Matt vs The Howling Franchise reviews

THE HOWLING FRANCHISE: Screaming at the hairy moon…

Matt Adcock (@Cleric20) tackles the beast of very questionable quality inside

There are probably film franchises which spend decades carefully curating their mythology, bringing characters in ways that work, dropping fan-service breadcrumbs and easter eggs  as though somebody, somewhere, knows what’s Canon.

Then there is The Howling, a series which begins in 1981 as a smart, nasty, genuinely rather brilliant Joe Dante satire about television, trauma and the monsters living amongst us. The effects and general vibe making it a killer double bill with An American Werewolf in London.

From then on though this lycanthrope franchise chews through its own restraints and bounds off to hang out with Transylvanian sex-witches, Australian marsupials, bargain-bin gothic murder mysteries, vampire-versus-werewolf carnival shenanigans and, eventually, the sort of country-and-western bar where the availability of line dancing seems to take precedence over whether anybody has remembered to put an actual werewolf in the movie.

Ok… It’s a full moon, the moors are calling… Let’s go:

THE HOWLING (1981)

Joe Dante's original remains a delicious early-'80s horror feeling of talented people being allowed to make something grim, clever and properly weird without anybody in a franchise strategy meeting demanding to know which character might support a streaming spin-off. Dee Wallace is great as Karen White, a television news reporter traumatised after helping police corner serial killer Eddie Quist, who is subsequently sent off to a supposedly therapeutic retreat called The Colony.

What still gives The Howling its teeth isn't simply the monsters but the thoroughly cynical view of the supposedly civilised humans standing around them. Dante and screenwriter John Sayles have great fun with television culture, self-help gurus, sexual repression and people's endless ability to turn horror into content. Rob Bottin's transformations still possess that magnificently tactile wrongness which CGI has spent decades trying unsuccessfully to replace. Faces swell, jaws stretch and human anatomy is remixed live on screen.

Darkmatters: ö ö ö ö ö

5 traumatised TV anchors unexpectedly turning into giant hairy truth bombs out of 5. This is the full-strength stuff: funny, nasty, technically glorious and still considerably cleverer than rest of the ‘franchise’!?

HOWLING II: YOUR SISTER IS A WEREWOLF (1985)

If Dante's original is an urbane beast in a suit, Howling II is the same animal three nights into an Eastern European stag weekend, wearing leather trousers it doesn't remember buying and attempting to explain occult genealogy to Christopher Lee while Sybil Danning presides over a werewolf orgy in the next crypt. 

To say there is a tonal lurch between the first two films that genuinely takes some believing would be fair. The previous film's haunted final moments launch a globe-trotting supernatural adventure involving ancient wolf cults, Stirba the immortal werewolf queen, titanium weaponry, punk gigs, ritualistic sex and the sight of Christopher Lee maintaining magnificent actorly dignity while surrounded by material which would have made lesser men simply stare into the middle distance.

The film's greatest achievement is perhaps that it never once seems embarrassed by itself. Philippe Mora directs with the energy of somebody who has been told there are no consequences, while the soundtrack pounds away, Reb Brown shouts at things and Lee explains adding unwarranted credibility. Then come those end credits, which repeatedly replay Danning ripping off her top in a manner so enthusiastic that the film itself seems to have stolen the remote control and become trapped in a rewind loop.

Darkmatters: ö ö ö½

3½ Christopher Lees grimly refusing to admit he is trapped in an erotic werewolf fever dream out of 5. 

HOWLING III: THE MARSUPIALS (1987)

Philippe Mora apparently finished Howling II, surveyed the smoking wreckage and thought the problem was that nobody had yet investigated the evolutionary possibilities of Australian werewolves with pouches, so The Marsupials relocates everything Down Under and proceeds to create a wildlife documentary.

Our focal wolf is Jerboa, a young woman escaping an isolated community who winds up involved with a filmmaker while scientists, military types and assorted interested parties slowly discover that Australia contains an entire strain of alternative lycanthropic life. Mora pushes the comedy harder here and the result is much broader than either of the previous films.

Feels like a petting zoo surrounded by scenes which resemble Mad Max having a nervous breakdown. 

Darkmatters: ö ö ö

3 baffled Australian wildlife experts out of 5. Deeply daft, strangely charming and precisely the kind of movie that rewards watching with tequila.

HOWLING IV: THE ORIGINAL NIGHTMARE (1988)

AGary Brandner's original novel had been heavily reworked for Joe Dante's film, so Howling IV returns to something closer to the source material, which means we are now watching the fourth film in a franchise that is also, in practical terms, another version of film number one. Nobody appears terribly troubled by this, least of all the movie, which simply introduces writer Marie Adams, sends her to the suspiciously named town.

