At last, we have reached day eight and the final (for now) film in the Howling franchise - The Howling: Reborn. There's no Clive Turner attached to this film either, so we can at least breathe a sigh of relief knowing we're unlikely to see any line dancing, country and western songs, or talk of lycanthropy as "devil possession" combined with long scenes of people doing nothing very much at all.
Well, actually we might still get that last one still. You know what these films are like.
A pregnant woman, Kathryn Kidman, is attacked in her art studio and apparently killed by what I think we can all guess are werewolves at this point, but not before her unborn child starts to be born. Eighteen years later her son, Will, lives an unremarkable life with his father (other than his father having him take silver nitrate pills daily, which should technically have turned him blue-grey or purple by now). Will is about to graduate high school and is something of a sadsack of a student - unnoticed by most, pining after the girl he has a crush on, Eliana, and occasionally getting into fights with the school thugs and Eliana's jock boyfriend Roland, who at one point uses his class ring to try to cut Will's throat. Will's only friend appears to be wannabe filmmaker Sachin, who plans to hack the school's communication network to broadcast his horror film on graduation night. Suddenly though, Will's luck and life begin to change - Eliana suddenly takes an interest in him and invites him to an underground graduation party; he starts seeing better without his glasses, and he develops enhanced strength and healing abilities. Will is a werewolf, and his werewolf nature is finally coming to the surface, much to the delight of the werewolf pack who have been watching over him in school for some time, led by a mysterious woman named "Kay". Will is unwilling to join them in their plans to create a werewolf army across the globe to reveal themselves to the world and take their place at the top of the food chain, however, and he and Eliana find themselves trapped in the locked-down school and fighting to survive against the werewolves. Will they be able to survive and will Will be able to resist his more animalistic urges?
For the most part, The Howling: Reborn is a typical unremarkable teen werewolf movie - no swearing, no skin, very little as-it-happens gore and no on-screen werewolf transformations, and so I was finding the whole thing rather dull - up until the end credits. Interspersed through the credits are news clips telling of werewolf sightings and attacks across the globe, much as the pack in the movie were planning, and the retaliation against these attacks - essentially World War Werewolf. And that caught my attention. That sounded interesting. I think I'd like to see a movie about World War Werewolf - just so long as it wasn't a Howling sequel or the people who butchered World War Z were kept away from it.
I will say that, as a film, The Howling: Reborn is not a badly-made movie. It's competently shot, reasonably well-paced and cheerfully throws away the albatross of a backstory that the previous films might have lumbered it with straight out of the window. The film credits its story to the Howling II novel by Gary Brandner, but it tended to remind me more of the first movie, especially the idea of Will broadcasting himself turning into a werewolf to people and asking Eliana to kill him (this is not a spoiler, the film all but starts with this scene and then backtracks through the events that led up to this) - obvious parallels between Will and Karen White there, even if things go differently for them. It is, however, still a teen horror movie and victim to the cliches that teen horror movies tend to fall into instead. Will is said to be an "outcast" in high school, of course (in reality he's just unnoticed by most people); he's got a crush on the hot rebellious girl whose boyfriend is a violent jock (who brings a gun to school and gets away with it despite the high security because of plot reasons), and of course the whole underlying theme of the movie is growing up/graduating and finding out who you really are. Most of the movie's major revelations are telegraphed well in advance, while other plot points are completely ignored - did Will's father know about his werewolf nature or not? If not, why was he making him take silver nitrate daily? And what was the deal with the circular, almost Ouroboros-like tattoos that the members of the werewolf pack had on their wrists? Obviously, it's supposed to be some sort of pack tattoo, but we see people with it who don't seem to be werewolves, and despite camera angles sometimes pointing them out, nothing is ever said of them. And what the hell are they teaching in high school science classes now that teaches students how to build flamethrowers out of parts just lying about a lab?
Will's horror nerd friend Sachin was clearly only there to be the exposition fairy (teaching Will everything he needed to know about werewolves), and so once he's done that you know his remaining screen time is going to be limited, which I found disappointing. They never turn the horror nerd into a vampire or werewolf or other monsters, and I think that would be an interesting (and probably amusing) twist. There's also cases of Chekov's Discarded Handgun and Chekov's 2nd Place Debating Trophy for those of you counting, the latter of which even gets an amusing little quip when it comes up. But other than that, The Howling: Reborn is pretty anaemic and by-the-numbers, which makes it a rather dull affair but still miles better than some of the other films we've seen this week. And I still think World War Werewolf should be made into a separate movie.
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