Howling II: Stirba – Werewolf Bitch (1985)

aka Howling II: … Your Sister Is a Werewolf

Coming to the funeral of his sister Karen, Dee Wallace Stone’s journalist character from the first movie, Texan sheriff Ben (Reb Brown) soon finds himself in curious company. Occult investigator Stefan Crosscoe (Christopher Lee) attempts to convince Ben that his sister had arranged her own on-camera murder to prevent turning into a werewolf for good. Karen’s former colleague Jenny (Annie McEnroe, doing an awkward Jamie Lee Curtis impression) is willing to buy into Stefan’s ideas quickly enough, but Ben needs a bit of convincing.

Fortunately, werewolf attacks are a good argument against scepticism, so soon, everybody’s on board with Stefan’s tales about the mighty werewolf queen Stirba (Sybil Danning) and her plan to turn more werewolves into wolfier werewolves, or something. Anyway, she needs to be stopped right quick. Stefan invites his new allies to accompany him to the small town in Transylvania that’s closest to Stirba’s secret lair in a big ass castle nobody appears to know how to find – not even Stefan’s local allies who must have lived in its neighbourhood for decades.

Needless to say, things turn weird in Transylvania.

Where Joe Dante’s first The Howling is still one of the best werewolf films ever made, Philippe Mora’s sequel is bad in so bizarre and wilful ways, it is also pretty damn fantastic without being good or best in any way, shape or form.

Aesthetically, this attempts to mix 1985 post-punk style, bits and pieces of gothic horror and a backlot Europe that manages to feel like an off-beat dream despite the backlot for once having been in actual Europe - Czechoslovakia to be precise. In practice, this means unholy yet weirdly compelling clashes between the kind of leather outfits favoured in movie BDSM and apocalypses and the cobwebby castles which are Christopher Lee’s natural habitat. A guy wearing an absurd medieval closed helmet and little else guarding said castle with an automatic weapon is the sort of thing you can expect here in every single scene. The film is nearly Italian in this regard.

Villagers that are having a folk horror village fete (probably to give Lee Wickerman flashbacks), a little person zombie attack that echoes Don’t Look Now, and a truly off-putting werewolf orgy to the jolly sounds of the film’s new wave theme song are only part of the film’s attractions. For the sleazebags among us, there’s also an incredibly ridiculous werewolf threesome between Danning, Marsha A Hunt’s character and whoever plays the guy trying to imitate wolf sex noises with them that’ll haunt your dreams (and not in a pleasant way), suggestions that Lee is the ten thousand year old brother of the equally ancient Stirba and the two once had a bit of an incestuous thing going on between them, and general horniness whenever nobody gets killed.

Our heroes are absolute idiots without any concept of strategy or any sense of self-preservation, jollily walking into traps like the giant idiots they are. Fortunately, Stirba’s not much better at her job either. I’m not sure what Stefan did with his life before becoming an occult investigator, or what his qualifications for the role are, apart from his knowledge about the movie’s curious werewolf subspecies that can only be killed by titanium instead of silver. But then, I’m not sure why our werewolf matriarch mostly spends her time having sex, shooting lasers and casting spells instead of doing anything werewolf-y, nor why there’s quite as much staking of werewolves going on here. Yes, titanium stakes, of course. Those are even more phallic, probably.

I am unsure if Mora is in on any of this being as funny, absurd and weird as it plays out, but then, that’s a not an uncommon reaction to Mora’s films for me. On the one hand, if he’s in on the joke, he keeps the straightest directorial face possible, on the other hand, how could anyone not be? The only point in the movie where I’m sure someone involved in the production is consciously taking the piss is in the ending credits, when Danning’s “iconic” moment of ripping her top off is repeated seventeen (of course people, including me, have counted it) times, intercut with outtakes from the movie one can only read as reaction shots to Danning’s breasts. Christopher Lee seems to approve of them.

