Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. My name is Rob.
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
And today's Weird House Cinema selection is, Oh, this is just b movie caviare I don't know. I don't know what you thought of a joke. You had seen it previously, if I'm not mistaken. I watched it for the first time in the last couple of weeks. Watched it on an airplane, and I was just overwhelmed by the glory of howling to your Sister is a Werewolf from nineteen eighty five.
I had seen it before, but didn't remember a lot about it. This is one I think I kind of watched in the early twenties haze of just like I'd go with my friend to the local you know, used book d CD and DVD store, and we'd get like an armload of ninety nine cent bad DVDs and just kind of watch them one after another. And this was one of those. I remember a few things about it.
I remember it being weird. I think I remembered Christopher Lee's bizarre outfit in the scene where he goes to the club, which we'll have to talk about later, and it's hard to forget the vibes of Sybil Danning presiding over the rituals in the film. I much commented upon kind of aura this movie has. In fact, in his one star review of this film, Roger Ebert singled out the Sybil Danning's ability to preside over rituals as one
of the best things about the movie. And I have to agree there certainly one of the most memorable things about it.
Yeah. I don't think he completely liked the film, but he certainly liked her performance in it. And I don't know you can tell when Ebert. Sometimes Ebert would give a review like this, and you know it'd be a low star rating, but you could tell he loved it.
Yeah, this was one of those. It's like, objectively, I must say it is a bad film, but most of what he had to say about it seemed kind of amused and pleased.
Yeah, yeah, because it is. This one's rough around the edges. It is you know, it's definitely lower budget, but it's it's trying really hard. It's throwing everything at the wall, it's laying in its teeth it's thrashing its head from side to side, and it refuses to let go. H that's that's Howling too, That's it, that's its vibe. It's a new wave horror party and all the werewolves are invited.
It is. I think this movie would be more remembered for its weirdness if it were not directly followed by Howling three the Marsupials, which is perhaps even weirder. It's almost like, uh, this movie, this movie would be more of a beacon of absurdity if not having if not for having been immediately one opt yeah.
Yeah, same director came back, Phelipe Mora, who will talk about it in a minute, came back and made the Howling three, doubling down on all the weirdness, making it a firmly assy weird film and in a way that yeah, really and it almost kind of overshines the genuine weirdness of this picture. But yeah, but Howling two is not to be overlooked, at least if your taste aligns with
ours when it comes to B films. So The Howling two is, of course a sequel to the nineteen eighty one Joe Dante film The Howling, which I believe we both watched almost in tandem not too long ago. I think we were talking about covering it for Weird House Cinema and then we kind of moved on to something else.
And I think it's largely because The Howling is a really solid werewolf movie with amazing special effects, some great practical special effects, and it also has some Joe Dante Looney Tunes weirdness in there and you know, kind of like appropriate brushstrokes, solids of humor. Yeah, a great sense of humor in the correct balance, solid cast, solid w one writing, incredible practical world effects, like I said, and
all that for a two million dollar budget. So in a way it was like great film, but not necessarily the greatest Weird House Cinema selection. But The Howling definitely made, but made a box office splash, made a lot of money, entertained a lot of people, certified hit, and again solid monster film that I would say balance is a kind of kind of like, on one hand, psycho sexual aspirations alongside those again sort of looney tune Joe Dante moments
that you've come to expect from his filmography and the effects. Again, the effects alone on the Howling give it a special place in horror history. You have those Rob Boteine effects that are just amazing, very good. So Howling two follows up on all of this. It's going to continue the party, but with a small still a small budget. I think it's one of these cases where the budget's technically larger, but when you you know year to year, it's maybe
a little bit lower. In this time, there's no Joe Dante, he'd moved on to direct Grimlins, no script doctoring from John Sales this time, and also you don't have Rob Botein doing his special effects. Now, those special effects in Howling To are still great, with a number of caveats, a number of limitations because for the most part they're shooting far from the Hollywood home base. Here, effects and props were boxed up sent to then Czechoslovakia for the
majority of the shoot. I was actually watching some extras on the Blu Ray that I'm going to reference here in a minute, an interview with Steve Johnson, who we've talked about on the show before he was There are a number of talented affects people on Howling To, but Steve Johnson was the guy that they sent to out in the field to the then Czechoslovakia set and the locations to make everything happen, to open up boxes that had been shipped from from Hollywood with props and effects
pieces that had in many cases not and completed yet or famously at least, the allegation is that some of the werewolf costumes were actually just leftover ape costumes from the Planet of the Apes television series and they're like, here, you go, do your best with it. And luckily you had some very scrappy effects guys out in the field who were up for the challenge, and they're like, all right, let's finish these things. Let's put it together. Let's make it work with what we got.
Yeah. I don't know what score you would get if you were just looking at the werewolf costumes and makeup effects in the movie in full direct lighting and getting a really good look at them, the way that you do get a good look at the werewolf effects in the original Howling, but the way the movie deploys them, I think you end up with with kind of a B plus on makeup effects here, because usually you are not getting a good square look at the at the costumes.
There will be a lot of use of shadow of obscures, your you know, obscure furry silhouettes coming through the trees and stuff, some of which actually look quite nice. Overall, the movie is not a masterclass in cinematography, but occasionally there was a shot where I was like, well, that looks great, that's spooky.
Yea.
I'm thinking particularly of some of the use of the wooded locations, like the overgrown cemetery. There's some very nice shots of where wolves creeping through the trees there that I was like, that could be an excellent movie and it would fit right in. The Other thing that this movie does is a lot of extreme close ups of were wolves. So when a wolf where wolf is about to attack, you will get extreme close up of teeth
and snout and fur that look pretty good. Uh, And then you don't get a whole lot of full perspective shots.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's that's a great observation here. And it also helps that a lot of the film is concerned with the road to full on were wolf mode, so it's about people changing into and what we're doing
while we're changing. So it allows us to dwell less on like the full wolf form in many cases, but in general, I would say that, Yeah, if the Howling was the first child that achieved great things on account of its own merits and hard work, Howling two is kind of like the second child who quickly who knows from the get go that it doesn't have the talent of the older sibling, but instead decides to just absolutely act out and prove just how much of a freak it is.
Marsha, Marsha, Marshah.
Yeah, and I think it achieves this marvelously, marvelously, And though your mileage may vary depending on your tolerance for B movie weirdness. Now I have to add, I don't think I saw any of the Howling films when I was young, but I do remember their terrific poster and VHS box art, and the posters would be in the video rental stores as well. The first three, in particular,
are all really great. The original Howling had this it looks like a woman with wolf claws clawing her way out of a I don't know, like a paper sack or something, or maybe it's supposed to be flesh. Yeah, and then Howling two we have another wolf and woman clawing through the poster itself, and I believe this is supposed to be Civil Banning's character, the were wolf queen striba right, steer bus, steer bus. Sorry, I'm further away from my notes than usual. So some of the letters
and a smaller printer are playing tricks on me. Yes, Stirba the were Wolf Queen, and then Howling three aka Howling three the Marsupials. At least the poster I grew up seeing on the walls doesn't really lean on the Marsupial thing too much and just shows like a ferocious wear creature again clawing through the poster or the VHS box art. The were wolves in the Howling movies, this initial trilogy anyway, it's implied that they are going to come out of the media and attack you. That's the
kind of experience you can expect. And as a child, I was like, that looks like too much for me, too much wearable faction for me.
But did you notice how across the three posters the material that is being slashed through changes, so you said, in the first poster, it's this opaque, leathery looking maybe it's like vellum or something. It's like an opaque kind of tan material that's being slashed through. And the second one, Queen steerba here is slashing through like darkness itself, cutting through this black void to come out from beyond it.
There's almost something kind of metaphysical about that. And then in the third one, the worlf is slashing through a translucent gossamer sheet, almost like implying something kind of of a bedtime nightgown feeling.
Yeah. Yeah, and then that wor wolf looks really wild, like there's no bargaining with that werewolf. So check out those posters if you get a chance. But yeah, this
film is a glorious mess. And to be clear, you know, well ahead of us getting into the plot, there are plenty of big and small things in this film that just don't add up, like scene to scene that don't make sense, and then also larger issues of plot and character relationship where you have to do a fair amount of mental gymnastics to even attain a sort of head canon that lets everything keep stay halfway stable.
Yeah. Another thing that's funny about this movie is the awkward the awkwardness in the dialogue. Again, this is not
a John salescript. There you can like follow what the characters are saying in the dialogue like it all kind of makes sense, but frequently I was noticing that the conversation does not feel human, like there are these unnatural patterns of information flow where people either state things much too suddenly without naturalistic hesitation or preparation, or they restate things that don't make any sense to say again, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, So it'll be fun to call some examples of this when we get into the plot. Yeah, but yeah, it's a terrifically fun film. It embraces its cheesy B movie vibes. It delivers some cool monster scenes, like we've been saying, hammer esque Gothic vibes that are really nice. Filmed in an actual castle. So the castle scenes, especially a lot of candle candle lighting and all, I thought looked pretty great. And also you have some neat elements
of werewolf eroticism that I think are pretty interesting. As I've discussed on the show before, I tend to tire of werewolf media that airs too masculine, and I love even a shallow exploration of feminine lacanthropy and so general listeners, we are in the shallow end of the pool on this one, but there's still a great deal of fun splashing around in those waters.
No, it's true, this one is very much about werewolf ladies. And yeah, we've talked about this on the show multiple times before, but a lot of werewolf media to emphasize kind of especially bipedal wear wolves as like V shaped musclemen. Yeah, but here, Yeah, there's a different take. Yeah.
Now, when it comes to the elevator pitch for this one for want for starters, I don't think I can really top what it actually said on the VHS boxes, and that is the rocking, shocking new wave of horror.
Pretty great. And then I also saw an interview where Feliet Moore, the director, called this film the Hammer movie they never made, which I think is pretty good because it is there are a lot of elements to the plot, into the setting that do feel very Hammer horror Gothic, but clearly taking it in directions that hammer horror films tended not to go well.
It feels more like the later Hammer films, the seventies Hammer films that were leaning more into the erotic elements and got a little zanier in the different plot elements they would throw together, and it just feels like taking that sensibility and extending it even further in to the eighties, so it's seventies hammer horror, but with punk new wave eighties noss.
Yeah. Yeah, all right. Well, if you're wondering, hey, how can I watch The Howling Too, Well, it's widely available at this point. For my first viewing, I watched it on a streaming service on an airplane, which this was always this is a sort of film. It's a fun exercise of Yeah, when the werewolves start getting naked, you have to sort of like lean over and watch it, kind of huddle positions so you don't alarm anyone behind you.