This is much slower and cheaper than Dante's film, with fewer jokes and considerably less satirical bite, but there is a decent clammy atmosphere to Drago. The budget occasionally shows through the wallpaper, but when the transformations arrive they have a wonderfully gloopy practical nastiness, including one especially memorable sequence where a human body seems less to transform than to melt into biological soup before hairily rebuilding itself.

Darkmatters: ö ½

1½ quietly liquefying authors out of 5. Not remotely essential, but respectably eerie and packing enough goo to keep the practical-effects faithful awake.

HOWLING V: THE REBIRTH (1989)

Then, The Howling decides it wants to become Cluedo. A group of assorted strangers are invited to an ancient Hungarian castle which has only recently reopened after centuries of grim history, heavy snow cuts them off from the outside world and people begin dying one by one while everybody attempts to work out which guest is secretly the werewolf. It's such a simple shift in approach that I'm surprised more of the sequels didn't try it: instead of worrying about escalating the monster action it just has the characters bounce between paranoia and fairly understandable terror as the bodies start accumulating. There is a pleasantly Agatha-Christie-meets-video-shop quality to proceedings, and although the film hardly possesses the resources of peak Hammer, it understands that half the pleasure of this sort of thing is watching a bunch of mutually suspicious people realise that one of them is considerably furrier than advertised.

The Rebirth is probably the most straightforwardly enjoyable sequel after the original because it has a clear gimmick, sticks with it and doesn't introduce a single marsupial reproductive organ.

Darkmatters: ö ½

1½  castle guests shedding on the furniture out of 5. An underseen little gothic-em-up bitten by insanity.

HOWLING VI: THE FREAKS (1991)

By film six the series has arrived at the travelling carnival, which is where every long-running horror franchise eventually goes when it has exhausted laboratories, castles and isolated communities. The Freaks introduces Ian, a drifter burdened with the usual full-moon employment difficulties, who falls into the clutches of R.B. Harker, the sinister owner of a carnival who spots Ian's lycanthropic condition and rather cruelly decides it would make a splendid attraction. This is already promising territory, but then the film reveals that Harker is a vampire and suddenly we're watching werewolf versus bloodsucker years before Underworld!?

Bruce Payne enjoys himself enormously as Harker without tipping completely into pantomime. There are echoes of Freaks, Universal monster movies and carnival gothic throughout, although naturally filtered through the budget and aesthetic expectations of early-'90s straight-to-video horror.

Darkmatters: ö ö 

2 carnies in need of flea treatment out of 5. Probably the late series' sleeper entry, with more atmosphere and empathy than anybody had reasonable grounds to expect.

HOWLING: NEW MOON RISING (1995)

And then we reach the country (low)bar.

There are bad sequels, there are cheap sequels and there are films whose very existence feels like somebody discovered a loophole in the legal definition of cinema; New Moon Rising exists somewhere in that third category. A mysterious drifter arrives in a Californian town, locals talk, drink, play music, dance and occasionally remember that they are nominally participating in the seventh entry of a werewolf franchise. The quantity of line dancing becomes so substantial that you begin to suspect the lycanthropy is merely a subplot in a documentary about regional nightlife which has been aggressively re-edited by someone holding the franchise rights.

The really extraordinary bit is the film's determination to tie together Howling IV, V and VI through reused footage and retroactive exposition. Scenes from earlier instalments appear, characters are discussed, connections are painstakingly explained and the movie behaves as though audiences worldwide have spent sleepless years demanding clarity on the precise canonical relationship between The Original Nightmare and The Freaks. It is continuity repair at the level of somebody attempting to fix a collapsing conservatory with Blu Tack while a country band plays ten feet away.

I found myself becoming weirdly fascinated by it. Not entertained exactly, because words have meanings, but fascinated in the way of seeing someone who obviously doesn’t like Werewolves make Howling film!?

Darkmatters: ½

½ increasingly alarmed line-dancing extras out of 5. An extraordinary object which should probably be preserved in a vault so future civilisations can understand what happened to direct-to-video horror in the mid-'90s.

THE HOWLING: REBORN (2011)

Sixteen years later the beast rises again and immediately discovers that Twilight has happened. This time the franchise is rebooted around teenager Will Kidman, whose imminent graduation becomes complicated by the discovery that he is developing lycanthropic tendencies, while the girl he fancies, Eliana, gets pulled into a supernatural conflict involving a distinctly more youthful breed of werewolf. The tone is glossy, earnest and extremely aware that supernatural romance has become a thing.

