When I first told people that I would be covering the Howling franchise in July, everyone's reaction was the same. All of them asked, "Isn't there a film where the werewolves are Australian and/or marsupials?" And my response would always be, "Yes, that's Howling III: The Marsupials." So I guess this review is dedicated to all of you. You know who you are.
In the Australian outback, a young woman named Jeroba runs away to escape her abusive stepfather and makes her way to Sydney, where she is found by a young man named Donny who wants to cast her in the lead of a horror film he is working on. She accepts and the two of them start a relationship, despite some of Jeroba's stranger comments such as how the werewolves she sees in movies "don't transform like that". Jeroba is, in fact, a were-marsupial, complete with gestation pouch, which is soon to come in handy as it is discovered that she is pregnant after being triggered into a transformation at the movie's wrap party by strobing lights, flees and is hit by a car. At the same time as all of this, anthropologist Harry Beckmeyer is investigating the existence of werewolves, worried that werewolves are a dangerous worldwide phenomenon. He hears of Jeroba and wants to study her, but before he can three of her sisters, dressed as nuns, arrive in the city and kidnap Jeroba and take her back to their hometown of "Flow" (twinned with the American city of Nilbog, no doubt), killing anyone in their way. However, as luck would have it, there is another werewolf in Sydney - a Russian ballerina recently defected from the Soviet Union so she can search for the were she is allegedly fated to be mated to. This turns out to be Jeroba's stepfather Thylo, and as weres are captured and subjected to scientific tests, Beckmeyer starts to have second thoughts and helps Thylo and Olga escape. They meet with Jeroba (carrying her son in her pouch now) and Donny in the outback and together attempt to survive as the Army and others try to hunt them down and exterminate their species once and for all...
Well, you certainly can't blame people for remembering this movie over some of the others in the series, that's for sure. Were-marsupials, a woman carrying her fetal child in a pouch in her belly, and the shot of three were-marsupials dressed as nuns alone are going to be embossed on your memory after this film. Howling III: The Marsupials is a very strange film - quite slow-moving, washed-out in places and with many scenes that seem rather dream-like; it all dovetails into the Aboriginal spirituality it sometimes brings up to explain the origin of the were-marsupials, who claim to be descended from the spirit of a thylacine (a species of wolf who were allegedly hunted to extinction in the 1930s). That aspect and the inclusion of both white and Aboriginal natives in the pack (and the apparent ability of pack elders to call the spirit of their ancestor thylacine into them) is probably the most interesting part of the film for me, and I was slightly disappointed that there wasn't more of it in the film.
But as you can see from the synopsis above, they had quite a lot to cram into this 94 minute-long film, and so quite a lot of potentially interesting stuff had to be truncated for the final film. Even with everything that happens in the film, however, it still feels rather... slow. It's probably the least "horror" of all the films in the Howling series, or at the very least of the ones I've seen so far (it's also the only PG-13-rated film in the whole Howling series). There's even less blood and gore than in Howling II, and so the film puts most of its horror moments into the transformation sequences (and into the ideas of the extermination teams going after the weres, if you want to add in the horror of humanity's habit of killing off anything it's a little bit scared of or is a little bit strange). And the transformation sequences are good, don't get me wrong, but once you've gotten over the initial body horror of them they start to become a little repetitive. Making the werewolves/were-marsupials into sympathetic protagonists probably didn't help there either.
Howling III was directed by Phillipe Mora, who also directed Howling II: ...Your Sister is a Werewolf, and this time he managed to keep creative control over the film and so it is much more the horror-comedy he envisioned it to be (Mora had been unhappy with the way Howling II turned out after the producers had their way with it, particularly the 17 breast-baring spectacular that the credits became, to which I'd just like to point out that he was the one who said it was inspired by New Wave Eroticism and that he told the producers to go ahead with that credits sequence, stating, "If you're crazy enough to do that. Go ahead.") Some people might find the comedy hard to find in the film (possibly along with some of the horror), but I'd say that it's more surrealist than anything, with only the occasional toe dipped into more traditional comedy. Still, the film has to be given credit for trying new ideas with the concept of werewolves, diversifying the species in a way we didn't see again until White Wolf brought out their Werewolf: The Apocalypse RPG line and gave people to roleplay as just about a were-anything.
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