But it was a pretty fun flight viewing. And then my subsequent viewing of it came via the excellent Vinegar syndrome Blu ray. This one right here comes with loads of extras. I really enjoyed it. This one's going in the collection for sure.
Wait, was The Howling Too? You mean one of the films that was selected by the airline service the stream on the Okay, you had it on your own device.
Yeah, I pre downloaded it so that I had it on my phone and then I could watch it. And generally I'll do a mix. I have a little little cardboard stand. I can set it on on the little tray table, watch it that way, and if things get a little violin or a little spicy, then I can, you know, I can sort of lean over it and make sure I have a little more privacy on those scenes.
It would be amazing if there was an in flight streaming service that catered to our taste that, you know, sometimes those selections on the airplane get they're very mainstream. A lot of like recent big budget movies that somehow I never even heard of, and it's like every you know, multi hundred million dollar movie that came out two years before that I didn't know existed.
Yeah, yeah, I mean I have some good experience. I think I did watch in Godzilla for the first time on an airplane. That was pretty great. Sometimes they'll have some older films, just depending on who you're flying with. Sometimes, you know, especially if you're using a foreign airlines, you
get some remarkable insight into contemporary foreign pictures. And yeah, I do wish there were more Werewolf films available on these and certainly more B films because generally, I don't know, when I'm on an airplane, I need some solid distraction. I'm more inclined to watch Franken Hooker than I am to watch whatever is nominated for an OSCAR this year. Though we do have some delightfully weird films nominated for Oscars this year.
I have not kept tracks, so I do you know.
Yeah, we'll have to talk after the mics are off, because there are a couple of really good ones that I like. All right, let's get into the cast and crew here. So we've mentioned him already, but Felipe Mora is the director here. Born nineteen forty nine, French born Australian director whose first big feature film was Mad Dog Morgan in seventy six that starred Dennis Hopper. Then came nineteen eighty two as The Beast Within starring Ronnie Cox. Have you seen this one, Joe?
I don't think so. Wait a minute. That's not a remake of the Beast with Five Fingers?
Is it? No? This is I haven't seen it either, but it's it seems pretty dark, pretty bonkers, and I think people turn into cicadas in it. That's based on what I was like. There's some sort of beast transformation, but I think it leans more insect than Wolf.
Okay, I gotta check that out, and it's got Kohagen. Yeah. Right.
So he followed this film up with the by all accounts bonkers pop musical comedy The Return of Captain Invincible in nineteen eighty two. This one stars Alan Arkin and Christopher Lee and Christopher I don't know about Alan Arkin, but Christopher Lee definitely sings in this one, so we may have to come back.
Be Still my Heart.
Then came the nineteen eighty three bald eagle conservation action film A Breed Apart, starring Rugger Howard Powers Booth, Kathleen Turner, and Donald Pleasants.
It's a bald eagle conservation action film.
Yeah, I think people. I haven't seen this one, but it's like, I'm assuming Donald Pleasants is trying to eagle eggs perhaps to eat, and I'm gonna go ahead and guess that Powers Booth is the guy that he has hired to do this.
He's a poacher for hire, and Rutgar Howard speaks for the Eagles. That's for Lore Acts of the Eagles.
Yeah, definitely from that period where Howard is like, I only play good guys. I don't play bad guys. I want to save some bald eagles. So Kathleen Turner is I'm guessing a conservationist and love interest. I think we probably predicted the whole screenplay right there.
I think, so, okay, But after this, do we get to Howling Two?
We do Howling too, as we're talking about now, followed up by the eighty six war slash crime drama Death of a Soldier, and then he comes back to Howling Country with the legendarily weird Howling three of the Marsupials, and at this point in his career, yes, it is
time to direct a Christopher Walken movie. Eighty nine's communion that this is one a number of you are going to be familiar with, an alien abduction drama about the Wolfen and the Hunger, author Whitley Striber, featuring a memorable dance number between Walkin's character, you know, playing the author and gray aliens. It's it's one of these that I've never seen this one in full. I've only seen segments of it, but those segments are pretty spectacular.
Do I understand correctly that the author here claimed this was a true story?
That is my loose understanding of it. I'm not a I'm not a big expert on his accounts, but it's my understanding that this is supposed to be his. I think his he allegedly has actual experiences with aliens. Take that for he has had paranormal experiences, and those are depicted to some extent in his in Communion.
I was asking what he claimed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll have to come back. Maybe we'll cover communion in the future and we can break that down a little bit more. But it's my understanding the Yeah, he famously wrote about where wolves and vampires, but believe in either of those, but the matter was different concerning aliens. Let's see. As for our director here, Phelipe Moura, still active, still busting out films, one of the more recent ones, and by that I mean the last three or four decades.
He did one call ninety six called Pterodactyl Women from Beverly Hills. But it doesn't look like he's slowing down. Looks like he still has a number of projects coming together. Okay, all right, Coming to the writing, we have Gary Brandner. He has original novel and screenplay credit here. So he lived nineteen thirty through twenty thirteen and he was an American horror author, best known for his trilogy of Howling novels.
These are the novels that were two varying degrees the basis for the Howling movies, and they came out in seventy seven, seventy nine, and eighty five. I was looking online. If you get your books digitally these days, you can get all three original Howling novels in a single volume and you can give that as an e book.
But he was, I'm just I maybe I'll be proven wrong, but this movie does not feel to me like it was closely based on a novel.
I do not believe it was, even though he apparently did the initial adaptation. But it's one of those situations where you know, his first novel was adapted. He wasn't involved into the Howling, and then when they were making the Howling too, they were like, all right, we're gonna bring him on board. He's the author, let's have him
do the adaptation. But then it goes through a couple of different adaptation cycles where they're like, all right, we're going to do it, but we have to shoot it in If memory serves, they were going to shoot it in Spain at one point and so he you know, and these are the budgetary constraints, and he had made those changes, and then more changes occurred, and at some point he just steps off the project, and you know, it gets passed on to a different screenwriter who were
about to get to But yeah, Brander was really prolific. Let's see the Howling for the original Nightmare is said to be a more faithful adaptation of his original book, and other adaptations of his written work include nineteen eighty eight Cameron's Closet and the nineteen eighty nine TV movie From the Dead of Night that was based on his novel Walkers. But yeah, he wrote good at least a
couple a dozen horror novels back in the day. And I think he even maybe it was The Howling had a if I'm not mistaken that Howling might have had at least in one of its printings had a Stephen King blurb on the cover.
M So, I don't remember if I have seen the Howlings four, five, and six. I know I've seen one, two, three, seven, I haven't seen seven. Seven is the one in the American Southwest with like Cowboy.
Oh wow, I haven't heard what I've seen one, two, three, and five. I've seen the one that's the Freaks that has Bruce Payne is a vampire in it.
I don't remember if I've seen that. I don't recall it.
Yeah, there was a time when the Howling movies were kind of they were just part of the like the cable wasteland that you would encounter late at night. So I think that's I saw. Some of my spotty viewing of Howling films came from there.
Yeah, it's possible four, five, and six have been on in rooms where I was, but I don't think I have paid attention to those movies.
The actual screenplay credit here goes to Robert Sarno. Sarno is responsible for the vast majority of the script we have here. His only other writing credit on the databases is ninety five's Decoy, an action film starring Peter Weller and Robert Patrick. So we get RoboCop and Terminator two coming together. I don't know what they're doing. I think it's just like a mercenary action picture.
It's about duck hunting.
Maybe. So all right, let's get into the cast. Top billing here is Christopher Lee playing Stefan, the were wolf, hunter.
Stefan. His name is Stefan Crossco, which I dare you not to accidentally say Chrisco, especially since his name is Christoph.
Yes, Stephan Crossco, and sometimes they call him Crossco. Sometimes they refer to him by his last name, sometimes by his first name.
Yeah, but to Queen Steerba, he is Stephan, because we will learn that they have it. There's a history between them.
Yes, Christopher Lee, of course legend I lived nineteen twenty two through twenty fifteen. This is our eighth Christopher Lee film on Weird House Cinema, putting him in the lead currently of actors whose films we've covered thus far in Weird House Cinema. And of course we don't have to We don't have to tell you who Christopher Lee was. Christopher Lee was Dracula, he was Sorrowman. He was Lord
summer Isle. He was Count Dooku, he was King Haggard, and many more, always bringing a smoldering, dignified presence to even the shakiest of projects, and more than proving his worth as an actor in the roles that allowed him to really shake things up and stand out, so an all time great, to be sure.
Bringing Christopher Lee into your movie is kind of like lighting a candle in a room. You know, whatever else is in the room, the room might have some tacky decor, it might have some you know, plastic everywhere, but once you light a candle, something in the room does feel a little more connected with the ancient and the spiritual and the powerful. It becomes more dignified and sacred by
the presence of candlelight. Christopher Lee is like that. He of course fits right in with a good script and you know, in his kind of horror and gothic horror and high fantasy settings. But bring him even into a more plastic environment and he becomes the candle light that dignifies and mystifies it somewhat.
Yeah. Absolutely. There are plenty of examples in this film where he's providing voiceover narration, or it's you know, an actual scene interaction between characters, and you're like, you're buying into what he's laying down. You're like, yeah, yeah, Lee, he is right, like the dawn of the Werewolf is nearly here, and it's backed up by biblical evidence. If you take two seconds to analyze any of it, you're like, that was nonsense. But Lee makes us believe, at least in the moment.
There were a number of his scenes in this movie where the first time I watched them, I was just kind of like, oh, okay, I was trying to follow. And then when I went back to make notes and I typed out the words that he had said, I was like, what the part about when they get We're gonna have to discuss his allegation that Queen Steerba is going to reverse the process of evolution.
Yeah, Yeah, raises so many questions that are not answered. One of the fun questions to always answer regarding an actor of this stature and with so many credits and him film like this is like, where was he in his career? I think we might generally say that these were the Hollywood years. This like the eighties and into the nineties. These were years when I'm to understand Lee had moved to Hollywood, he was making a determined effort to put behind him Hammer horror, and you know, thinking
that it was limiting his options back home. And he was appearing in a number of number of different sorts of films. There were some, you know, some fantasy films, various comedies, so to a certain extent, he was kind of, you know, stretching his legs a little bit and trying on different sorts of roles. But I don't know, there are a lot of films in this period that are
kind of forgettable. There are some standouts like eighty Two's of the Last Unicorn, in which he is the voice of King Haggard who has captured all of the unicorns. Pretty great role. And then even into the nineties, I mean, you get things like Grimlin's two, during which he apparently apologized to Joe Dante for the Howling two, which I think is unnecessary. I think Dante Dante gets it, but you know, and then there's like The Rainbow Thief, but
in some other curios. But really it's not until Fellowship of the Ring in two thousand and one that it seems to me that Lee like really sort of comes back into full stature and people begin to really take note of him again. And you know, I'm not just say that every everything he's in after that point is golden, but you kind of see this later portion of his career that has a number of standouts in it.
