see at the theater because that was HILARIOUS. I kind of loved all the cheesy camera angles they used where the people's faces were too close to the camera because you don't see that very often. For good reason, too, it looks really amateur. The movie also did actually have one good action scene when the military guys (that came from... somewhere? to hunt down... someone?) are attacked by a werewolf in the woods. Another good thing? The ending! Yes, the ending to Howling 3 comes completely out of nowhere from where the movie started out, and yet it still manages to be strangely satisfying, at least it was for me.

The werewolf related stuff is surprisingly not that bad, though definitely not the best either. With the exception of the weird, hairless little things that the nuns turn into, many of the special effects are well done. Jerboa's birthing scene when she has her little rat baby thing is incredibly strange and made me feel a little bit sleazy, but the effects don't suck that much. Jerboa's got a nice... pouch. Gosh, that's so weird. It's weird for me to think of a werewolf having a freaking pouch, being a freaking marsupial, when I thought those were completely different things! They might have explained the whole reasoning behind that hogwash somewhere in the movie but I must have gotten lost in the sea of the choppy plot. It was also very unbelievable when Jerboa shows the father Donny the baby thing in her pouch. Donny is not the least bit freaked out by the fact that a) he has a baby with someone he just had sex with a couple of days ago or something, b) the baby is barely humanoid, or c) that the mother is carrying the baby around in a POUCH.

Again, there are almost too many bad things about this movie to talk about them all in one review. All the crap with Beckmeyer and his experiments. Thylo. My goodness, I could write a novel about Thylo, my pervy little bald-headed werewolf. So Howling 3: The Marsupials is a bad movie. There is almost nothing remotely redeemable about it except for the fact that it is so shitty. And if you're in the kind of slap-happy mood I was in when I watched it (after being awake for nearly 20 hours), you can appreciate the hilarity of the badness. Can't wait to see what Howling 4 has in store for me, although now I am more than a little worried...

Franchise Review: Howling 2: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1986)

I wanted to do this little Howling marathon by including all of the movies of course, but short of buying it, it doesn't look like I'll be able to watch the first Howling just now. It's definitely unfortunate because I have only seen that one once, many years ago, and I barely remember it. Surely, however, it couldn't have been more entertaining than Howling 2: Your Sister is a Werewolf was.

The movie begins at the funeral of Karen White from the first movie, where Christopher Lee, playing occult investigator Stefan, informs her brother Ben that - you guessed it - "your sister is a werewolf." Karen's colleague Jenny also gets involved as the three travel to Transylvania to put an end to the one who started it all, the queen of the werewolves, Stirba.

What. The hell. I'm no stranger to flat out odd and ridiculous movies, let me tell you. The thing about Howling 2 that makes it so odd and ridiculous (and therefore highly entertaining), however, is just how freaking random everything is. The whole movie is a random mishmash of funky weird shit that has no flow whatsoever. After watching it for a while, you find yourself saying, "Oh, we're... we're going here now? Okay, sure, just transition without making any sense, yeah. That'll be fun." There's a bare minimum of a story here, and the movie just jumps right into it all with pretty much no set up. By the conclusion, I completely lost sight of where we all were and how we got there in the first place.

Oh, there is plenty of crazy to talk about here, but where does one begin? First of all, ditch any ideas you might have had about character, plot, good special effects - the stuff all those other "serious" movies rely way too much on. That doesn't happen here. Like I said, the movie dives right into the craziness with Ben and Jenny having almost no problem with the existence of werewolves and then deciding out of the blue to go to Transylvania with this weird guy where they do... kinda nothing. There was no reason for them to go to Transylvania. Anyway.

The actors playing werewolves here... give those people a gold star. They had to do the most stupid, embarrassing shit in Howling 2, but I'll be damned if they didn't seem totally committed! The hot black werewolf chick Mariana seemed to have the most fun, constantly growling and acting all werewolf-y even when she wasn't transformed into a werewolf. All of the werewolves do that, actually, and it's soooo dumb and hilarious. I'm pretty sure no one can talk about this movie without mentioning one particular scene: the werewolf threesome. Stirba, Vlad, and Mariana gettin' it on in the most sloppy and unsexy way possible. Wow.

Saying that this movie is very 80s is a major understatement. There's shitty music blaring everywhere and some serious rock 'n' roll and punk-related costuming. Stirba wears the best one, which I cannot describe but only show:

Rock it, girlfriend. The werewolf party scenes were reminiscent of the beginning of The Lost Boys - minus awesome saxophone man, but plus an equally hilarious punk band - and did nothing to help me take this movie the least bit seriously. Cocaine was pretty big in the 80s, yes? Okay, I think I understand the movie a bit more now.

The editing. Oh my goodness, the editing. It made the movie all the more fun. If there is one thing I love, it is a movie that has the sense of humor to use one of my favorite editing techniques - amateur screen wipes! Diagonal wipe. Diamond wipe. SPIRAL wipe. This movie uses a freaking spiral wipe and it was glorious. It also likes to cut to random statues or whatever on buildings, the people at the fair in Vlkava (the town in Transylvania that is the apparent epicenter for werewolves), and they also cut back several times to previous scenes in the movie. Maybe just to fill time or because they didn't know what the hell else to do. 

The best scene of the entire movie, however, is what plays over the credits. I've never seen a movie do anything like this before. It's pretty much like a music video for the punk band featured in the movie where they use all the good stuff that you've seen previously - most specifically focusing on the part where Stirba rips her top off to expose her boobies. I could not stop laughing. This part was edited beautifully for their purposes of yet again making Howling 2 as ridiculous as it possibly can.

Oh, so much more to talk about here. So little space on the internet. With horrible fight sequences, gunshots only seen in close-up, werewolf three-ways, and werewolves who can shoot red lightening out of their fingertips and pop a dwarf's eyeballs, Howling 2: Your Sister is a Werewolf is immensely successful at being so random, so stupid, and so freaking awesome at the same time. Big time kudos for all that. 

HAPPY OCTOBER

I know my favorite month of the year has only just begun, but I'm a little disappointed that it doesn't quite feel like October yet. Today it was in the mid-80s and a bit muggy - totally not fall weather. I want to be chilly and wear hoodies and flannel pajama pants. We've been having the foggy mornings but not the crispy evenings.

Despite that, it's still October! Best month ever that leads up to the greatest holiday ever. But once I again, I suck big time and have nothing blog-related planned. The reason I haven't been blogging lately is partly because of Breaking Bad (which I just started watching) and partly because I haven't watched anything all that blog-worthy lately. Or I've just run out of things to say, which I never thought would happen.

Have no fear, whatever blog buddies I may have left. I do have at least one series of reviews planned: THE HOWLING SEQUELS MARATHON. Oh, yes. I'm skipping over the first movie and planning on just plowing through all the sequels - and I've never seen any of them before. I hear I'm in for a treat with the third one. 

So have fun this October, bloggers! Let's celebrate like only horror fans know how to!