The rest of the movie, I have no idea. What I do know is that Howling II is the perfect portrayal of the dream life of some male 80s teenager who also happens to be a fan of pulp writing.

Past Misdeeds: Robowar (1988)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

A merry mercenary group working under the delightful moniker of BAM (as the film explains, this is an acronym for "Bad-ass motherfuckers"), is hired by shady government types to go on The Mission for them. Now you might ask yourself: "What's this mission about?". The film isn't going to tell you. It is in fact withholding this information for its audience's own good, or at least to spare you wasting too many brain cells, as The Mission will turn out to be not what our heroes believe it to be, so there surely is no need to bother your pretty little heads with it.

All members of BAM have manly codenames like Killzone, Blood, or Diddy Bopper, alas they very seldom use them when talking to each other. The only thing that's important about them is that their leader is played by Reb Brown and that the rest of them might just as well be wearing red shirts instead of army fatigues. Reb ain't too happy when he learns that the team is going to be accompanied by a man of the Man who just might be called Asshole or Fuck You (Mel Davison). But what can a Reb do when he's already somewhere in Central America and on The Mission with his guys?

After the BAMsters have played around with some random guerrillas and picked up a gal named Virgin (Catherine Hickland), they finally meet the problem they were brought in to solve without having been told that they are supposed to solve it - a big bad government cyborg who is running amuck. And IMDB tells me it's played by Claudio Fragasso! Kill that monster, people of BAM!

Of course, it won't be that easy for the mercenaries, and in the end, only Virgin's superior chemistry skills and the fact that Robocop was nearly as successful a film as Predator will conquer the big bad.

And lo! It came to pass that Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso watched Predator. And they saw that it was good. So obviously, they needed to make a terrible, yet glorious version of the material all their own. Dear Fragasso is only taking the responsibility for the story this time, whatever that might mean in a film patently without one, while the writing credit goes to Rossella Drudi, who has certainly fine qualifications in her future work on Troll 2, her past work on Hell of the Living Dead and being married to Fragasso. It's quite the script the couple produced, never giving an explanation when one would probably be a good idea, never having an idea of its own when it can manhandle someone else's, and never satisfied stealing from just one source. Why only rip off Predator, when Robocop is also there, rife for the picking? It's what you expect from real masters of their art.

I'd love to go deeply into the principles of Mattei's direction, his meaningful use of the colour green, the way he uses the adventures of the BAMsters as a metaphor for all human struggle, but unfortunately I'd just be making it all up. If you have seen any Mattei film, you know how it looks; if you haven't, words cannot prepare you for the experience, at least not words I feel comfortable using.

I'd also love to tell you about the acting performances, alas, there aren't any. There certainly are people on screen who are speaking some perfectly bizarre dialogue, and they certainly are actors by trade, but that's all I can tell you about them, at least not without using words I don't feel comfortable using when talking about people I have never met and who could probably still kick my ass in a fight.

Furthermore, I'd love to tell you about the action. Let us just say that there's a lot of shooting and punching on screen, often executed by BAMsters standing in a single line, shooting and screaming and avoiding cover like their Civil War ancestors before them, at other times performed while running and screaming wildly. And yes, of course there are exploding huts.

Finally, I'd love to tell you about the film's awe-inspiring effects, how the cyborg dude is dressed in an Ultraman Halloween costume someone has painted black and makes the same chittering noises a toy robot I once owned makes, but I don't think I'm fit to do it justice.

I'm afraid I can only leave you with questions about Robowar where I should be giving answers, but that is part of the nature of the films of Mattei and Fragasso. I am full of questions about their works myself, starting with the natural - if very unspecific - ones, like "who gave these people money to make movies?" and "can I meet him?".

There are, however, more pertinent questions to ask about Robowar. Why did the script only have five pages? Where did the promised appearance of Alan Collins/Luciano Pigozzi disappear to? Did the authorities of the Philippines (where the film was shot) know whom they let into their country and what terrible consequences their lenience would have for the sanity of mankind? Why is it that Reb Brown screams whenever he shoots his gun? How does the Cyborg manage to hit anyone with his pew-pew laser gun when his point of view shots show clearly that he sees the world as a random conglomerate of orange pixels? What exactly was the government's idea in sending the mercenaries there? Did I really need to see Reb Brown in a belly top?