He experienced a marvelous resurrection of his career in the early two thousands due to Lord of the Rings.
Yeah, and I think it almost feels at times like the people knew that the Lord of the Rings was coming one way or another. And I think a number of people knew that this is the only guy who can play Soomon.
And who else could have been Samon.
Yeah, They're like, just keep him active, keep him acting and things that are gonna you know, keep him limber. But we need we need to contain his energy, we need to prepare him, we need to hold on to him and keep him with us until we can make these movies. M all right. So that's Christopher Lee easily the best act during this film, but not the only actor. Moving through some of the other human characters. We can argue to what degree Stephan is human or mortal? A
number of questions there. But we have Jenny and Ben. These are our two human protagonists, really, and.
God bless them. You know they're trying.
I mean they're sandwiched in here between Christopher Lee, Sybil Danning, and a whole bunch of were wolves and they're doing their best. And you know, at least with Ben, the character of Ben, he does stand out. We'll get to him the second but first Jenny, played by Annie McEnroe born nineteen fifty five, American actress with some fun genre credits here, beginning with the TV movie Snowbeast in seventy seven.
Have you seen that one?
I haven't. I've heard good things about it, though. This one is one that I think there's a lot of excitement about recently.
Oh wait, I don't know what the recent excitement is. I just know because I saw it on I think VHS, probably a long long time ago. It's like a so the idea is it so a rip off of Jaws. It's like the structure of Jaws, but with a yetti instead of a shark.
There you go. Ok it sounds great.
But what was the recent news about it?
I think it just received new attention. I can't remember. I can't remember what form it took. It might have taken the form of a wrist track coverage, or maybe it was like just a You know, some of these films will get a new DVD Blu Ray release and people will get excited about them again, unless I'm confusing it with another snow based horror movie, which is possible.
Okay, well I have to come back to it.
Yeah, So McEnroe follows this up with such films as Oliver Stone's The Hand in eighty one, Battle Truck in eighty two. She followed up Howling two with a cameo in Michael Mann's Manhunter And That was in eighty six, and then a supporting role in David Byrne's True Stories. She also has a performer credit in That Wall Street in eighty seven, Beatlejuice in eighty eight. She's the real litter in That enrolls in several subsequent Oliver Stone films.
She met her husband, producer Edward R. Press And on the set of The Hand.
Wait a minute, just earlier, I asked a movie. I asked if a movie was a remake of Beast with Five Fingers. But Oliver Stone's The Hand is a remake of Beast with Five Fingers.
Essentially, right. Yeah, it's a disembodied hand slash transplant movie. Yeah.
I must have seen this in the notes and subconsciously been thinking about it or something.
Yeah, that's one I've wanted to revisit for a while. That one. That's probably one of my favorite Oliver Stone films.
I mean no offense to Annie McEnroe. She seems great, but a kind of bewildered performance in the movie. I think she's just getting through it.
Yeah. Yeah. And then we have Ben, and Ben is played by B movie action powerhouse Reb Brown.
Yeah, speaking of bewildering but a frequently bewildering action star. I have suggested on the show before that we sometimes just do a Reb Brown film festival series because he is in so many weird B movies. He's in the Italian leather diaper barbarian movie Your Hunter from the Future, directed by Antonio Margheriti, which is no. I think he made a movie we've done on the show before. Was it a cannibal Apocalypse? Is that right?
Was that the Margeriti film? I know we have covered too, think so yeah, okay.
And Reb Brown was also in a ripoff of Predator I think maybe an Italian Filipino ripoff of Predator called Robo war Ye, which that one is not especially watchable. A lot of it's just kind of boring, like commandos walking around in the jungle, but there are some very funny parts in it.
Yeah. Reb Brown is He's the for my taste anyway, the perfect sort of B movie muscle bound action hero because you have that nice combination of Yes, he's big and muscly and objectively handsome, but he is also awkward on screen. Yes, in this film especially. I mean it's in the and I love him. I don't mean any
of this as a dig. Like, if you give me the choice between Reb Brown and I don't know the Barbarian Brothers or I don't know even any number of very competent muscle actors, I'm going to say, please put Reb Brown in there, because he is entertaining.
Always love a Reb Brown performance, even though it is frequently, as I said, bewildering. A lot of strange choices in the line delivery is just kind of why did he have that inflection? I don't know, but they kept it, and it's I'm glad they did.
Yeah. I mean a lot of people are going to know him best from the nineteen eighty eight sci fi epics Space Mutiny, which was riffed on MS two three K. That was the one that co starred John Philip Law, Cameron Mitchell, and Reb's wife Sissy Cameron.
And he's blast hard cheese. Yeah yeah.
So many scenes in that film are him firing a weapon and letting out just this primal scream like that's just bewildering. It's just bewildering. And he gets to do that all the time in this movie as well.
Shoots the gun, either before or after he shoots the gun, or before or after he charges in to tackle someone gravelly high pitched shriek, which is kind of his signature move that really distinguished him from the other meat meat based musclemen of the time. Like, you know, Red Brown is never going to be as big a movie star as Arnold or Stallone, but they do not shriek like this. You will remember him because he's the only one that shrieks.
Yeah. So, yeah, he's so he's tremendous. Inness loved him. Let's see, I'll briefly mentioned a few of the things he was in. He's Captain America twice on TV.
I've thought we should maybe do one of these, one of the alternative Captain America movies from before the Marvel renaissance. There are actually multiple ones. There is the one directed by Albert Pyune that has JD. Saliner's son and that Captain America Captain America, and then there are also the Red Brown ones, which I haven't seen. The Red Brown ones, but I'm very interested.
One of them has Christopher Lee in it, presumably is the villain, so it looks good. He did a lot of TV work. He was on stuff like The Love Boat Three's Company back in the day. Yeah. He followed up Halloween two with Death of a Soldier, which I mentioned previously, and yeah, just been in a ton of a ton of action films over the years and then occasionally shows up in stuff like he has a minor role in nineteen ninety one's Flight of the Intruder. But you don't want Red Brown in a minor role. You
want in front center. And that's what this film offers. All right. Moving on, Yeah, let's talk about Sybil Danning, who plays Sturba in this film. The Werewolf Queen born nineteen fifty Austrian American b movie queen of the seventies and eighties. We've talked about her before in our episode nineteen eighties Battle Beyond the Stars and nineteen eighty three's Hercules.
Oh okay, Yeah, I definitely remembered her from Battle beyond the Stars, in which she plays a kind of gleaming armored angel alien.
Yes. Yeah, her costumes and these films are often extravagant and amazing, and the same is true of this film as Volk We'll get to.
Do you know what I mean When I say a Sybil Danning performance, she often seems to be performing in a costume from a different film. Yes, yes, does that make it's the case in this one too.
Yeah, Well, she had a designated costume designer on this film. This was, in fact Peter Mitchell. His credit is Costume Designer Sibyl Danning. He was an Australian fashion designer turned costume designer for Australian ballets, operas and theatrical productions before making the move to la where he was working at the time. And so all of her costumes were designed, fitted multiple times and then shipped out to then Czechoslovakia for the shoot.
So, her character in this movie is supposed to be like an ancient vampire queen, and the first time we see her, she's dressed in an old kind of crone's robe before she has a magical sort of vampiric rejuvenation process go through. But so when we first see her, it seems like she's in line with this old world aesthetic. She's like a witch from the Middle Ages or something. But then she spends i don't know, the other sixty
percent of the movie wearing like a fim Darth Vader outfit. Yeah, that's a like a very feminine body shape, emphasizing black leather and metal pieces. Robotic kind of design.
Yeah, made from real leather, real brass, and gives her the look like she just came off of a runway. Yeah, yes, yeah, yeah. You can't think to her about where this costume came from, but she does look pretty fabulous in it. So Danning started out in erotic and sexploitation films of the seventies. She was a model turned actress, but steadily worked her way into more mainstream pictures like seventy two's Bluebeard and
the Gallo, The Red Queen Kills seven seven Times. Sorry had a page jump there, The Red Red Queen Kills seven Times. Do you know this one, Joe?
I've seen it, but I forgot she was in it. It's been a while since I've seen it. This is one of those it's a very jallo title. It's a whole sentence.
There's a nice interview with her on the Vinegar Syndrome disc and she points out that this kind of like jump from European cinema, like European low budget cinema to bigger budget Hollywood affairs meant that she no longer had to apply her own makeup using a mirror hanging on a tree, which was a fun, fun example that she
drew here. Like even with a film like Howling Too, she's in an example, she's in a case, she's in a film where she's getting professional makeup and professional costume design.
One thing I have read about Sybil Danning is it seems like she had a great sense of humor about being in ridiculous B movies, not somebody who was like, you know, annoyed or thought that this was beneath her. It's like she thinks this is hilarious and just having a great time.
Yeah, yeah, she was. The extras for this. She was talking about like it was just super fun to play Queen of the Werewolves and just embody this this feminine character that has all of this power, gets to wear all of these cool outfits. So yeah, a lot of fun.
There's one little story that she shares too. Apparently she showed up on set with a swollen eye from a spa mishap, like spa oil got in her eye, and this is a scene where she's gonna wear that brass and leather outfit, and she's like, you can't film me, like look in my eyes. This looks horrible. But Felipe More of the directors like, a, we can't lose any time on this and we can't burn a day of shooting.
But then he says, let's get you some sunglasses and gets these pair of sunglasses four and she's like, well, what a thousand year old werewolf queen? Where are these? Like does this make sense? And More reportedly told her, Sybil, you're the queen of the werewolves. You can do whatever the hell you like. So I like that. But yeah, she has a ton of great credits. She was in The Three Musketeers in seventy three and it's seventy four sequel that I think we're filmed back to back. Those
film featured Christopher Lee as well. She appeared in God's Gun in seventy six, starring Lee van Cleef Believe that's a spaghetti western. And amid all of this, she continued to appear in various genre films like eighty three's Chained Heat, a women's prison film with Linda Blair and John Vernon, fred Olin Ray's The Tomb in eighty six, which we might come back for The Phantom Empire in eighty eight.
I believe that's also fred Olin Ray, and then a number of action films that kind of round out her main period of on screen activity. Eighty six is The Panther Squad, which she co produced and starred in, and La Bounty in eighty nine, which she co produced, co wrote, and starred in opposite Wingshuser. Oh Wings all right, yeah, yeah,
the late Wingshuser rip. And she's remained active as a producer and occasionally has acted, including in rob Zombies, were Wolf, Women of the ss Ground Grindhouse trailer, and she was also at least has some sort of a small role in his two thousand and seven Halloween remake.
