Howling VI: The Freaks

A man Ian wanders into a dusty Western town where he takes up with the local preacher and his horny daughter. Things go well until a carnival, complete with an elaborate freak show, rolls into town. Ian and the show's owner Winston have a checkered past together. Winston knows Ian is a werewolf, you see, and knows how to make him change...

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There are movies that are pretty damn good, movies that are pretty damn awful, and movies that are just...kind of there. Howling VI is one of these. It's like a rice cake; tasteless and mostly harmless. Now, it does have a very disturbingly realistic scene where a circus geek bites the head off a chicken. But other than that, that's pretty much it.

Well, I guess I should mention the Evil Vaguely European Villain. As with all EVEVs, he's suave, smart, sexy in that homoerotic Anne Rice kind of way...which is very appropriate, considering that he's a vampire. Just imagine an older, more overweight Lestat and you'll have Winston, our EVEV. Amazingly enough, we don't have the Unabashed American Protagonist to counter EVEV; no, the protagonist is actually British! He even has an accent, and the name 'Ian' to cement this fact. Never mind that the setting of this movie is a Western town that seems to have never recovered from the Depression. Well, no, I guess it does make sense. How else can you have fish-out-of-the-water jokes?

Our hero Ian is pursuing the EVEV Winston because he once was in charge of an evil cult. Not a lot of detail is given about this cult, so I'm simply assuming that it was an evil one. If it wasn't they probably would have called it a 'religion.' Anyhow, the cult practiced obtaining immortality through vampirism, and Winston actually accomplished this. It isn't your pretty, foo-foo angsty goth vampirism either, but a far ickier kind. Winston, when in full vampire mode, actually metamorphoses into a very ugly humanoid bat creature. Not good for radiating homoerotic tension. Ian's father, for whatever reason, once tried to infiltrate this cult, but instead he wound up dead and Winston-for whatever reason-cursed Ian with lycanthropy. The fact that, in the first five minutes of the film, Werewolf Ian kills an innocent girl suggests that this is a curse, but, really, if I was training someone to be a villain, I would think explaining that giving someone whose father you just killed supernatural powers potentially rivaling your own would be high on my teacher's agenda. Plus, if it is fully a curse, why is Ian able to keep his werewolf side from killling later in the movie? If he could keep himself from killing a cat, why not a human girl who he seemed to have loved?

Plot problems aside (and there are a few), this is actually a decent movie. The acting's tolerable, the movie moves at a slow but decent enough pace, and the characters-especially Ian and Reptile Kid-are actually likeable and somewhat complex. In fact, I liked most of the characters, even EVEV, with the exception of the completely generic Requisite Love Interest. Of course, I can't fault her, since her only point in existing is to bring about the Requisite Sex Scene (saved, at least for me, from blandness by the fact that Ian is an excellent specimen of British manhood). The film also does a surprisingly good job of capturing both the atmosphere of a dusty, half-abandoned Western town and the archaic sideshow carnival. Now, keep in mind, I've been to neither, but it seemed authentic, especially the infamous geek scene.

Unfortunately, the whole thing really slides down about the last thirty minutes. What starts off as a relatively original and fresh horror movie suddenly pulls out one of the dumbest cliches: the angry village mob. The fact that it's led by a character who started off as overly compassionate and reasonable and suddenly becomes Charlton Heston on speed (yes, I know he saw his daughter's boyfriend turn into a vicious werewolf, but still...) makes it even harder to swallow. The final fight promised by the back of the box between werewolf and vampire was also kind of disappointing, in terms of both dramatic tension and special effects. The fourteen year old in me gave it a satisfied if reluctant thumbs up, but the English major adult in me said solemnly, "Oh for God's sake, how insipid is this!" Then Ian walks off into the sunset-leaving behind the Requisite Love Interest and the town while carrying the corpse of his buddy the Reptile Kid. This parallels the beginning of the movie, where Ian came into town carrying the teddy bear owned by the aforementioned female victim of his. Sure, it's a well-placed bit of symbolism, but it doesn't make much sense. After presumably freeing himself from the werewolf's curse (we never really find out if Winston's destruction causes this) and definitely not having to worry about the whole avenge-father thing anymore, he just walks off, leaving behind PLI and carrying the dead body of a hideously deformed guy off to nowhere. Maybe he was just taking out to the dump, I don't know, but it was still a very strange scene to end the film with, undermining whatever good was there before.

Oh wait, and I still haven't mentioned the hermaphrodite and the midget who are a romantic couple. I'll leave that for you to see...