So many questions, yet so little answers. And that, my friends, is the point of the works of Mattei and Fragasso. They help us understand the importance of asking questions we never even knew we had, and show us that answers about the world that permitted the insane duo to make more than one movie can only be found in the tears of laughter rolling down our cheeks while we are watching them.

Night Claws (2013)

aka Apex Predator

Welcome to beautiful Mobile, Alabama. Mobile’s sheriff, Joe Kelly (Reb Brown), is having a tough time, because for some reason, a ten foot sasquatch has decided to make the woods around town its home, ripping people apart whenever it meets them.

Kelly’s not the only one interested in the murdering hairball. Government backed cryptozoologist Sarah Evans (Leilani Sarelle) comes to town to bag herself a sasquatch and disturb the romance between Kelly and his deputy Roberta (Sherrie Rose), and a crazy hunter (David Campbell) and his pair of goons wander through the woods. Then there’s a small group of people (among them Ted Prior) wandering through these very same woods on a survival training trip. Things will get very complicated and wood-wander-y before they get better for Mobile.

The advent of fully digital filmmaking has invited some of the elder statesmen of cheaply shot local productions back into the business of making things most people would barely interpret as movies, and putting the local colour where their younger peers only want the colour yellow. Among these happy few is house favourite David A. Prior, him of Sledgehammer and Action International films. Looking at the cast of Night Claws, Prior still has a degree of clout, so instead of the usual young people who can’t act you generally find in this sort of film, it features a lot of low budget veterans who sort of can. Unusually, these middle-aged and older veterans don’t just pop up in cameo appearances (that’s left for - I kid you not - Frank Stallone), but as the film’s actual leads, giving the proceedings slightly more dignity. And while the Reb Browns and David Campbells of this world won’t be my choice for Shakespeare, they do know how to look grumpy, deliver awkward dialogue lines with a degree of verve (and perhaps a little wink from time to time), and get by on some basic charisma.

Speaking of awkwardness, this is very much a typical David A. Prior film in its approach, which is to say, always entertaining, sometimes clever, and often just ever so slightly off. Even though nothing at all of import for plot and characters happens in a film’s middle part, as it does/doesn’t for Night Claws, Prior’s detours are generally fun to watch in that classic parallel dimension cinema way I love so dearly, where middle-aged romances still work like the ones in kindergarten did, plot twists seem to have been made up on the spot without even the tiniest thought for their sense in context of anything that came before them, and so on, and so forth.

In fact, and obviously, the whole of Night Claws carries that parallel dimension feel, presented with a bit more charm and self-consciousness than usual in this sort of affair, perhaps. The film’s final third, when the twists and turns of what we may as well call a plot become particularly random and weird (you didn’t think you’d get a Prior movie without any kind of conspiracy thriller elements, right?), is particularly lovely in that regard, with never a dull second between Prior chewing scenery, Brown being Brown, things that must surely be meant as jokes (but one can’t be sure) and Prior seemingly just putting up any old nonsense that comes to mind at the moment, as long as it’s fun. Which just made me incredibly happy while watching Night Claws.

As an added bonus – as if this were needed! -  the delighted audience (what do you mean, a 2.2 user rating average on the IMDB?) gets a smidgen of dumb gore, and a bit of shameless dubious monster costume action from a film that is as generous with its particular brand of thrills as its budget allows. In exchange, I offer up my honest enthusiasm for whatever the thing I just watched is.

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On WTF: Robowar (1988)

I'll just say this: Mattei/Fragasso. Predator. Reb Brown. Things that can never be unseen.

Learn what I'm talking about on WTF-Film.com.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,bruno mattei,claudio fragasso,action,reb brown,reviews,other places