The Howling

Joe Dante is possibly my favorite of that crop of directors to come up in the post-Spielberg 1980's that include such giants as Burton, Donner, Zemeckis, and Cameron. Dante may not have been as huge as the others ultimately became, but his body of work was always fun, often silly, and touched heavily and proudly by the B-movies he loved to watch growing up in the 50's and the exploitation movies that he began his career working on for Roger Corman. I still haven't seen a few of Dante's films, but the ones I grew up watching (The Burbs, Innerspace, Gremlins, and my personal favorite, the utterly wacky Gremlins 2: The New Batch) are all a ton of fun.

The Howling came quite early in Dante's career as a director, after only previously making his debut with Pirahna for Roger Corman. It's about a woman named Karen (Dee Wallace) who, after a traumatic experience with a psycho stalker, is sent with her husband to a vacation resort by her shrink. Something is fishy about the resort (aka "The Colony"). The people there are rather suspicious (aka "Werewolves").

There's a lot to like about The Howling, though it wasn't great. It's quite well made for having a relatively tiny, $1 million budget. The cinematography is moody, the effects and gore are cool and done practically, the story has some fun twists, and the score by Pino Donaggio is dramatic and Hitchcockian in that way that he does.

I liked the transformation of Karen's husband from a gentle metropolitan vegetarian-type, to a violent, aggressive meat-eater, after getting seduced and bitten by a particularly naked member of the colony. I also liked the performance of Dante regular Robert Picardo as one of the big villains. He gets the big transformation scene in the movie.

Speaking of the transformation scene, it's a tough one to judge. It was partially designed by Rick Baker, who left during production to do his masterwork, An American Werewolf in London. There are a few similarities between the two, but American Werewolf is a far superior film with a bigger budget, and a much better transformation. It is THE werewolf movie and THE transformation sequence. The biggest difference between the two is the performance of the transformee. In American Werewolf, it looked excruciating. You could feel the agony of his body transforming into a four legged beast. In The Howling, cheaper versions of some of the same effects are in place, but Picardo doesn't play it as painful. In fact, his sadistic character seems to be enjoying it.

Still, The Howling is a different kind of movie than An American Werewolf in London. It's a fun and pulpy B-movie with lots of gore and scares. The ending is actually really clever and quite funny. The credits run over a shot of a hamburger slowly sizzling on a grill, which is a fantastic way to end the movie. You can totally see how The Howling, though imperfect, could have paved the way for Dante to direct Gremlins.

The Wolf Man (1941)

Here we are, edging our way towards Halloween, and here I am with another classic horror film to review. Over the last year, I've been catching up on the classic Universal monster movies. It seems to me that they are required watching that I've somehow managed to miss out on all this time. Now that I've seen the first three Frankenstein movies (2)(3), The Invisible Man, and Creature from the Black Lagoon, I finally feel like I'm getting somewhere. I've been meaning to get to The Wolf Man for a while.

The Wolf Man, directed by George Waggner, stars Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot, a man who is returning home to his family estate in Universal's Old-Timey Village Set, after the death of his older brother. While there, he meets Gwen, a local who works at the antiques shop across the way. In the shop he finds and purchases an interesting old cane with a silver wolf's head for a handle, and in so doing learns of the town's rich mythology around lycanthropy.

Through persistence and creepiness (always works in old movies), Larry also manages to land a date. A band of gypsies are in town so he takes her and one of her friends to see a fortune teller (Bela Lugosi). The seer reads Gwen's friend's palm, seeing a pentagram on it, meaning she is the next victim of the werewolf. He freaks and tells her to go while she still can and takes off himself. Moments later, she is indeed attacked by a wolf. Talbot attempts to rescue her, beating the wolf to death with his cane, and gets bitten in the process.

The next morning, Talbot wakes up to find the bite healed completely. The police are also visiting. They're investigating the murder of the fortune teller, who they found beaten to death with Larry's cane. By this point, Talbot has put two and two together, whether he wants to admit it or not: The wolf that bit him was the fortune teller, and it is only a matter of time before he, too, will become a monster.

I was quite surprised how completely character-driven The Wolf Man was. The Wolf Man himself only has five minutes of screen time, tops. The movie is more about Larry Talbot dealing with the dread and inevitability of becoming a monster. Lon Chaney Jr. is really great at this. He has extremely expressive eyes. Even when he is outwardly denying that something is wrong, you can read on his face that he knows the truth.

I don't really understand why he never becomes a full wolf, even though Bela Lugosi did. Instead he becomes the hairy dog man we all know and love today. I suppose you could rationalize it by saying he's still early in his transitioning and that were he to make it further along in his transformation he will eventually become a full wolf. The truth is surely that Universal simply wanted Chaney to play the monster, not just hand those duties off to a trained dog.

The make-up effects and transformation were groundbreaking for their time, though they were still early days for these things. As I said above, the Wolf Man has very little screen time. It must have taken forever to transform him. The first time it happens we only see his legs change. We don't get the famous series-of-dissolves on Chaney's face until the very end.

The direction by George Waggner is decent, though I thought James Whale's work in the Frankenstein, Bride, and Invisible Man was far better. Still, Waggner got some great performances out of his cast, and obviously, he helped Chaney to create a truly iconic monster, who would have been nothing if the man behind him weren't so well fleshed out.

Another thing that struck me that I'm guessing people nowadays don't really consider is that the Universal movies weren't just done one after another. I think we tend to sort of clump them all together that way when we think of them. You just associate Dracula, The Mummy, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Invisible Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon as one big group. The fact is, these movies were all made over the course of several decades. I honestly don't know why that's important. I just found it interesting, I guess.

The Wolfman, while not my favorite of the Universal monster movies, was still 100% worth seeing. Lon Chaney Jr. steals the whole show, though, surprisingly, it was his performance as the man that carries the movie, adding more weight and underlying humanity to the tragic circumstances he must endure as the wolf.