Monday, October 24, 2005

Howling VII: New Moon Rising


(1995) *

My first one star movie this year! During the 'thon, one watches a lot of bad acting, bad storytelling, bad sound, etc., but for me it takes a movie that generates real hatred to get the one star smack. And late last night I got it.

This movie serves the bizarre purpose of feeding the ego of one Clive Turner (pictured above), who has his grubby fingers all over the Howling series: writing, producing and starring in Howling V as the annoying Australian guy with the pony tail. In this movie he plays Ted, who arrives in a town full of lovable hicks and gets a job in a bar. This sets in motion the main action of the movie, which is the unattractive cast being amused by Ted's godawful jokes, listening to endless Country Western music. It's obvious real soon that a bunch of drunk hicks thought it would be cool to film themselves over a series of several Saturday nights and call it a movie. When the strange, overly dark footage of joyless line dancing kept getting used and reused, I realized I'd found a movie that was genetically engineered to piss me off.

The werewolf part of the movie consists of two funny-looking old guys providing backstory, actually bothering to pull in plotlines (and footage, naturally) from the previous movies. Howlings 6, 5 and even 4 are mined, the last so that Clive Turner could point out he played a tow truck driver in it. Not kidding. The werewolf attacks are depicted with red-lens Werewolf-Cam, until the end when the werewolf transforms in the worst morph ever. Seriously, I hope the FX outfit that pulled that at least gave them a free mouse pad. The beast gets blown away by the lovable hicks and then it's back to the bar for another C&W number. Are the credits rolling yet? Thank God.

This was 90 minutes that felt like four hours.

5 comments:

JPX said...

You’re truly a glutton for punishment! I applaud you for going through all these so we don’t have to. Could you please cover all the Leprechaun and Puppet Master movies next year?

Johnny Sweatpants said...

That picture is hilarious. Makes me want to throw a pen at my computer screen. I think that was the guy that played God in the Acid House. He was alright in that but I can see how he could become grating very quickly.

Octopunk said...

He's Australian! He doesn't become grating very quickly, he's grating INSTANTLY.

God, this movie...I feel like someone stepped on my spine.

DKC said...

I could have told you you would have hated this movie based on the Australian thing alone...
D.

Octopunk said...

Having just left a positive comment about Austrailian zombie movies on Summerisle's Undead review, I suppose I should chime in that I don't hate all Austrailians by any stretch. You know how a certain type of English accent can make you hate? There's a certain type of Austrailian whose Austrailain-ness makes me want to punch 'em. Crocodile Dundee is not a bad template for what I'm talking about.

Another example: For all the fluidy, gooshy grossness of Peter Jackson's Meet The Feebles, it was the accents that really put me off.

Malevolent

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