The Howling: New Moon Rising (1995)

Betty Sue, the mischevious, perky werewolf from Howling V, has come to a small town in the western United States...for no reason. With the help of the survivor from Howling IV< who is in town (for no reason), a detective is about to uncover the werewolf's identity, but does he have the right person?

I've learned a few things from years of watching crap, painful lessons brought with many tears. The less a movie believes that it's worth something, the more tolerable it can be. Of course, there are many exceptions: Manos: Hands of Fate is one off the top of my head, as is Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (hell, I'm going to get e-mails about that...), but I find it generally true, at least for me. There's this movie, and then there's Vice Academy, my personal Waterloo. Vice Academy actually thought it was a hilarious comedy, when in fact it was as funny as Sophie's Choice. This flick, on the other hand, knows on some deep level that it's 100% Grade A crap, and that makes it easier somehow. That doesn't mean, though, that I was able to walk away completely unbruised.

Imagine a two hour country music video where very few actors are used, mostly real local 'color' (all of whom take to 'acting' with the same enthusiasm as one would when reading the terms of the lifetime gaurantee on one's lawnmower), and that's sort of about werewolves. While werewolves are involved in the plot, you don't really get to see one until toward the end and even then it just involves a cheap effect where someone's face is stretched. But who needs werewolves in a werewolf movie when you have the glories of generic, poorly performed country western music! Halfway through the film, a character who has not appeared before pops up to play in front of a campfirre a ffiteen-minute song about how eeeevil drugs are. Or something. I'm pretty sure I was in flipping-through-books-and-magazines by this point.

I would spend the rest of this review discussing the course of events in this movie, but, to be honest, I'm not quite sure what it's about. Somehow we're supposed to believe that the thin Austrailian guy from Howling V survived that flick and is living 'undercover' in the town. Whatever the organization that's hiding him, they must have a really good plastic surgeon; not only does he little resemble the guy from Howling V, but they've given him a completely different build! He still has the accent though (and, actually, his accent is semi-convincing, if you can get past that every five minutes they have him spouting a "mate" or 'g'day") They also pull in the sole survivor from Howling IV, whom I think is actually the same actress, but that, my friends, is another movie I'd like to purge from my mind.

Oh, yeah, and then there's the 'villain' of the piece, Mary Lou from Howling V. She also bears no resemblence to herself from before, but they give a throw-away line about her being a 'shapeshifter,' so I guess that covers it. I don't know if she's another piece of the 'local color' or not, but, my God, her acting was so bad I thought that it would reach around from the other side of the spectrum to Orson Wells or Joan Crawford quality. I'm not even sure I can correctly apply the verb 'acting' to what I saw going on.

There's a lot more I can say. There's also the detective-mystery-who's the werewolf? subplot, which unlike Howling V doesn't quite work because the movie doesn't offer up any suspects except the Australian guy, and we're told from the very beginning he's not. Then there's the long "abusive cop" sequence, which seems more like a scene from an episode of "Dukes of Hazzard" gone horribly mad. But I think I've made my point. This movie is boring, tedious, inept, and, well, awful in all but the most basic technical respects, but at least it doesn't quite reach heights of evil, and at least it's not a maliciously bad movie.