The Howling

Alternate titles : None

Tagline : "Imagine your worst fear a reality."

News reporter Karen White (Dee Wallace) is helping the police apprehend a vicious serial killer, known only as Eddie, after he contacts her and says he wants to arrange a meeting. However, the police sting very nearly goes wrong and Karen is only saved from near death by two passing police officers.

Badly traumatised by these events her doctor, George Wagner (played by Patrick MacNee), recommends she spend some time at a special woodland retreat he's founded known as "The Colony", to help her recover from the ordeal.

At first she and her husband think the small community to be the idyllic resort, unfortunately though it seems this Colony has a very dark secret. Strange howling noises can be heard in the night, bodies of mutilated cattle are found in the fields, and everybody acts like they're hiding something. Her husband is the first one to discover the truth after he is bitten by a wolf like creature one night, and then begins a hideous transformation.

Yes it turns out that most of the people at the colony are indeed werewolves, and Dr Wagner founded this small community to try and integrate them with society to preserve their species. Meanwhile, Karen's friend Chris (Dennis Duggan) has discovered that Eddie's body has disappeared from the morgue, and convinced that there's indeed more to Dr Wagner's colony than meets the eye, arms himself with silver bullets and goes to get Karen back.

Arguably director Joe Dante's finest work, "The Howling" has got to be THE most popular werewolf film of all time, featuring some great special effects (well, they were for their time anyway), dark humour and a host of special guest appearances (and it was kind of amusing seeing Slim Pickens typecast as the Sheriff). Werewolf fans will not be disappointed.

Overall Marks : 6/10.

Terrifying Trivia

• Several characters were named after classic werewolf movie directors. George Waggner, Roy William Neill, Terence Fisher, Freddie Francis, Erle C. Kenton, Sam Newfield (I), Charles Barton (I), Jerry Warren, Lew Landers, and Jacinto Molina.
• The films budget was $1million
• Robert Picado, who played the killer Eddie, went onto appear as the holographic doctor in Star Trek : Voyager.
• The Morgue attendant was played by the scriptwriter John Sayles.
• The porno film that Karen is forced to watch when she confronts Eddie was specially filmed for the movie and was actually shot in Joe Dante's garage.
• Filmed in just 28 days, with a few additional days of reshoots.
• Elisabeth Brooks, who played Marsha, only agreed to do the nude scene as she was told that her body would not be fully visible on screen and would be obscured by smoke from the nearby bonfire. So she was extremely shocked when she saw the finished scene and was shown fully nude throughout. As a result, she never appeared naked on screen in any subsequent films.
• The guy waiting by the telephone booth near the beginning of the film, when Karen (Dee Wallace) is making a call, was played by fellow director/producer Roger Corman.
• Patrick McNee has said that this was the only really "good" film that he has ever appeared in
• The bookstore owner was played by Horror/B-movie veteran Dick Miller, who's appeared in several of Joe Dante's films. The person he tells to "Either buy it, or put it back" was noted sci-fi writer Forest J Ackerman.
• Originally, they were going to use stop motion animation for the werewolves, but they were unhappy with the finished results, so they went with prosthetics instead. Although because of the film's budget they could only afford one wolf suit, so they had to re-use it and for the scenes requiring more then one wolf, they used a spare mask in close up along with several spare pairs of wolf hands, to give the impression there were multiple wolves. The original stop motion footage was included as an extra on a special edition DVD.
• Karen's Husband Bill, was played by Dee Wallace's real life partner Christopher Stone. They actually got married shortly after the film was finished.
• Director Joe Dante was not a fan of the original novel and has criticised its writing on numerous occaisions. Even going as far as to hold it up as a prime example of how the story from a bad novel can be greatly improved by the scriptwrters when adapting it to film, which he did during a script writing seminar he was presentng. But what he didn't realise, was at this particular seminar, the book's author was in the audience who promptly got up and introduced himself. Causing much amusement and embarrasment.

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