BARGAIN BASEMENT SEQUEL A WASTE OF CAST AND FILM
Sun-Sentinel - November 15, 1986
Author: BILL KELLEY, Television Writer
The Howling II has been creeping into and out of South Florida off and on for weeks now, usually hitting the midnight circuits and never staying long enough for anyone to track it down and burn all the prints. But we can at least do the next best thing: warn you not to see it.
This follow-up to Joe Dante`s 1981 werewolf thriller is a sequel in name only. It begins at the funeral of the Dee Wallace character from that film -- a TV anchorwoman turned into a werewolf -- then jumps to modern Transylvania, where three intrepid werewolf hunters stalk the leader of a cult that has infested Los Angeles.
Want to know how bad this movie is? Christopher Lee is in it, as the hero, and he doesn`t give a good performance. Now, here`s a guy who has been in more than his share of movies that are beneath him, always playing them as if they were Shakespeare, but Howling II is so bad even he couldn`t rise above it. It`s like Laurence Olivier staggering through The Boys From Brazil.
Clairvoyance does not accompany acting skill, or probably no one -- not even Z-movie queen Sybil Danning, awful as ever as the lead werewolf -- would have appeared in this film. Everything is inept. You`ve never seen a movie with such a hurried, slapdash look.
Although shot in Czechoslovakia (doubling for Transylvania), the film fails to take advantage of the colorful location. The photography is worse than you`d see in a home movie, filled with jump cuts and unmotivated zooms (and the color is washed out and grainy due to cheap lab work). Phillippe Mora`s direction is thuddingly unimaginative. The zero budget allows no special effects. The makeups, what little we can see of them, looks like dime-store Halloween costumes. Forget the state-of-the-art makeups of the first Howling -- the filmmakers went to the bargain basement this time.
But the worst thing -- even worse than turning it into a sex- horror film with orgies (and you haven`t cringed until you`ve seen those) -- is the waste of its cast. Reb Brown, the male second banana, isn`t Spencer Tracy, but he was adequate in Uncommon Valor; he`s given nothing to do here. One of Lee`s talented British contemporaries, Ferdy Mayne (seen on U.S. television as a jewel thief on two Cagney & Lacey episodes), is killed off so quickly that his part could have been played by the drive r of the studio`s catering truck.
Horror fans waiting for Lee to do his first werewolf movie, and as the hero no less, were in for the rudest shock. Try as he does, not even he emerges with dignity. Howling II manages to make both him and the eastern European landscape seem dull -- which is no mean feat.
MOVIE REVIEW
(No stars) The Howling II
Three werewolf hunters journey from modern Los Angeles to Transylvania to destroy the leader of a cult of werewolves.
Credits: With Christopher Lee, Reb Brown, Sybil Danning, Annie McEnroe. Directed by Phillippe Mora.
Nudity, violence, gore, coarse language.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`Howling II' nothing like facetious original
Houston Chronicle - March 18, 1986
Author: JEFF MILLAR, Staff
By calling the film "Howling II" (rated R), its makers commit a deception that in any other industry would make ambitious young lawyers at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice drool.
None of the principals involved in "The Howling," the cleverly facetious gross-out movie of a few years ago, had anything to do with this. No screenplay by John Sayles. No direction by Joe Dante. No Slim Pickens turning into a werewolf.
The filmmakers, unless my old eyes deceive me, evoke the progenitor film only by splicing into their film some of the turns-into-a-werewolf special effects used in "The Howling.
" This has to do with the surviving brother of the Dee Wallace character hitching up with a TV reporter and going along with Christopher Lee, as an "occult investigator," to Transylvania, motherland of werewolves, to put a stake through the heart of a witch.
It was written by Robert Sarno and Gary Brandon and directed by Philippe Mora. One senses that these filmmakers hoped for Sayles' and Dante's wryness. But they're a light year away from having enough talent to achieve their objectives. The movie is junk.
I extracted some cruel pleasure in watching Reb Brown and Annie McEnroe, as the brother and the TV reporter, struggling to find a way to deliver the nitwit dialogue. Lee, who's been delivering nitwit horror -movie dialogue since the Truman administration, knows how to protect himself. One imagines Brown and McEnroe after shots, shielding their eyes from the lights and looking out into the darkness that conceals the camera and saying, "Look, can someone give us a break?"
No comments:
Post a Comment