Worst. II. Ever. This is, of course, in
relation to the movie it follows. I'm sure there are movie
sequels out there worse than 'The Howling II: Your Sister is a
Werewolf', as unfathomable as that may be… I mean I'm sure 'Puppet
Master II' or 'Killjoy II' or 'The Gingerdead Man II' are all awful
movies but none of those originals were considered masterpieces to
begin with, unlike Joe Dante's 'The Howling' is often considered.
Phillipe Mora's sequel is stupefyingly bad, mind numbingly gawdawful,
Earth shattering in its attention to crappiness. Now here's where
I often chime in with something like 'But I wouldn't have missed it to
save the world…' I can guarantee you that those words will not be
coming out the mouth of this damaged movie watcher. Not
today. Not ever in regards to this one.
As you know, as the original 'Howling' played out, Karen White was shot
while turning into werewolf on national TV back in 1981. It's
taken four years, but we've finally gotten around to burying her,
though there is this weird cat hanging around by the name of Stefan
Croscoe, played without embarrassment by the great Christopher Lee, and
he's here to tell Karen's brother Ben (Reb Brown) that Karen is very
undead and is a werewolf. He doesn't believe him. But Karen's
colleague, and arguably the worlds worst reporter in Jenny Templeton
(Annie McEnroe) does believe him. Hell if we know why.
Stefan even plays back the video for these two in which Karen turns
into a werewolf before being gunned down, hard to believe that neither
of them haven't seen this yet, even harder to believe that the
filmmakers couldn't have just borrowed the clip from the old movie and
ran that instead of that awful reenactment they ended up going with,
but nonetheless, Ben still doesn't believe. That is until he,
Jenny and Stephan run into a crew of werewolves at the cemetery.
At least I guess those were werewolves because they were looking a lot
more like bigfoots to me.
What we gotta do is stop the werewolves from taking
over the world, and to make that happen our trio has to make it to the
City of the Dead… or Transylvania for the uninitiated. There,
they have to find a way to stop Stirba, the queen of the werewolves as
played by the legendary Sybil Danning. Right now, at this point,
'Howling II' is absolutely awful. Reb Brown and Annie McEnroe
have all the charisma of a pair corpses, Christopher Lee looks to be in
constant pain, probably because they dressed him Devo shades and made
him put on an orange leather jacket and blue jeans so he can 'fit
in' at a New Wave club. Note that he's still 6'5" and old as hell
so he's still not fitting in, but we gotta roll with this. But
when we get to Transylvania, a bad movie becomes something else
altogether. It now becomes almost transcendently bad.
We meet Stirba and her glorious twins under her shirt, which prompts
everybody to rip their shirts off. Admittedly… that was kind of
awesome. Got me there. Then Stirba has to meet her new
daughter Marianna (Marsha A. Hunt) and true enough Marianna is pretty
freaking hot as well. But now Marianna and some dude have to
engage in sexual relations under the tutelage of Stirba, and this by
itself is comedy of the highest order. The incessant howling and
growling and scratching was simply hilarious. Then there was the
children's puppet show, one that had to have had Kukla, Fran and Ollie
rolling over in their graves. What a show.
Regardless of all of that, Stirba has a plan. Hell if I know what
this plan is, but I do know it revolves around getting all of her
werewolf underlings shot to death. It's a crap plan.
But at least she has a baby dragon. It's complicated. Hell
if I know what's happening. Oh look… Sybil is ripping off her
shirt. Sorry Mr. Director, that only works the first ten times as
a viable distraction.
While 'Howling II' was awful, simply terrible, I must say I did get a
little misty watching the New Wave band play that Howling tune that
dominated this movie, even more than Sybil Danning's tits, and the
keyboardist was jamming on a shoulder mount Prophet Remote. I
played a little keyboard back in the day and really wanted one of
those. Oh well.
Standing by itself, 'The Howling II' is awful. The acting from
our two leads is atrocious, the werewolves look like ass, the pacing is
painfully slow, the narrative makes next to no sense, and the movie had
so many plot holes that it almost had no plot holes. That's how
plot hole ridden it was. However, if this movie had been named
'Werewolf Monster Titty Fest', we would've had a semi-masterpiece on
our hands as bad acting and horrible looking werewolves would've worked
like a charm. But it's called 'The Howling II' which means there
are expectations of competence and those expectations were so far from
not met…
But here's the problem as it relates to me. I recently brought a
Kindle Fire and I get a free months of Amazon Prime with that.
Most of the free movies on Prime are ancient or gawdawful or
both. Such as this one. And all the subsequent sequels are
available to watch at no charge. I have thirty days and I hear
each one is worse than the one it follows. It's foolish, I know…
but I am a trained professional. Wish me luck.
