The Howling & Moon of the Wolf

I need to watch more werewolf movies.
Really, heck, who don't, right?
I decided that the other morning while watching the 1972 tv movie The Moon of the Wolf, starring David Janssen as a small town sheriff in Louisiana where... something is killing people.  The poster sort of spoils it, while the movie itself is rather like a murder mystery, with suspects and clues, til the third act reveal, where you actually get to see the killer for the first time.
It was pretty by the numbers, but workable for the constraints of the medium   In fact, the murder mystery aspect of the story was reminiscent of The Beast Must Die, which was part of my decision to try and watch more in the genre- the idea that werewolf movies- at least the ones where the identity of the werewolf is unknown, like Silver Bullet or Moon of the Wolf, are sort of a cross genre thing, the horror mystery.  I'll be getting back to that in future posts.

One the other hand,  sometimes the werewolves are right in front of you, a point as old as Lon Chaney's The Wolfman and An American Werewolf in London... and of course, The Howling.

Dee Wallace plays a reporter who, after getting attacked while on an assignment, leaves the city to visit a colony/spa run by a psychotherapist to recuperate.

While there, she hears the howling of wolves and realizes... somethings wrong.

Because, yes, it's a colony of werewolves.  Things go downhill for her from there.  But not for the viewer- The Howling is full of references to wolfishness, from clips of the original The Wolfman, including an after the credits bit, vintage Big Bad Wolf cartoons, and (my favorite) a copy of Ginsberg's poem Howl on a character's desk.

I haven't seen this in years, and I was really surprised at how similar it was to Howling IV: The Original Nightmare, which was essentially another film version of Gary Brandner's novel the The Howling that the movie The Howling was based on.  Similar, but so very much better than IV to a degree of noon and midnight.

The Beast Must Die

The Beast Must Die.  I’ve been looking for this Werewolf Whodunnit for a while, and after watching Ten Little Indians, I felt inspired to go look once more- and I didn’t have to look far since it’s on Shudder.

Simple, classic premise: a group of people is gathered at a country house for the weekend, and their host announces that one among them is a killer- only this time, a killer werewolf.

It’s from Amicus, which is like Hammer-lite, in 1974.

Calvin Lockhart plays the host, a self made millionaire hunter who’s going for the most dangerous game of all.  His guests include Peter Cushing, Charles Gray, and Michael Gambon, all mainstays from Hammer.

The Beast Must Die works best as a crazy whodunnit, because as a horror film, it has issues, mostly with effects: lots of blue filter day for night filming and the werewolf… well, it’s a gussied up German Shepherd.  

There’s also a swingin’ hip score that’s THERE during the first sequence of the movie, but thankfully fades less intrusively into the background.

As I’m writing this, another aspect of the movie occurs to me- there’s no sex, no profanity.  The Beast Must Die is a terrific, watch-it-with-the-kids starter film for genre loving parents who want to start the kids on the scary but don’t want to go too terrifying to begin with.

It’s a fun film, and were there not so many other films out there to watch, I’d consider giving The Beast Must Die another go, if only to see how it holds up as a mystery.

Howling IV: The Original Nightmare

Another fun choice- Howling IV: The Original Nightmare.  I've seen the original Howling a couple of times and I've seen Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf at least a half a dozen times- it's really really awesomely bad, with Christopher Lee, Sybill Danning and TV's Captain America Reb Brown.
Knowing that movies get worse the further away from the first in the series, and taking degree of aweful that is H2 into consideration, I figured anything subsequent would be cataclysmically bad.  ... and well, may be it is, or maybe not.

IV is essentially a remake of the first movie, going back to Gary Brandner's original novel as a source.  Filmed in South Africa, pretending to be Callifornia, with a small town sheriff with a Southern twang and a town doctor with an odd combination of Down East and British so it's kind of low budget wacky.

A writer takes time away from Los Angeles, because she's having a nervous breakdown.  She gets away from the city to a small town called Drago, where she hears howling but no one else seems to.   It's not actually a nervous breakdown, it was visions.  ... and the howling?  Werewolves.

The actual Werewolves don't get much screen time, and it's more "suspense" than horror, but as a "paranoid city dweller in a scary rural environment story" it works pretty well.

(Additional points for having a theme song sung by Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues.)