There is no Joe Dante media satire, no Christopher Lee occult road trip, no Australian evolutionary anthropology, no gothic castle mystery and, thankfully, absolutely no line dancing. Instead we get a competent teen horror in which puberty and lycanthropy are treated as adjoining inconveniences, complete with school corridors, romance, angst and young people discovering that adulthood involves considerably more body hair than anyone warned them about.

Darkmatters: ö ½

1½ hormonally overwhelmed teen wolves out of 5. Slicker than most of its ancestors, considerably less interesting than the lunatic ones and crying out for Christopher Lee to appear halfway through and explain that everything is actually the work of Stirba.

SO WHICH HOWLING ACTUALLY HOWLS and which are just HOWLERS?

Watching the whole series back-to-back is a wonderfully unhealthy reminder of how franchises used to mutate before cinematic universes became corporate engineering projects. Nobody had a twelve-year roadmap for The Howling; somebody simply kept finding enough money to make another one and, crucially, often seemed determined not to make the same movie twice. The results range from genuinely excellent to barely classifiable, but even the disasters have personality, even if they make you want to punch yourself in the face to stay focused, which is more than can be said for plenty of far more expensive franchise entries currently algorithm-ing their way onto streaming services.

Werewolf mythology has always been about the respectable exterior giving way to something messier, nastier and much less socially acceptable underneath, and few horror franchises have demonstrated that principle quite so literally in their own production history. The Howling begins as prestige cult horror and gradually transforms, movie by movie, into something nobody involved at the start could possibly have anticipated; the mostly embarrassing results speak for themselves...

Darkmatters says: come for Rob Bottin's still-extraordinary flesh-ripping transformation effects, stay for Sybil Danning's immortal wolf queen, marsupial birth horror, Hungarian castle paranoia, vampire carnies and the only horror sequel I can immediately recall where extensive line dancing becomes a legitimate endurance test. 

Inconsistent… Spectacularly. Mostly terrible? Beyond argument. But boring franchises are ten-a-penny, whereas this one is certainly packed with oddities, and makes Hellraiser’s even longer running efforts look classy :) 

Read my take on the 10 Hellraiser films here.

>>> Imagine a cyberpunk world where the Earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope... This is high tech / low life meeting the forces of hell!?

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The Gentlemen series one and two review...

THE GENTLEMEN: DRUGS, DUKES AND GOOD TAILORING

Matt Adcock looks at Guy Ritchie's criminal aristocracy…

There are some filmmakers like Guy Ritchie, whose particular blend of sharp suits, sharper dialogue, criminal scheming and sudden bursts of ultraviolence just does it for me. I loved his The Gentlemen movie, a hugely enjoyable gangster-em-up which saw Matthew McConaughey's splendidly named Mickey Pearson presiding over a marijuana empire hidden underneath Britain's landed estates, so when Netflix announced that Ritchie was going to revisit that same criminal ecosystem as a TV series, I was excited, but also I really didn’t want him to fuck it up!!

So The Gentlemen series isn't really a sequel to the film at all but an expansion of its central idea, ditching Mickey Pearson and introducing an entirely new family headed up by Eddie Horniman (Theo 'Divergent' James), a soldier who unexpectedly inherits his father's title, Halstead Manor.

What initially looks like a nice fish-out-of-water crime comedy soon becomes something considerably more interesting because Eddie, unlike most decent people who accidentally discover a drug empire under their house, turns out to be worryingly good at running one.

I've seriously enjoyed this show, so here is my Darkmatters episode-by-episode Gentlemen-em-up, with mild-to-quite-severe spoilers depending on your tolerance for knowing when somebody might end up dead, buried, eaten or all three...

SEASON ONE – WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

Episode 1: REFINED AGGRESSION

Eddie comes home after his father's death expecting to deal with the usual inheritance issues but instead gets a dukedom, Halstead Manor, a basket case of a brother and the small matter of an enormous cannabis farm. Turns out primogeniture is considerably more exciting when the family legacy comes with industrial hydroponics and armed criminals... Welcome home Your Grace :)

Episode 2: TACKLE TOMMY WOO WOO

The wonderfully psychotic Gospel and his crew add another layer of threat and by now one important rule of The Gentlemen has become clear: every problem can be solved, but the solution will almost certainly create three significantly worse ones.

Episode 3: WHERE'S MY WEED AT?