Oh, I haven't seen that since it came out. I forgot she was in it.
Yeah.
Well again, As Roger Ebert said, no one presides over a ritual quite like Sybil Danning, and I think he's absolutely right. She she just seems born to like stand like this while the magic is going on, and people are, you know, kneeling before her.
Yes, yes, yes, some great ceremonies in this one.
However, we should point out that this movie does not only have one great werewolf woman villain. There's another one played by Marsha Hunt.
That's right, playing Marianne. We've talked about Marshall Hunt before on the show because she was in well, she was in a few different films, so she was an eighty Two's the Sender, eighty threes, Never Say Never Again, but also Dracula AD nineteen seventy two, which of course starred Christopher Lee. Ah yeah, okay, yeah, so she was a model. It is Slash was a model, singer, actor, author, editor, and she was also famously in a relationship with Nick Jagger and the two had a daughter together.
She also seems to really have a great sense of humor about what's going on here and does not hold back, plays up her like werewolf transformations and all that to the extent that the makeup effects can keep up. But yeah, she's great.
She's good. She has some pretty good makeup in this one, though when she starts changing.
Well, there are parts where she's not even like fully wolf mode. Like there's this shot of her kind of halfway there, like where her face is starting to change and she's just kind of looking back and forth and snarling, and they use the same shot like three different times in the movie.
Yeah, and he's also good at just embodying the wolf even when she's she hasn't started transforming yet.
Yeah, she does a great howl, like standing in the middle of this empty warehouse, and that's great.
We also have a male werewolf in the mix. We have Vlad, played by jud Omen born nineteen forty, American actor, best known for roles in eighty four's Red Red Dawn, eighty five's Peewee's Big Adventure, and also David Lynch's Done. We devoted two whole episodes of Weird House Cinema to the nineteen eighty four adaptation of Doune, and the cast, of course, is so stacked that I don't think we
even really properly mentioned Omen in that. But he played the Fremen Jamas in that, the one that Paul must overcome in single combat as he is entering into Fremen culture.
Oh, I forgot about that. Okay, Yeah, but in this, Yeah, he's a werewolf here named Vlad. Who is I would say the other main werewolf apart from Stierba and Marianna.
Yeah, yeah, I think he's like Stierba's second in command sort of.
Yeah.
But anyway omens credits go, they go all the way back to an uncredited role in seventy three Serpico, with TV and film roles going up through I believe two thousand and five. His other films include eighty nine's Chud two Bud, The Chud, and The greens doll Man. And let's see just a couple of other quick references of people in this We have Ferdy Maine playing Earl. He
lived nineteen sixteen through nineteen eighty eight. German born characteristic actor, best known for roles and the Fearless Vampire Killers in sixty seven where Eagles Dare in sixty eight, Conan the Destroyer in eighty four and eighty six is Pirates. Often played Germanic baddies and or vampires of sorts.
Yeah, and I like his look as a henchman because he's not like a meaty muscle guy. He almost comes off as a professorial henchman.
Yeah. And then again, this film was shot a lot of it was shot in then Czechoslovakia, and we do have a number of check actors that have roles, including a diminutive check actor diminutive in height but not in talent, Yuri Critinar. I hope I'm saying that correctly. Critinar. He lived nineteen forty seven through twenty fifteen, and he plays this character. He's a good guy Vasili right, Vasila Yasila. Yeah, good guy and eventually some bad things are going to
happen to him. But a fun role here. His credits go back to sixty nine and include such Check films as seventy three's Three Wishes for Cinderella and Jan schunk Meyer's Lunacy in two thousand and five, and even a count Bathory movie Bathory Countess of Blood from two thousand and eight, alongside some other foreign productions that were filmed in then Czechoslovakia or later in the Czech Republic, including nineteen eighty four.
As Amadaeis, he is involved in. I think both of the two creepiest scenes in the movie, both his death and his ignominious resurrection scene are like the actually scariest things in here.
Yeah yeah. And then finally, the score. The score is pretty great here, and it is by Stephen W. Parsons born nineteen fifty one British rocker, composer, songwriter and record producer, best known outside of film for his work with the band Sharks, but he was also involved in various other bands and performs this movie's excellent theme song Howling with the band Babble, which I think was assembled for this picture out of some frequent collaborators of his.
Okay, and so you actually see the band perform the song on stage in a scene in the film, and then you get to hear the song about eight more times before the whole guys get over. They play it so so much.
It's one of these where I'm like, I hope you like the theme song because you're gonna hear it a lot, but you're gonna hear it so much you're probably gonna love it by the end. It's gonna win you over. You have no choice. Yeah.
Yeah, it really gets in there, and it almost becomes this kind of background hum in the film, like you kind of stop noticing when Babel is playing again.
Yeah. So Parsons had never composed a film score before, but he cites Giorgio Moroder is a prime influence on the electro electronic stylings that are present here, with obvious new wave flavors as well. Parsons would go on to score numerous projects, including eighty nine's Food of the Gods Too and Hey nineteen ninety two Split Second, which we previously discussed on Weird House Cinema, a score that was allegedly selected over a Windy Carlos score if you can believe it.
Wow, I have vague memories of that, but yeah, that's a strange choice. But yeah, how to describe this song by Babel that you keep hearing. I'd say it's the center of a venda diagram of Devo, Oingo Boingo and the Damned. So it has that new wave sensibility, a little bit of punk, a little bit of electronic. Does they play a key tar?
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah apparently apparently the concert scene they shot in Czechoslovakia, but they had to like fly in a bunch of la garbage to properly illiterate, some of
which got confiscated before it could enter. Like I think they were trying to bring in some playboys to be on the on the ground and they're like, no, can't bring this in a quick note on the locations here, again, much of the film's charm I think, I think comes from the great Czech locations and sets, like we see this castle at one point, we see Prague's medieval astronomical clock. And on top of this, we do have some scenes that were shot in the US, most for some reshoots
and so forth. Most notably, Frank Lloyd writes in his house in la a home that has been featured in various films, including fifty nine's House on Haunted Hill and nineteen eighty two's Blade Runner.
Hmm, okay, is this Christopher Lee's house in the movie with the textured columns.
Yeah, you can see those columns with that like signature, kind of like cube square repeating square pattern.
There's a maze carved into the columns. Yeah, all right, are you ready to talk about the plot.
Let's get into it. Let's make sense of it. Let's justify the ways of God demand here.
We will make sense of it. We begin in outer space with the voice of Christopher Lee ringing in our ears. He says, for it is written, the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with her blood. And then at this point, an image of Christopher Lee in a suit and tie fades in superimposed on the starfield. He looks kind of like he's giving prepared remarks. He's like reading from a book or something, but of course it's just like you know, book of revelation stuff. Also, there
is a skeleton hanging out behind him. Do you notice that just at his elbow, a skeleton.
Yeah.
So he goes on and I saw her sit upon the hairy beast, and she held forth a golden chalice full of the filthiness of her fornications, and upon her forehead was written, Behold, I am the Great Mother of Harlot's and all abominations of the Earth. So there's your your book of revelation stuff. Have we talked about recently? Why how come every horror movie that quotes the Bible
it's always got to be the Book of Revelation. Why should do a horror movie that quotes the Sermon on the Mount or something.
I mean, there's where all the wacky cryptic stuff is not all of the wacky cryptics.
But I'm not I should have phrased that differently. It's not surprising why you go there, That's where a lot of the most ominous and dangerous sounding stuff is you know, the Yeah, the cryptic and monstrous imagery. I just feel like I'm it's played out, you know. Yeah, we've heard from the Book of Revelation and horror movies before. Let's let's let's source somewhere else.
Yeah, now does where do we see him holding the Book of Revelation here?
Or is that I don't remember. I don't remember what we see. He's clearly reading from something.
Okay, at some point I believe he's reading from Revelation, but it's the middle of the book, so I don't know which Bible this is.
Yeah, this is the one that had a lot of extra stuff, Yeah, the bonus chapters. So from here we go into what I thought was a breathtakingly ugly credit sequence because the text on the screen is in this zany font where the letters are read with blue outlines, so it looks almost like a three D effect, but this is not a three D movie. And also, in whatever font this is, the t's look like c's So this movie is scarring Christopher Lee or scarring Chris Koeperlee.
And the credits music is this very eighties rock song. I guess this is probably the Babbel song. I made this note before we got to the Babbel scene.
Yeah. Well, yeah, we hear the Babbel theme song a lot, so very likely, and I would agree this this is kind of an ugly way to start the picture.
Yeah, but the imagery here, I mean, the background image is kind of interesting. It's a montage of European castles and old mansions and these flashes of disturbing art, Like one of the close ups is a kind of copycat of Goya's painting of Saturn devouring his son, a bunch of somber faces and themes of witchcraft. Then we cut to and text on screen says Los Angeles, California, USA. Glad we know it's the one in USA, and then text on the screen after this as City of the Angels.
And none of this is AP style guide.
Yeah. So we go to an LA cathedral and join the congregation for a funeral where the priest is giving a eulogy that begins with the statement the death of anyone is a sad occasion. It feels kind of impersonal.
Yeah, it's like this one's supposed to be especially sad because this is our funeral.
Come on, Also, this LA based priest has a British accent. He kind of sounds like Eric Idol, And I did not recognize the style of the vestments he's wearing. It looks kind of like an old time e Quaker outfit. So I don't know if that's a denomination. I don't know what the priests normally look like in But so, the funeral here is for a person named Karen White, who was the main character of the first Howling film,
played by d Wallace. The corpse here is not d Wallace, it's somebody else playing this character, and the priest explains that she was murdered in the prime of her life, and then the eulogy takes a turn. He says it is small consolation for her family and friends, but it is a sign of the terrible times we live in, that the anonymous of violence characterizing our cities can claim the life of a human being for no reason at all. It's just just what everybody wants at their funeral, like
a strident jeremiad against this six ad world. So anyway, while father in Law and Order here keeps blabbing, we pan over the crowd and we see several characters, the first one that automatically sticks out is Reb Brown. He's sitting in a pew between some much older people, and he is a whole head taller than everybody around him. He's wearing a western style blazer with a bowlow tie. And this is going to be the character Ben White,
who is Karen's brother. He's some kind of wild West Montana lawman who has come into town for his sister's funeral. The camera also stops a couple of times to focus on a woman in the audience played by Annie McEnroe. This will be the character Jenny Templeton. She is a journalist who worked with Karen at the local LA news station. And then, finally, standing in the back of the church,
we see Christopher Lee. There's no skeleton beside him now, he's just standing there behind the congregation, looking very solemn, staring at the floor. The priest's eulogy goes on to make the following points. He says, there's no way to bring Karen back from the dead. Usually do they specify that, But then he says her death. Says, however, her death might prove useful in that it causes us all to reflect on our lives, to believe in the power of love and to rid our thoughts, rid our hearts of
all thoughts of hate. M okay, I just I have notes for this guy. He needs to work on his eulogizing. But then the whole church says amen, and I like how I think the third time they say amen, you can distinctly hear Christopher Lee's voice saying amen, like an octave below everybody else. Paul bearers carry the coffin away and they deposit it in some kind of crypt But the moment the coffin is shut up so no one else can see, we get a shot inside the coffin and Karen's eyes suddenly pop open.
