Le loup-garou

This is a film that was featured on my favorite television show Mystery Science Theater 3000. It made for a very funny episode of the show as there was just a lot of aspects to the film to riff. You had Joe Estevez who is Martin Sheen's brother who I am guessing only gets roles because he looks like his more famous sibling. You have a dude who changes his hairstyle several times during the film, you have a solid actor in Richard Lynch reduced to a very underwhelming role and wearing a grandmotherly sweater and you have the two lead characters who both sound like they are from the same country in Europe. It is not all bad though, as the werewolf at times looks pretty good and the lead female has a nice set to stare at, but that is just not enough to rate the film any higher than the two I have given it here. It was not boring though and there were also a couple of good kills, but there is just too much randomness going on in this one to rank it higher. The fact that the film goes in one direction and shows you the beast and then proceeds to take it in another direction with another main character kind of weakens the film.

The story starts out having people digging in the desert, searching for stuff. Well, they find the remains of something and then proceed to get in a fight that Richard Lynch must stop. One of the workers gets cut on the remains that resemble some sort of animal, but also has some human qualities too. Well the guy who gets cut becomes a werewolf and the guy who constantly changes his hair proceeds to make matters worse and soon the guy is a full blown werewolf who promptly gets shot. Is the movie over already? No, another character is introduced who goes to a party and somehow gets involved in the whole affair and gets cut too as the dude who changes his hair also likes to wield werewolf skulls as weapons. Soon, the writer who likes the girl with the nice rack and is apparently from the same country as him, starts changing and running through the streets and doing things!

This made for a great episode of MST3K. It is a bad film, but not a boring film. There is enough in it to keep one entertained throughout and for the gang to riff throughout too. The film is much longer without being on the show as I am guessing MST3K showed maybe an hour and ten minutes while the run time for the standard version is an hour and 39 minutes. That would probably explain some of the more confusing jumps in it, but I am pretty sure the movie would remain pretty bad even with the extra time as the two lead characters are still going to be talking with thick accents and that one guy may have even had a couple of more hairstyles on display. I do think there had to be more with Richard Lynch though as his character kind of disappears at the tail end of the MST3K version.

So, while this film is severely cut for its showing on MST3K, I am just going to assume that whatever was cut was not going to make this thing an Oscar contender. As I've said the werewolf looks pretty good at times, but a lot of the time it is just some hair here and there and at other times it resembles a bear. The characters are over the top and fun to make fun of, but it is kind of sad to see Richard Lynch stuck in this mess. The guy was in some good films during his career and this is most definitely not one of them! In the end though it is a perfect film for MST3K and I think that if they had simply continued to do the show as like a DVD release here and there after SyFy canceled it, they could do more justice to films like this because they could do more unedited versions. I am kind of curious to see an uncut version just to see if that one gal goes topless!

Saw this one recently with some friends who have an ironic love of truly terrible movies, and in that context, it was just the ticket. It was a double feature with "Satanik," a 1968 Italian piece of junk that was just as bad but at least had a hot Eurobabe as the killer. Both flicks were made by the absolutely untalented, and can be watched only by dedicated students of bad film.

In a "climactic" scene in "Werewolf," the title critter kills a man apparently without touching him, or even being in the same general area. We repeatedly cut back and forth between shots of the werewolf going RARRR, and of the victim crossing his arms in front of his face (again and again), in a posture of defense. Finally, the bloodied victim drops to the ground. At no time do both the werewolf AND the victim appear in this scene together. It's as though the two "actors" involved couldn't coordinate their table-waiting schedules in such a way as to be both on the set on the same day. We all looked around at each other and said, "What just happened?"

See it for laughs, if this sort of bad flickage is your idea of fun. Otherwise, flee like a Texas Democrat.

I've seen some good werewolf movies in my time. "An American Werewolf in London", "The Wolf Man" and "The Howling" are among my favorites (and, incidentally, some of the better examples of the genre).

And then we get to "Werewolf", which seems to be the cinematic equivalent of a really bad train wreck. Up until I had seen this beauty, "Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf" was the worst movie about lycantropy I had ever witnessed.

Even the synopsis is bad: archaeologists dig up a skeleton of a werewolf and when people get cut on it, they turn into werewolves!

Kids, I won't lie to you...this movie stinks in every conceivable way you could imagine. The actors have so many different accents among them you'd think this was a co-production with the League of Nations. There are about ten (that I noticed) different versions of about, say, four werewolves in the whole movie. The director has absolutely no sense of how to set up a scene - scary, introductory, dramatic, what-have-you (a werewolf transformation gets up-staged by a mural in a bar? Yeah, just what I was thinking).

There are pretty women to ogle at, though. Whether or not they can act is a moot point, I suppose, but they talk about "fussinading" things, scream with what sounds like three voice boxes and type letters while pantsless.

But in the end, this is about as sorry an excuse for a werewolf (or "wahrwilf", or "wherwalf" or whatever) film I've seen in my life. Yep, it's bad; as bad as a truckload of dirty gym clothes. Bad like those ties way back in your closet. Bad like a Pauly Shore retrospective. Bad like getting gyros from an Italian restaurant.

Break out the silver bullets, wolfsbane, crucifixes and everything else for this flick!

No stars for "Werewolf" - the worst werewolf movie ever featuring Joe Estevez.

TIDBIT - victims of lycantropy should NEVER drive.

Thrill to the harpsichord music in the pool hall scene! Wonder at our heroine's ability to abuse English syntax and pronunciation! Tremble as the "wuur-wilves" grow wispy hair extensions and don animal puppet heads before striking! Shudder from exposure to the looney militant caretaker! Cackle as the greedy and inexplicably violent archaeologist's hair style and color spontaneously change from scene to scene! And don't miss Charlie Sheen's uncle's critical role as an itinerant site-digger.

Let's face it -- the only way to watch this dud is with the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew lambasting it. Richard Lynch, ordinarily a good character actor, must have really been hurting financially to allow himself to be seen (and wasted) in this were-dog of a movie. Other favorite parts of mine include the hero turning off a radio, abruptly ending the annoying spooky soundtrack, and (in the MST3K version) Mike and the 'Bots' sing-along variations on the end theme.

Well, let's put it like this. They must have spent more money for the cool-looking holographic werewolf-transformation cover than they spent for the entire rest of the movie.

It was a horrible, horrible film. Makes Plan 9 look like Ben Hur.