Jimmy (Michael Vu) manages to misplace enough product to keep several counties happily sedated, sending Eddie and Susie chasing the missing weed and eventually into a Fast n Furious caper involving a truly radioactive-looking Lamborghini. 

Episode 4: AN UNSYMPATHETIC GENTLEMAN

Blackmail, aristocratic depravity, Nazi memorabilia and Hitler's preserved testicle all collide in an episode which finally gives Britain the costume drama it deserves. Freddie Fox turns up as the wonderfully vile Lord Bassington and the whole thing goes full deranged-posho-em-up…

Episode 5: I'VE HUNDREDS OF COUSINS

Eddie's continuing attempts to stabilise the Glass operation introduce another criminal ecosystem, this time a traveller family whose strength very much lies in numbers. Ritchie has always been great at creating competing underworld tribes!

Episode 6: ALL EVENTUALITIES

Fifteen million quid needs laundering, Jack Glass needs protecting and Freddy decides that what the world really needs is 'crack weed', because apparently ordinary cannabis just wasn't creating sufficient levels of mayhem.

Episode 7: NOT WITHOUT DANGER

Susie goes into full revenge mode after events involving Jack while Eddie starts considering whether the best way out of one criminal empire might be selling it to an even more dangerous criminal empire… Giancarlo Esposito's beautifully controlled Stanley Johnston is absolutely superb here, radiating the sort of immaculate menace which suggests that accepting one of his dinner invitations probably counts as signing a legal waiver.

Episode 8: THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO BOBBY GLASS

Bobby Glass announces his intention to retire and essentially turns the criminal empire into The Apprentice: Organised Crime Edition, only with a considerably harsher firing process. 

DARKMATTERS SEASON ONE VERDICT

Season One occasionally meanders while positioning all the pieces but once Eddie, Susie and the Glass empire are properly locked together it becomes massively addictive stuff!!

Out of a potential 5 you have to go with a Darkmatters:

ö ö ö ö ½ (4.5 – Extremely classy crime-em-up action with a nasty streak hiding under the tweed.)

Awesomeness öööö½ – Gunplay, gangsters and stately home weed farms, what's not to like?
Laughs öööö – Freddy alone adds at least two stars.
Horror ööö – Some pleasingly nasty moments when the criminal world draws weapons.
Spiritual Enlightenment öö – Thou shalt probably not build a narcotics empire beneath thy ancestral home.

The MVP has to be Susie Glass, because Kaya Scodelario somehow makes organised crime administration look both incredibly stylish and utterly exhausting. 

Then there's Freddy, a genuine walking public-safety incident… Daniel Ings pulls off the impressive trick of making him appalling, hilarious and somehow still weirdly lovable.

Vinnie Jones' Geoff is the other secret weapon. There's real melancholy behind the hard-man exterior and Jones gives him far more depth than expected, although there is never any doubt whatsoever that Geoff could dispose of a body, mend a fence and be back to feed the pheasants before lunch.

And the season's WTF crown? It simply has to be Hitler's testicle. There are times when television stops being mere entertainment and becomes culture.

SEASON TWO – THE DUKE OF FUCK-AROUND-AND-FIND-OUT

The empire has expanded, the ambition levels have gone stratospheric and Eddie wants influence, territory, status and increasingly the whole bloody board, which means the show can stop asking whether he'll escape the gangster lifestyle and start examining the much juicier possibility that the respectable Duke and the ruthless criminal might actually be the same person wearing different jackets.

Episode 1: THE ROAD TO KINGDOM

Season Two wastes no time announcing its bigger ambitions as Eddie starts chasing political status, the Italians arrive, valuable art becomes problematic and a tiger delivers perhaps the most decisive staff appraisal of the year. Mafia politics, Botticelli, aristocratic scheming and large carnivorous mammals all appear in the opening salvo.

Episode 2: THERE'S A RAT IN THE KITCHEN

Eddie heads to Milan and discovers that international business networking apparently works much like LinkedIn except there are significantly more corpses. The big change is how proactive he has become because Season One Eddie generally reacted to danger whereas this upgraded version plans, manipulates and keeps things from Susie, which is obviously going to be completely fine and definitely won't come back to bite anybody later...

Episode 3: DO YOU REJECT SATAN?

Eddie becomes a godfather, starts dealing with some very amusing unrest among the weed-farm workforce. Does Eddie reject Satan? Not so much as appear keen to explore whether there might be mutually advantageous business opportunities. 