Oh, this is when I think we begin to connect the dots. This is the titular sister Yea, and she is Awarewolf. There you go, I think, So maybe somebody will clarify that for us later in the picture.
Oh, they'll clarify a few times in the next scene. So we cut to the crowd at the cemetery leaving the funeral service, And at first I didn't know where the cemetery location was. As soon as I saw it, I was thinking I would be really surprised if this was actually shot in La. It's actually quite beautiful. It's this heavily overgrown forest graveyard with old headstones and monuments covered in vines, so it's very green and shady, with
this full tree canopy overhead. There's ivy on all the tree trunks, a dappled sunlight coming through its beautiful environment. So I went and did a little digging online to see if I could figure out where this was. I am not positive, but I think this might be a place called Olshawnee or Olshanya Cemetery in Prague, which has a very romantic, overgrown appearance.
Rob.
I put a couple of pictures of this cemetery in the outline for you to look at. It has a similar appearance. So I think this is where it is. And it would make sense because the movie was largely shot in Prague, even though this part is supposed to be set in La.
Yeah. Another example of how they really benefit from some of these locations.
Yeah. So as the people are walking away from the mausoleum, we close in on two of them. It's Jenny who he saw at the funeral, and then another man, I guess her news editor, and he's saying, quote, I just phoned the station. The police leaked the story that six bodies were found mauled and killed by either wild dogs or coyotes. The coroner said that the marks found on the bodies were made by canine teeth. I want you to cover the story. Meet your film crew out at
the Hollywood Reservoir. And the first time I saw it, I was just like, Okay, this is a weird thing to talk about at a funeral. But then on my rewatch, I was like, wait, he got a call from the police with these hot leaks at the mausoleum. That's where they're coming from.
Yeah, and what's the editor doing out in the field. Usually the editors back at the Newsha.
So wherever the phone was. This is a weird time, place and manner in which to get a TV news assignment. But the weirdness continues with this awkward dialogue. So after this, Ginny turns and she sees Christopher Lee talking to Reb Brown again. Reb Brown is playing Karen's brother Ben, and Christopher Lee says to him, almost whispering, your sister is alive. Ben says, are you sick, buddy? My sister's dead. And then Christopher Lee says it is her immortal soul which
is in very grave danger. Ben says, I just buried my sister. Please leave me alone.
One of the all time great cinematic pairings, Christopher Lee and Reb Brown amazing.
So Christopher Lee gives Ben his card and tells him to call him later, and then Ben tells him, with evident irritation, to get out of here. So christpher Lee leaves, and then Jenny the journalist approaches Ben the law man and asks to see the card. She reads out loud. Stefan crossco a cult investigator. He's got cards printed up to say that. And that made me think, how do I get a job as an occult investigator?
I think you can become one, and today it's entirely self employed, I would imagine.
I guess maybe you have to be independently wealthy. You get the sense that Chris Frilly comes from money.
Yeah, there might be some sort of verification process like there, you know, you have to pass the online quiz or something. But I think it's probably pretty easy to become one, a little harder to make a living out of it.
The licensing may be a bit of a headache. Let's see, so everybody's filing out of the cemetery, and here we meet a couple of other characters who stand aside watching them go. One is an older man in his seventies who's gaunt, with a white beard and dark circles under his eyes. He's wearing a flat cap and black leather gloves, holding a slightly withered bouquet. And this character we will later find out is called Earla.
Earla. I may have caught him Earl earlier.
Ear Well, it looks like could be Earl, but I think it's like a Germanic pronunciation, Earla. And then next to him is a beautiful woman of about forty with long, voluminous hair, wearing a black dress and a black lace veil over her eyes. She stands watching the people and she's kind of sneering, curling her lip at them a bit. This is the character Marianna, played by Marcia Hunt, and it's like, if you haven't seen this movie before, do you think these two characters are gonna be were wolves?
And Earla leans over to Marianna and says it's Stefan, and they both snort unhappily. So they are familiar with his work, so they do not approve.
Yeah. I like how they they're setting him up though that like, this is not just a were wolf hunter or an or un occult investigator. This is a true enemy of the lichen thropes, and they they seem very they seem very fearful of him and take his threat very seriously.
I feel like this scene would make more sense if Stefan had come from out of town to this funeral, but he's just La based, which is odd. So Jenny runs out after Christopher Lee and confronts him awkwardly through a wrought iron gate to ask him what he knows about Karen's death. Stephan says, I know that she is a werewolf, then walks away. And then there is a scene that happens many times in this film where a character tells another character what a different character just said.
So Jenny tells Ben about the exchange. He doesn't believe it, and then suddenly we cut to inside Karen's coffin and she is screaming and scratching at the wood. Then we're going to cut to the club. This is the music club scene we talked about earlier. This scene is a lot the plot relevant thing here is that there are these three creep hooligans who are hanging out at a
music club. And it's that thing we've talked about before from movies from the eighties, like you get this in Return of the Living Dead, where it's a group of people but each one is dressed as a different fashion subculture. Yeah, so you've got three guys together and like one is a punk, one is a rocker, and one is new wave. But they're all creep hooligans. They're hanging out watching the band. They start talking to Marianna, who's there at the bar.
She's the sneering lady from the funeral. They start making some vulgar passes at her and she's like, hey, I like these vulgar passes. I'm going to invite you to a second location. So they all join me warehouse and we'll see what happens. Yeah, they all leave together. But also here we're seeing the band perform. The band is again called Babbel. They're this new wave band. The song is called the Howling. I already sort of described the sound of it earlier. But they're up there jumping around
on stage. The main singer is doing some he's got one of these like nerd rock star personas where he's wearing sunglasses and a new wave suit. He's got kind of goofy looking curly hair, and he's just jumping up and down, mugging at the at the audience. The lines that we here repeated a lot. In the song. The chorus goes like, howling, howling, since the world.
Began ancient werewolf's all right, now, did you get the sense that is he werewolf? Is this a werewolf band? Did they work for Steerba?
Unclear?
You?
Yeah, So later in the film, they, through editing, create the impression that this band is playing at Steerba's castle, but they're just showing footage of the same scene of them playing at the club.
Okay, all right, yeah, in the moment, it does make it seem like they're there, but yeah, the editing in this film is wild. We'll just cut to some close up on a werewolf transforming and then back to what's actually happening.
So most of the band here, they're all wearing sunglasses. I think maybe the key tar player is not, but the rest of them are wearing sunglasses. A lot of the people in the audience are wearing sunglasses. And then suddenly in the back of the club, we see Christopher Lee standing next to a light up Budweiser display and he acquiring his own sunglasses, almost like you have to have them to be admitted to the club. You know, these are our loner pair. So this lady's leaning across
the counter putting sunglasses on his face. Not sure exactly what's going on there. But apart from the sunglasses, Christopher Ly's outfit here is bizarre. When you add the sunglasses in, he has a cyber snowboarding style. It is an outfit so far beneath Christopher Lely's dignity. It's almost all inspiring. It's like Sir Ian McKellen in cargo shorts and an ICP shirt.
Yeah, these are like venice beat sunglasses. These are like they think those of you who are as old as I am, think about the back of the future to sunglasses you would get at Pizza Hut. That's the vibe here.
Yeah. They are radical, rad tubular.
Yeah, but you got to have them to hang out in this club.
Also, I like all the clearly fake graffiti on the walls here. It just does not feel like organic graffiti that somebody would leave up. That organic graffiti tends to be more personalized and obscure. It points away to different things that you would have to understand or know. Instead, the graffiti on the walls in this place says things like alien sex.
Yeah yeah, some clear fake graffiti yeah again. The case here is that they they had to recreate an LA like slimy punk scene in then Czechoslovakia using whatever garbage they were able to ship in and whatever they were able to put together, you know, on location.
So the three creeps leave the club with Mariana and with another woman, and they drive apparently all night until they reach a dilapidated empty industrial building looks like it might be an old foundry or something, and Mariana goes inside. First, she stands in the middle of the big main room and starts wolf howling just out out o wooing, and then elsewhere we see a close up on some human
ears that suddenly grow hairy and start becoming pointed. So I think Marianna is coming into the place and howling
at other werewolves there to activate their werewolf mode. So the creeps follow inside, Marianna teases them, they turn nasty and they start making threats at her, and then in a hilarious twist, someone from off screen starts chucking objects at the creeps, like the new wave guy named Deacon gets a bottle smashed on his head and then one of the other guys is in the middle of saying like, oh, you shouldn't make Deacon mad, and he gets pelted with this big piece of pipe. Yeah.
I love that the werewolves have ranged attacks in this. You know, they don't come in like like hunting wolves. First, there's gonna be a They're gonna just throw a bunch of crap at you. I love it. Yeah.
Then they go in for the bites. Yeah. So these guys get their weapons out. Deacon has a switchblade and the other guy's twirling a chain, so they're going into battle mode. But are these guys they're going to stand up to were wolf power? Obviously not so. Deacon tries to chase down Marianna, but when he finds her, she has now partially transformed into a wolf. She attacks him, and then his friends see his severed hand fall to
the floor, still gripping the switchblade. The two other guys and the lady they start to freak out and scatter, but they can't escape. One by one, they get chased down and mulled by the wolf pack. One of them gets knocked off the roof of the factory, another gets hit by a falling box, and of course, all through the scene we're hearing the song again, the same song by Babbel.
But this is pretty good. This is just were wolves eating human scum for the most part.
Right, Yeah, so by horror movie logic, it should have known better. Yeah, So anyway, let's pay a visit to the occult Investigator. So Ben and Jenny are driving together. I don't know why they're riding together. Now, do these people previously know each other? I don't think. So they're driving together up a winding road in the hills, and we hear their conversation. They are heading out to meet Stefan Steffan Crossco. Ben is like, why do you want
to talk to this crack pot? But he's already in the car on the way there, and Jenny says, because he knows something about Karen and because quote, it might be an incredible story. I guess, like for the news. Multiple times in this movie there are lines where that suggests that Jenny is involved in this story at all, because she has journalism related ambitions, but the performance does not sell these ambitions.
