This movie poster is awesome. Seriously. People have told me that this movie was terrible for years, but I would see this poster and think maybe they were wrong, maybe there was some great stuff in the movie that other people didn't see, and I would watch it and be happy that I did. It should be against the law for a movie this horrible to have posters that make it look good. What happened to truth in advertising?
This movie is about a lost tribe of werewolves in Australia that are marsupials, meaning that the babies emerge still in the embryonic stage and then grow to full term inside a pouch on the mother's stomach. Anyway, a beautiful teenage girl escapes from this tribe because she's tired of following their rules, like how she has to let her stepfather rape her, and she's discovered by a movie producer and cast in a low budget horror movie, and the movie producer falls in love with her and has sex with her, not realizing that she's a werewolf even after seeing her covered with fur and having a pouch. He's clearly a genius. Soon she starts to transform, and scientists and the government fight about whether to study her tribe or kill them all.
I realize that it sounds like I'm making this all up, playing some kind of a joke on you all, but I assure you, this is what actually happens in the movie, and there's a bunch of other crap that's even dumber than this that I didn't even tell you about. This movie has like, five subplots, dealing with a Russian ballerina who is also a werewolf, and a scientist who's father disappeared while studying the werewolves in Australia, and a little werewolf baby, and the aforementioned rapey stepfather, and seriously, it's a huge, jumbled mess.
Jerboa, the teenage werewolf girl, isn't a bad actress, though her talent is kinda wasted here trying to be sultry and seductive when she just looks strung-out and high most of the time. There's not much gore, but there's an awful lot of nudity for a movie rated PG13. A lot of the acting is ridiculous. The rapey stepfather is just terrible, and his character is such an ass that I couldn't root for him. The Russian ballerina werewolf acts insane, like she's about to snap and go on a killing spree any moment (plus she keeps making these weird guttural hissing noises that make her sound like the ghost woman from the movie "The Grudge").
I get the sense that this movie is supposed to be a parody, but it really pisses me off when people half-ass a movie and then hide behind the idea that they were trying to make some kind of point. Yes, the low-budget horror flick that the teenage werewolf gets cast in has bad special effects, and surprise! This movie has bad special effects too. That doesn't make s statement like you think it does. I've seen plenty of low budget horror movies that are actually good, and the filmmakers give a shit and try to make the best movies they can. You're not proving anything except that you're lazy. And I don't think having a stepfather who rapes you is a fun, quirky subplot, asshole.
People's argument for the "parody" aspect of this movie seems to be "it's tongue-in-cheek, the filmmakers don't take it seriously!" Well good for them, I'd rather watch a movie made by people who DO take their subject seriously, at least enough to put EFFORT into making their movie. As much as the first Howling annoyed me, I recognize that the filmmakers worked hard on the satirical elements in it, and even as much as the second Howling sucked, they at least made their main characters likeable enough that I cared what happened to them. I can deal with bad movies. Lazy movies that pretend they're funny because they're too cool to care? Not so much. Hard pass. Go be cool somewhere else, some of us have work to do.
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