Episode 4: THE BIGGER PICTURE

Cannabis legislation, Westminster connections, bishops and a missing falcon make for one of the season's best collisions of old establishment and new crime, as Eddie discovers that lobbying Parliament doesn't feel entirely unlike organised crime 

Episode 5: A SUBURBAN A-ROAD ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF BASINGSTOKE

Possibly one of the greatest episode titles ever committed to television sees Eddie beaten, buried alive and subjected to what might generously be described as Bobby Glass' immersive executive mentoring programme.  Visit Hampshire - bring a shovel.

Episode 6: THE BELLS OF SAN DOMENICO

A gorgeous Italian wedding full of sunshine, gangsters, family, fabulous clothes and let’s not forget some blood. It’s glorious but we’re just waiting for the inevitable bad thing... and when it comes, it properly hurts. 

Episode 7: THIS MAD CIRCUS

Halstead Manor effectively becomes Home Alone as armed men descend on the estate and make the spectacularly poor decision to invade somewhere defended by Vinnie Jones. Geoff gets to demonstrate why he’s the baddest ass character in the show.

Episode 8: BRING ME THE HEAD

By the finale Eddie it’s all betrayals, family revelations and the battery-to-bollocks interrogation technique… Eddie can survive this criminal world and it’s getting increasingly nasty... Bring on the chainsaws!?

DARKMATTERS SEASON TWO VERDICT

Season Two is where The Gentlemen goes from being a highly entertaining spin-off to something closer to its own proper crime saga. The stakes are bigger and the locations more exotic, sure, but what really makes it work is that the violence now comes with consequences. Eddie's transformation gives all the Ritchie swagger a poisonous dramatic core because ambition costs him something, power starts demanding payment and the smooth Duke increasingly resembles the sort of person Season One Eddie might have regarded as the problem.

Out of a potential 5 you have to go with a Darkmatters:

ö ö ö ö ö (5 – International gangster-em-up brilliance with extra teeth.)

Awesomeness ööööö – Tigers, Italian mobsters, revenge and Vinnie Jones defending the manor.

Laughs öööö – Still gloriously funny even when everything is going horribly wrong.
Horror öööö – The violence lands harder this time because now we actually care.
Spiritual Enlightenment öö½ – Power corrupts, although apparently it also comes with incredible tailoring.

Theo James gets the Season Two MVP for the subtle way Eddie changes without ever feeling like he's suddenly become another character. The really clever bit isn't watching a good man 'turn bad', it's watching him slowly stop pretending that the qualities required to become a successful gangster weren't already baked into him. Confidence, entitlement, discipline, connections, territorial instinct and the ability to make extremely unpleasant decisions.

Susie is still magnificent though, particularly because she grew up knowing exactly what this world was while Eddie actively chooses it, a distinction that could yet become the fault line which blows the whole partnership apart. Kaya Scodelario's ability to suggest murderous disappointment with approximately half an eyebrow remains one of television's most underappreciated superpowers.

Ray Winstone also gets some properly meaty material as Bobby because he doesn't need to shout, posture or even move very much to remind everyone that the Glass empire exists because he built it. His confrontations with Eddie have the flavour of a veteran predator watching a younger one grow teeth and quietly deciding whether that development should be encouraged or terminated.

And then there's Geoff again, because if civilisation does collapse don't waste your time finding some billionaire survival bunker… find Vinnie Jones. Geoff will already have a Land Rover, six months' food, several firearms, a working generator :)

LONG LIVE THE DUKE?

What I really like about The Gentlemen after these sixteen episodes is that the show hasn't simply settled into endlessly remixing Lock, Stock and Snatch, even though all the familiar Ritchie toys are still present and correct. Underneath the stylish criminal fun there is now a genuinely compelling character story because Eddie is so much fun to watch.

Theo James is brilliant because nothing about Eddie's descent feels wildly out of character. If anything, it feels worryingly natural. The qualities were there all along and the criminal empire merely provided somewhere they could flourish.

Maybe that has always been Ritchie's cheekiest point with The Gentlemen anyway, that the distance between aristocracy and organised crime isn't necessarily as great as either group might like us to believe. 

Season Three is coming too, which is excellent news, I hope it’s not too long before we can see Eddie, Susie, Bobby, Geoff and the human IED that is Freddy as a fully dysfunctional criminal dynasty… and I am very much up for seeing just how much worse things can get.

>>> Imagine a cyberpunk world where the Earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope... This is high tech / low life meeting the forces of hell!?

Click banner below to hear a FREE 5 mins sample of my audiobook which is becoming a graphic novel too)...