Yeah, and do we see her take notes? Do we see her quotes or anything?
Not at all. There's no journalism being done except I guess, well except I guess in the scene where she's talking to Stefan, But I don't recall her taking notes there either.
Yeah.
So anyway, maybe she's just vibe journalism, you know, I'll get a basic idea of So they go to his house and on the way there they have more conversations before they meet him, and the dialogue is full of awkward exposition for the benefit of the viewer. At one point, Jenny says, look, Ben, why don't you just go back to your sheriff's office in Montana? And he responds drawing his service revolver. He like pulls out a revolver and
he says something else. Country boys know, when the varmints start knocking off the chickens, we start knocking off the varmints. And I was like, wait a minute, does he believe in the werewolves or not?
If not, was he talking about Yeah, yeah, he's just talking about killing a bunch of people. I guess if he's not, If he's not come to believe in werewolves by this point.
But what people would he be talking about?
Whoever gets in his way? I don't know, I don't know. Yeah, pulled out a revolver.
So also, there's just general wardrobe weirdness in this movie. I mean, so Christopher Lee, his wardrobe is pretty. He's just wearing a dark suit the whole time, but they've got reb brown in the denim tuxedo, so he's wearing a red gingham shirt, and then the whole movie from here on he's wearing blue jeans and a matching blue denim jacket, so he's just this column of blue.
The budget was probably spent mostly on Sibyl's wardrobe. Yeah, everyone else, you know, you get what you get.
Yeah. Any McEnroe's outfit is also strange and interesting. She's wearing a blue necktie and this red sweater vest that like is open in the front but joined at the waist. I don't know if I've ever seen a garment like that before, so I'm not even I don't know what that's called. But so, yeah, interesting costume choices for everyone involved. Basically, So, Jinny and Ben head into Crossco's house, where he invites them to sit in his living room full of candles
and chemistry beakers, occult tomes, skeletons, prosthetic monster heads. It's just like sm Savini stopped by and brought his brought all his heads with him. It's got a bunch of tape recording and playback equipment, and he makes a pitch to them. He shows them a silver or no, he shows them like a wooden cigarette case full of silver bullets, and he tells them that Karen was killed by bullets
like these. Quote. Unfortunately they were removed during the autopsy, and as a result, she can never rest in peace.
Classic mistake.
Yeah, well, this is the same logic that's in play in at least a couple of the Paul Nashy Werewolf movies where he gets shot by a silver bullet and then there's a medical examination, the silver bullets are removed, and then Valdemar Doninski can wake up and rampage again. I know this is exactly what happens at the beginning of the Werewolf versus the Vampire Women, and I recall
at least another one of the least saying things. Yea, the same thing happens Anyway, When Crossco reiterates that Karen was a werewolf, Ben l laughs at him and suggests he is insane, but Crossco becomes deadly serious, and he says, even now there are great numbers of werewolves living secretly among us. Your sister was working on a story about one such group and was transformed.
And if we did mention already, they are referring to what happened in the first Howling movie. There is this connection between the two films.
Yeah, so we'll get to more in just a second here. But so he explains that after Karen became infected by a werewolf fight, she intentionally arranged to be killed with a silver bullet on camera so that she could escape her cursed fate. And I guess so that also people could see what was happening. But now that the silver has been taken out her, she's damned once again, and the only way that they can help help her achieve
rest is with a spike to the heart. Also to convince the two of them, Crossco plays the secret videotape of Karen's final nightly news show. Also, every time Christopher Lee says the name Karen, he pronounces it like kaw Red, like it's a fantasy name from Lord of the Rings, Like he doesn't just say like Karen. So this is the videotape of kaw Reds last night where so she's a news anchor. She's seated behind the desk. She starts going wolf mode and then somebody shoots her. And this
is indeed how the previous movie ended. And there's a stinger kind of at the end, like a humorous ending after that, because it's broadcast, like everybody sees it on their TVs. But then people are just like, ah, they'll do any gimmick with special effects these days. Nobody believes it. Yeah. And then also while they're watching the videotape of the
werewolf on the news, reb Brown starts tearing up. And after this, chrispher Lee shows them a bunch of what looked like surveillance camera photos of the character Marianna, and he explains that this woman who is at car Red's funeral is a were wolf too, and they say she's especially vicious, even more dangerous than most were wolves because she is immune to silver. First, that's like, oh, no, silver is like the one thing we know will definitely work to kill a were wolf. So how can you
beat her if she's immune to silver. There's one thing that can stop her, titanium. It's a different metal.
Yeah, I guess it's playing with this logic that like titanium is this is super metal. It's like, if silver can't do it, you got to turn to titanium. I don't know are there other metals on the periodic table that would work. I don't know. We don't get any answers here.
I don't know the relative price or rarity of these metals, but it would seem to me it can't be that much harder to get a titanium weapon made than a silver weapon.
The only metal that can kill this werewolf is a steak of solid mercury. That would be good.
Oh, because then at room temperature would be liquid.
It's useless.
Yeah, yeah, that's actually great. Somebody should use that, everybody who's listening. He said it first.
I give it to the world. Do with it what you will.
So crossco says that were wolves will never allow another werewolf to remain buried in consecrated ground. So tonight, Marianna and the other wolves in her coven, they're going to be coming to collect Karen's body, and he promises that he's going to protect her. He says, I will prevent this blasphemy, and he holds up a big sharp knitting needle. I guess this is either silver or titanium. But in this movie, you kill a were wolf by driving a
metal steak through its heart. So it's getting a little vampirey. Yeah.
As we've covered before, it is often these various places where the werewolf and the vampire overlap, and we actually see that in folklore as well. That's true, so it's not completely without president. He also does some more exposition here. He tells Ben and Jenny that the were wolves have a leader. It is a woman named Steerbaugh, and he says at the next full moon quote it will be the tenth millennium of Steerba's birth. At midnight on that.
Day, all were wolves will reveal themselves. All the transformations have already begun. The process of evolution is reversed. And for a second I thought it was going to cut away to Ben saying I don't believe in evolution, but Christopher Lee goes on to say he says there are many stages before men becomes a beast. Before that happens, Steerba must be must be destroyed, and I will do it. So at this point I was confused. So is he
saying at midnight on that day Steerba. If Steerba is not destroyed, evolution will be reversed because the werewolves will all simultaneously go wolf mode? Like is that all he means? Or does he actually mean all evolution will be reversed and so everything will just like revert to its its an ancestors.
I mean, I guess it's that right, I mean the stakes are high.
He suggests worldwide implication.
Yeah, like all humans will become wolves or something like a wolf or some sort of something like a wolf.
Humans evolved from wolves, as we all know.
Maybe so within the context of this film, it's possible.
I guess. Maybe it's just meaning like we revert to weird little quadrupedal synapsids pre Triassic era. So Jenny, Jenny takes the silver bullets from Stefan and they leave, and then there's a scene where Ben and Jenny just sort of review all of the exposition they've already taken in, with Ben making derisive and skeptical comments throughout. Also at the end of this conversation, he says he will kill Stefan.
I don't know why, but did you want to hear that song again by Babbel in the pale, pale light? So it fires up, and then we fall Be and Jenny as they returned to the cemetery at night. Ben has come armed with a rifle. He gives Jenny a pistol. I guess we can assume that they put silver bullets in both of them, which is confusing because Ben is saying he doesn't believe in this, but he is using
the silver bullets. Our heroes find the gate hanging open, and they hear wolves howling in the distance, and then they're creeping through the woods to Karen's grave, and we keep hearing the same wolf howl sample, and Jenny is like, I think it's coyotes.
Yeah, yeah, codies sound like that. Sure.
And here is where I mentioned earlier that there are actually some quite nice looking horror shots, and there are a couple in this scene, Like there's one where we see the woods in the dark, and then there's a kind of soft light from the distance, and then the middle distance is filled with fog and through a gap in the trees and the vine. Suddenly we see the silhouette of this hairy beast sloping through the mists toward us. It looks great. Yeah yeah. Inside the mausoleum, Stephan is
already there. He's kneeling over Karen's open coffin. He's praying to God. His prayer includes the sentence protect us O Lord from the evil of man and the malevolence of beast. So he prays to Jesus Christ that Karen's body be purified of all evil. He flicks a bit of holy water on her, and he's getting ready to drive the steak into her heart. Meanwhile, outside the mausoleum, Ben and Jenny are approaching and they get surprised by a snarling werewolf.
We again do not get a good look with perspective. A lot of the early shots here are just these extreme closeups of teeth, snout, and fur. And when Ben sees the werewolf, he shoots at it, but of course he doesn't just shoot. He screams, is good, so good, pure, pure red brown. I love it. And then after he shoots at the were wolf a bunch of times, he screams.
Go right behind you can.
So Ben and Jenny bust into the mausoleum just as Stephan is about to stake Karen's body and Ben stops him. He's threatening him. He's like, if you touch my sister, I'll blow you away. But wait, he doesn't believe in were wolves still, he just shot one with silver bullets.
Yeah.
Anyway, the situation resolves itself because Karen suddenly wakes up. She has They're all standing right there around her, but somehow, without them noticing, she has gone fully into beast mode issues She's covered in hair. She attacks crossco Several other were wolves attack from all directions, and I guess this is finally all the convincing that Ben needs. Because our heroes work together to fight off the were wolves. Ben
keeps screeching anytime he's about to blast one. There's a really funny looking, funny fight moment where they close werewolf Karen inside her coffin by forcing the lid down on her. But the lid has a glass window, so they're just putting the lid down and she's inside like all furry scratching at the window. I don't know. So they chase one of the injured werewolves outside as he is transforming back into his human form, and this is the one
we met earlier named Erla. Cross Co interrogates him to learn the whereabouts of Steerba, and the answer is the Dark Country, and we will later learn this means Transylvania, though actually it's shot in Czechoslovakia.
Yeah, and we've been in Czechoslovakia for most of the scenes thus far. So yeah, it seems so we don't necessarily get that feeling of transport across the globe here.
Yeah. Erla begs to be released from his curse and cross Coo stakes him. Meanwhile, we see Marianna. She's shown watching from a distance, dragging her wolf nails over a tombstone in a sensual manner, like she just loves death. So after this, it seems Karen is finally peacefully laid to rest, and outside the cemetery gate, Crossco tells Ben and Jenny that he's got to go to Transylvania to track down Steerba because she is the source of it all.
