Tonight I went back to the early '80s once again with "The Howling" (1981), director Joe Dante's Werewolf movie that made a big splash at the time for it's makeup effects. It got good reviews upon it's release, partly for it's fresh approach to the Werewolf genre, but also for the man-to-wolf transformation scenes, groundbreaking at the time and still effective today, CGI eat your heart out.
My friends and I all went to see "The Howling", and like "The Fog" - which I reviewed last night - I think at the time I thought it was "pretty good", meaning that it wasn't near as good as a realistic horror film like "The Hills Have Eyes", but for a big studio production it wasn't too shabby.
In last night's blog I remarked that in hindsight I was wrong about "The Fog", which I had also thought was "pretty good" or simply "okay" at the time, but after seeing it a second time - 38 years later - I had a complete change of opinion and thought it was really good if not excellent. This was because I was better able to appreciate the film for it's atmosphere, which is eerily fantastic, instead of discounting it wholesale for it's lack of hardcore shock, the tack I'd have taken when I was twenty years old.
To be fair to myself, I was a pretty astute observer even at 20, and my take on things from a "gut feeling" standpoint would not be much different from what they are now. But as we all experience, the tendency to see things in extremes (or the need to have shock, or to listen only to heavy metal, or things of that nature) starts to fade as we go through the decades, from our early 20s to our 30s, and then through our 40s and 50s, when time begins to speed up. Through all that time (which thankfully rubberbands, i.e. slows down as well), we acquire a lot of nuance in our perspectives. And for me, as the years went by and as far as horror movies are concerned, I began to appreciate the atmosphere more and the shock value less. Don't get me wrong, I still love a good "gotcha" moment as much as I always did, but what I really love is a spooky sense of impending terror, or doom or any macabre feeling when it pervades an entire movie, such as the quiet but sinister feeling that lurks in a movie like "The Innocents". I might not have been able to sit through that film in my 20s because I would not have had the patience. Now, I've seen it several times and consider it to be one of the scariest films ever made, no contest.
All of this rambling brings me back to "The Howling", and why I was a bit disappointed that it did not hold up nearly as well as did "The Fog", after all these years. "The Fog", though infused with modern lighting effects and other "specialties", was made with no excess. In that sense, it was very much like a classic Universal horror film of old. Every scene built the suspense right into the next, and the sense of horror was built step by step and moment by moment, as the story was unspooled by a tightly constructed script. All of the best horror movies do this, they never relax the chain of events, except maybe for a few brief moments here and there. "The Fog" followed this formula, and though it was short on teenage "gross-out" moments, it was structurally brilliant. It looked incredible and it never let up, from start to finish.
"The Howling", on the other hand, began with promise. Dee Wallace (of "Hills Have Eyes" fame and later "E.T." as well) is a TV newswoman investigating a serial killer loose in Los Angeles. The street footage you see in the first ten minutes gives you a view into what Hollywood Boulevard looked like in the 70s and early 80s ; lots of neon-lit porno shops and prostitution fronts. It looked like New York in those days. Now, that aspect of the street is all gone, but in the movie it is the setting for news anchor Wallace to daringly meet up with an anonymous caller who is claiming to be the killer. She wants to be the heroine, the lady who solves the case and presents it to Los Angeles on TV.
But she gets a lot more than she bargained for, and to be honest, the scene of her meeting with the killer in the porno shop is borderline disgusting and would probably not be released by a major studio in this day and age. But the early 80s were a time of experimentation. Anyhow, despite the repellent nature of that scene, the opening 20 minutes of the film sets the viewer up for an exciting story, a taut thriller. The action is quick, the story is in motion, what will happen next?
Well, director Dante and screenwriter John Sayles made the decision to make a 90 degree angle turn into black comedy after that, by throwing the entire frame of reference from Hollywood to travel up to "feel good" Northern California, to a coastal retreat akin to the Esalen Institute or some other phoney baloney "encounter group" conglomerate. The newswoman, Dee Wallace, is sent to this institute by her boss to recover and to have a psychiatric evaluation by the resident doctor, after she is attacked by the serial killer in the porno shop in Hollywood. But at the Institute in Northern California, things only get worse, for Wallace and for the viewer.
For some reason, when he gets to "Esalen", Joe Dante decided to go the black comedy route, only twenty minutes after he had established the beginnings of a serious thriller. Now we are amongst a bunch of kooks, the kinds of which California is unfairly stereotyped for, and the movie meanders around these people for the next forty minutes, taking up the entire middle of the film. Man is that a bummer, and it almost had me considering to turn the movie off at one point, but I persevered. Dante throws some Werewolf sex into the middle of this miasma as if he knew it would be the only thing to keep you watching at that point.
I was saying to myself, "well, you can't win 'em all", when all of a sudden the movie rebounded, thirty minutes from the end. Other reviewers have remarked about this too. The last half hour is great, and delivers the promise of the first twenty minutes. This is when the major Werewolf action breaks out, and now you finally have the horror film you've been waiting for, with great makeup effects courtesy of industry legends Rick Baker and Rob Bottin. Watching this sudden rebirth, I went from thinking "two thumbs down" and "man, I should have went with 'Dr Renault's Secret' instead", to thinking "wow, this must be why I remembered 'The Howling' as being so good".
I remembered it fondly because of the final half hour, which is pretty doggone good, and at that point you are made aware, via some dialogue, why the entire Esalen Institute encounter took place at all. It seemed ridiculous for Joe Dante to shift the action there, but it turns out he had a reason.
That reason, plus the last thirty minutes and the promising start, were ultimately enough to get me to change my mind about the two downwardly depending thumbs and to reposition them so that they are both pointing upright, but I do so with caution.
Two cautious thumbs up, therefore, for "The Howling", but they are not strong thumbs by any stretch of the imagination. It's just that I thought one thumb was not enough, and two without reservation were too much.
Two thumbs in this case means that the movie is worth watching, especially to catch the time period of the carefree early 80s, and for it's Werewolf effects, but the thumbs are wobbly because of the middle 40 minutes, when the story turns goofy and becomes unfocused from time to time.
If you are gonna see a black comedy werewolf movie, watch "An American Werewolf In London" instead. But give "The Howling" a shot, too, if you have nothing better to watch tomorrow evening.
It's not a classic, but you might find something redeeming in it, as I did.
See you in the morn. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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