Ben says, Stephan, I'd like to go with you. It's a very hard turn into like now he's all in. He says he wants to make sure that what happened to his sister, never happens to anybody again. And then he says, I'm with you right to the end. Whatever it is said. Oh, Jenny also says, so am I Ben then mocks her. He's like, oh, she just wants to write something and win the Pulitzer Prize. And she says yes, among other things.
I mean, who doesn't want to win the Pulitzer Prize and werewolf journalism it's highly coveted.
The way she says, among other things implies she wants to write something and win the Pulitzer Prize among other prizes.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, what is the There's got to be an egot except Pultzer Prize in various other awards.
So it's off to the dark country. It's time for the Transylvania Montage. So we see morbid old churches covered in these weird skeletons and emblems of death. There's rob I think you mentioned earlier, a Prague astrological clock. Ye, like a clock tower with this face that includes these gold circles and astrological symbols. And then an old steam engine comes chugging through the forest and arrives at a small mountain village called Volcava, so I looked up Volcava.
It is actually the name of a real village in the Bohemian region of the Czech Republic. So I imagine this might be actually where they shot parts of the movie. It's fairly close to Prague. This, of course, is not in Transylvania, which is a region of Romania, not the Czech Republic. When the train arrives, we see Mariana get off the train. She's wearing dark sunglasses and a black leather suit with no shirt under the blazer. She meets a guy in a pinstripe suit waiting on the train platform.
They say hello by sniffing each other, and he tells her that Steerba is very anxious to meet her, so together they climb into the back of a truck with a tarp covered bed, along with a bunch of other people, presumably all were wolves. Yeah, just the truck, And in a few minutes we see this truck. They say like, ooh,
we didn't arrange any lunch. But then we see them drive by a couple of German hitch hikers who are they're like hiking in these tight shorts and singing a German song and they they're like, oh, yeah, I get in the back of the truck and then they immediately start eating them and the driver declares schnitzel ah oh the Broughton so Ben and Jenny are also in town.
They're driving around a mountain road with Christopher Lee. Christopher Lee is sitting awkwardly in the back of this tiny car, looking kind of pained and with his eyes closed, like he's carsick or something. Then we finally get to the first steer by scene. This is really what everything's been working up to. So we cut to this ancient stone castle in the forest where in one of the great halls, the Wolf Coven is holding a festival of sadism and decadence,
complete with these creepy metal helmed guards holding crossbows. They're shirtless with black pants and the helmets on. They're standing in the dark outside. Inside you got huge roaring fires everywhere. This music, which is I think finally here it is not the Babbel song. Instead, it is a guy in a fur hat pounding on a big drum with a mallet, and then there's this a tonal chanting. You've got a stone altar in the middle of the room. You gotta have that, A bunch of half naked wolf people wearing
random patchworks of metal armor and black leather straps. You've got some chained up human prisoners.
All gingers, I think, all wearing panties of some sort or another.
I think so. And then infernal paintings in the Bosh and Goya style all over the walls. So Marianna is there at the ceremony, and it is being presided over by a crone dressed in furs and a long, dark cloak cloak. She's like an ancient witch. Eventually, a man named Vlad brings an unconscious woman dressed in a white gown into the room. Laser down on the stone altar, the Vlad pours a big bowl of blood out over the unconscious woman. Then the crone leans over her face
and sucks some green animation out of her mouth. Then everybody starts howling and chanting steer Ba, steer Ba. And there's a kind of cool cutaway here to some imagery of a wax face melting in a fire. And then when Steerba finally stands up once again from leaning over the woman, she is no longer a crone. She is Sybil Danning, and she not only has transformed in body into Sybil Danning, she has transformed in accent, so now
she no longer has the same accents. She talks like Sybil dan She's now got the sharp cheekbones, big hair. She rips her cloak off and shows everyone her magically rejuvenated body and they all keep howling, and then we see the woman she sucked the life out of now reduced to a withered, decomposed corpse. So after this ritual scene, it transitions via a double peel away wipe. There's some great whites in this movie, by the way, and they
keep changing it up. It's always a different wipe. It transitions into the much commented upon Werewolf three way sex scene where Steerba, Marianna, and Vlad all take turns kissing and grabbing on each other while becoming increasingly hairy and occasionally snarling and a wooing. And my memory is that this goes on for like the entire middle third of the movie, so you'll have other action happening and then it just cuts back to the were wolf sex.
It's pretty great. I love this scene and some of the behind the scenes details about it. They're pretty interesting. Johnson gets into some of these on the on the Blu Ray. I think for starters, there would have been a better way to get these three actors in their kind of werewolf mode, like some sort of spandex covered with hair or you know, some other sort of approach. But no, they had to manually glue all of the hair onto their bodies, which apparently took forever and was
just like the effects. Guys were like, this is not a good use of time. It's gonna take forever to do this. And then once this is all applied, when these werewolves are rolling around with each other and I guess should be like caressing each other, they can't actually touch each other because they peel the hair off. So the the werewolf threesome scene has this strange vibe to it where they're they're like, I'm almost touching You're almost touching me. It's it's weird, but it but then the
lighting is great. It's it's got its own super weird energy. So I love it.
Yeah, that is exactly what It's like a lot of almost. Yeah. So after this there is the scene of the road ambush, which was funny in a couple of ways. So Ben, Jinny and Stefan are driving along the mountain roads until they roll up on a big crowd standing in the middle of the road. There's a lady lying down in the street, and then a priest in the crowd says that she was hit by a car, and then the
all the just walk away. But it's a trap. The lady is a werewolf, and just as she starts to wolf power up, Crossco sees what's happening and stakes her with a silver dagger, and then Crossco leaves and tells Ben and Jenny that he's going to meet them in the village. Ben and Jenny get back in the car and start to drive away when Jenny, from out of nowhere, whips out this big flask and starts having a glug of whatever's in there. And then there's a werewolf in the backseat.
Oh no, oh my god.
Yes, so Ben shoots it, and then they almost drive their car off the road into a ravine, but they stop at the last second, and then there's a spiral wipe and yeah. Then there's of course more of what the were wolves are getting up to, trying not to mess up each other's body. Hair prosthetics, and after this a diamond wipe. And then finally Ben and Jenny arrive in town, in the village of Volcava, and it really lays out the scene. So there's this cobbled street in
the middle of town. The locals are decorating for the festival of the with garlands strung up between the buildings over the road, and you've got vendors setting up stalls with flowers and animal pelts and food. There are people dancing in brightly colored costumes. When we zoom in on them, we realize some of these dancers are were wolves in human form. There are goats roaming about, old men smoking cigarettes, and then this kind of shady looking guy hunched in
a doorway in sunglasses with an owl. He's just got an owl perched on his wrist. So Ben and Jenny get checked into the hotel. The hotel is obviously run by were wolves. All the dudes in the lobby start licking their lips when they walk in, and Ben tries to first get them separate rooms, but Jenny is like, no, we want one room. This comes out of nowhere. I don't recall any scene in the first act with any indication that she likes him, or that they're you know,
even really becoming friendly, much less falling in love. But I guess now that they're in Transylvania, Jenny's heart beats only for Red Brown. So the hotel manager gives them a room and says that his nephew, Tondo, will take them up there. It's a room number six six six, of course it is, yeah, and he gives a very toothy grin, and after they go up to their room, Tondo tells Ben that he's an excellent local guide. I do like this weird hotel. The interiors are pretty nice.
I wonder where this was filmed. I didn't look that one up.
Yeah, it might have been the hotel that they were staying in, the one where where Sybil, Danny and Christopher Lee have dinner every night, and apparently Christopher Lee one of them. Is something Steve Johnson shared and his extras is that Christopher Lee really liked to talk and would talk to anybody and share all these stories about the old days, which is great. And you know that people
love Christopher Lee and he's a wealth of knowledge. But you had these guys working on the film, like the effects guys especially, and they had so much to do. They were like having to dodge Christopher Lee because they were like, you can get into a conversation with him, you're not going to get out of it. We've got We're just so overclocked here.
That's funny. Christopher Lee won't stop talking to me. It's a great problem to have.
Yeah. Yeah, Like Johnson was like, you know, looking back on it, it's like so weird because you know, it's Christopher Lee. He's a legend. It's like you in retrospect, you would want to listen to all of that stuff, but in the moment, there was just so much to do you just didn't have time for it.
So anyway, once Ben and Jenny get to their room, Jenny whips out this big wreath of garlic bulbs that she had in her suitcase, and then she just starts kissing on Ben. I guess they're in love. Now.
Can you bring that much garlic on an international flight? I don't know, I don't know.
Maybe they went by boat. So while they're going at it, we see the werewolf dancers down in the street below, and one of them starts sniffing the air and giving these cute little mini howls in the direction of the hotel, almost like he's really happy for them. He's like, oh, great for them. They found love.
So the next.
Scene, Ginny and Ben meet back up with Stephan at a church. Stephan explains that many people in the village are in league with evil and they're being watched wherever they go. He introduces them to his local allies, which include the priest father florin Vasila, who's a person of short stature who lost his elder brother to the wolf coven. There is Constantine, a local man who lost his daughter, and Luca, who lost his wife. And then for some reason,
right after this, they zoom on a statue of Jesus. Well, maybe it's implying he's their other.
Ally, Yeah, well they have all gathered together, and so he's there, right, And I guess wherever wherever, wherever three or more of you gather together in order to slay where wolves, I am there with you.
I think, referring to in the original context to church gatherings or prayer or something, but it could refer to where wolf hunting parties as well.
I think I think that is alluded to elsewhere in the Bible.
Yes, So they come up with a plan. These guys are going to go look for Marianna at the village festival and when they find her, they're going to follow her to find Steerba and then when they find Steerba, Crossco is gonna take care of her. So in this scene they also describe their secret back channel communication method, which involves a puppet booth. Yeah, I never figured that out.
I don't. I don't know, but I like the puppets. The puppets, the puppet play they're putting on. It seems to be where wolf related was pretty good.
It's pretty good. Also, Chrispherley gives the gives Ben and Jenny each holy medals to where as protection and then we get a clock face wipe. So Ben and Jenny go to the festival and everybody's out dancing and watching the puppet shokea and it's about where wolves attacking people.
Somewhere in here, there's a scene where Ben and Jenny are in bed talking about how the name of the village Volcava means the place where wolves live, and so they're just lying in bed and then suddenly there is a sawtooth wipe and some text on the screen says the following afternoon.
All the wipes like, did you buy a could you buy a collection of package? Yeah?
Why did it need to say the following afternoon? Cutting to the next day is a normal type of cut, and people understand it's not like cutting to three years later.
Oh man.
Uh So, Ben and Jenny there the next the following afternoon, they are dancing at a festival when uh, let's see Ben. Let's see first. Ben sees Marianna walking around with her wolf powls, and Ben tells Tondo to keep an eye on Jenny and he walks away, following the werewolves. Ben here is going to end up joining forces with Vacila and tracking down the were wolves to Stierba's castle, so
they do a whole recon mission. I'm not going to recount everything that happens here, but basically Steerba is inside doing some crazy satanic magic where she's just saying a lot of Latin and you know, names of demons and stuff. She's reciting spells. This is where we first, I think, see her wearing the fem Darth Vader outfit, very robot like appear end and Ben and Vacilla's mission is going great. At first, Vacilla gives Ben a pair of ear plugs that look like teeth, but we will later learn that
these are wax from the sacred candles. Yeah, they use them to plug their ears because this has never explained, but we learn that Seerbu can kind of use the voice to tie things into Sarumon again, so if you hear her voice, she can destroy you. So they plug their ears and approach the gate. Vacilla hurls a throwing knife to take out the werewolf guard and then he whacks him in the head with the morning Star, and Ben says, that's a definite new kill technique.
It is Hey quality, definite new kill technique.
So inside the castle Steerba. This is also the first scene where we see her wearing her Terminator sunglasses, so I guess this must be where she had a swollen eye. She reveals that Stefan Crossco is her brother, and though he plans to destroy her, in fact, she will destroy him.
So many questions already at this point, because we have already established that she is like ten thousand years old. Does that mean Stephan is ten thousand years old? An Immortal Warrior or what.
Quite confusing. Yeah, Marianna, I think she's eager to please her new werewolf friends, so she's like, let me kill him, and steer Ba says no, but you're sweet. Then Ben and Vacilla get spotted and they bolt as the were wolves give chase, and this is the scene where Steerbus starts using the voice like she's muttering these Latin phrases as they echo through the air all around. And unfortunately, while they are running away, Vascilla loses his ear plugs.
They fall out of his ears into the dirt, and the voice gets into his ears and he starts screaming in pain, and then his eyeballs explode and shoot jets of blood, which is a horrifying and disgusting effect.
Yeah, well done here. It looks looks grow nice exploding head. And then also Steve, but we get to see some like lightning red light horse lightning yeah, from her fingertips, which which looks pretty good. I think all the magical lighting effects in this picture look pretty good.
Yeah, I can't complain. Meanwhile, Tondo lies to Jenny and tells her that Ben wants her to meet him somewhere else. And he's going to show her the way there, so he leads her off into the woods. He starts becoming very creepy and starts making unwonted moves on her, and then she like faints. But then before he can do anything, the other werewolves come and reprimand him. They're like, you know, Tondo,
you're out of line. You will be disciplined. But Jenny is captured by the werewolves, so Steer but takes her back to the castle with plans to use her as bait for their real prey, which is chrispher Lee, who is down in the village watching the puppet show. Okay, so while yeah, I thought he was the real were wolf hunter, but he's watching the puppet show while the
two or having wear wolf encounters. And then there's a scene where Stefan gets lured into a church after he sees a child in a mask wearing the holy metal that he gave to Jenny, and he follows the child to the church asks where the child got the medal, but it's a trap. The child is actually a magically possessed demonic Eyelis of Acila in service of the witchcraft of Stirba, and he swipes it Crossco with a knife, but Ben arrives just in time to throw him out
the window, where he is impaled on spikes below. I don't know if you noticed this, Rob, but in the shot where Ben throws him out the window, it is not Reb Brown at all. Like whoever this stunt double is does not look the slightest bit like Reb Brown even from behind. You can only see from behind, but it's a guy with curly hair who is bald on top.
I mean, imagine rolling your production into some sort of like small town European setting and you have Red Brown here, enormous dude, you know, former high school and college football player turned actor, and you're going to just find him a body double. You know, good luck, good luck finding him a body double like anywhere kind of a singular looking dude.
So we've kind of got the setup for the final act here. Jenny has been captured by Steerba and the werewolf coven. They're keeping her tied up in this dungeon where the walls are made out of skulls, and then Ben and Crossco, along with the rest of their allies from the village, You're gonna have to go rescue Jenny and destroy Steerbu's power. So there's a scene where they get all their weapons. They're going to use some consecrated oil, some wax from sacred candles to plug their ears. I
guess so their eyes don't explode. Yeah, titanium daggers, of course they've got those around. And then this. They skip over this really quick, but Stefan says the chalice that held the sacred Blood of Christ.
Like, is this on loan from the Vatican secret vault? Like? Does that just work?
Got the Holy Grail there with them, holy water, and then a gun that belonged to Vacilla. Ben is going to get to use this. I guess it goes without saying that it's got silver bullets at Yeah.
Yeah, he's like, give me the gun. I know how to use that. Yeah, holy Grail.
No, No, not interested in the Holy Grail. But I would have to think the Holy Grail would be even more effective than the gun. I don't know.
Yeah, but that's more of a Stephan weapon. Yeah, red brown with the Holy Grail, it's just too laughter inducing.
Yeah, but we get to see Stefan is also doing werewolf gun play. In the next scene, he starts shooting like something that looks like a luger or something. Meanwhile, at Steerba's castle, everybody's meeting up for some kind of ritual werewolf orgy. If you look at the werewolf orgy crowd, there's one guy in the middle of it doing a handstand. Yeah, just so like some people are there for the orgy, some just want to do gymnastics practice.
I mean, it's a free for all. It's like, this is the this is what you kind of get from the werewolf coven here. It's like, yes, there are plans to reverse evolution and take over the world. Yes, they want to eat random dirt bags and you know innocence as well. But also they're just stuft for a good time. They're just heatonists. They're in touch with their their biological origins. They're in touch with the beast in all its forms.
So well, I think this ties into the tagline about like the rock and roll lifestyle of the yeah too. Yeah, they're trying to sell that. Yeah. And speaking of rock and roll lifestyle, here is where it's implied that the band from the club in la is playing at the castle. We hear the song and it's showing them playing it, trying to create the impression that they're in the room with the orgy, but the footage is obviously the same footage from the club earlier.
Yeah. Yeah. In the interview with Danning, she's like, oh, yes, Stir was so cool. She has her own band, so even even she thought was like, I thought this must be the werewolf Queen's band.
So Steerbu gets worried that the enemies are approaching the castle through the woods, so she interrupts the party and sends the werewolf out to get them. Our heroes get ambushed by were wolves in the forest and they put up a fight. Ben of course, lets out some wonderful
screeches when he starts blasting. The humans win the fight, though their ally Constantine, is killed, and then another one of the villagers, Luca, gets nabbed by a werewolf from a pit trap beneath the path, and Christopher Lee then hits the trap with a holy hand grenade. Final action. So this builds up to the final action once they reach the castle. I'll break it down into a few different threads here. One is their remaining ally, the priest
who's been along for the mission. Father Florin. He tries to sneak up on Steerba with a battle axe while she's doing some magic spells, but she wheels about on him and then she gets him with We should have
mentioned this earlier. She's got a staff on top of which is a beef jerky gargoyle, And the beef jerky gargoyle comes alive and it does xenomore face hugger stuff to the pre Like, it attacks his face and then revoltingly sticks some kind of tail or tube down his throat and then blood comes out of all his face holes. It is gross and genuinely disturbing. The effects here looked, I don't know, like it literally made me feel bad.
I agree with that. I loved it, But mostly I just love the way Sybil Danning like considers the staff the gargole of staff before using it. It's like she's clearly having a great time here, and then yeah, what uses this horrific magical weapon against the priest? And yeah, body heart ensues.
Steer Bud then sends Vlad and Marianna to go get Jinny from the skull room. They're having some trouble because I think Vlad is feeling the urge to warp into wolf mode, but Marianna is yelling at him to get control of himself. I didn't understand this part, like, can they not carry out their orders when in wolf mode, because it seems like throughout the movie we see wolves in wolf mode doing Steerba's commands.
Yeah, this feels like it's an either underdeveloped idea or maybe a remnant of one of the previous scripts because it really doesn't seem to matter for most of the picture.
But anyway, once they get down to the dungeon, Ben is there. Ben shoots Vlad with silver and then stabs Marianna with the titanium dagger. Feels like a very sudden and unceremonious end to these major villains. I thought there'd be more of a I don't know, more of a confrontation, there'd be more to the end of them than this. Yeah, I agree, but he just unties Jenny and they escape the castle. Meanwhile, we get the final show down between
Stephan and Steerba. He has to go confront Steerba by himself. Some weird you know, lanister incest vibes pop up from out of nowhere. She's suddenly trying to seduce him. Don't know where that comes from. She's saying a bunch of they're like. It actually becomes quite funny because they are both mumbling these magic spells at each other back and forth.
He's doing, I guess, a more Christian flavored invocation of magic, and she's over there like you know by Asta Roth and but you knew, and just saying all these names and stuff, trying to do magic against him. But finally they're sort of embracing and he stabs her with the titanium blade and then they are consumed by magic fire.
I mean, if she is indeed a ten thousand year old werewolf queen almost some sort of a demi god, and he too is some sort of an immortal adversary of her, then I don't know. You're getting into that weird area. And the gods are always incestuous with each other our various mythologies, so I guess it makes sense. It doesn't make sense. It really feels like different versions of the script are colliding here, But I don't know. If I do enough mental gymnastics, I can get there.
There is nothing about Stephan other than other than what we've been talking about that would imply he is an ancient being. He really reads as a character written as a regular human monster hunter.
Yeah, but then how come if his sister is a werewolf, then why is she ten thousand years old?
Yeah, it doesn't make sense, but she I like how it's implied that she sort of invented being a were wolf. Yeah, she invented were wolves. So anyway, Ben and Jenny escape. There's a scene that I think he's played for comedy, but does not. It's not funny in the way it's supposed to be, where Ben and Jenny go back to the village and Ben like points a gun at the villagers and tells them how to get to the airport and like it seems it's a little much Ben, and
then it cuts to one year later. The next year, Ben and Jenny are living happily together. I guess it's Halloween and they somebody knocks on their door. They open the door and it is a child in a very convincing looking werewolf mask. So they give the child a treat, and the child leaves and seems to have come from the apartment across the hall. So they go to invite
their new neighbor over for wine. But the man who comes to the door is this odd European gentleman and a priest's caller who says, Oh, I don't have a child, I live alone, I guess, implying that I don't know people from Volcavo are coming to get them.
They were wolves are at large in the world. Still the threat.
Remains, and then during the credits, it's a whole music video. It's just a clip show of the movie you just watched, and it shows the scene where Sybil Danning rips her clothes off about forty times. It uses it in a percussive manner. She has a at the beginning.
Rip away top. And they use this scene over and over again like it's like it's a hec static video or something.
Yeah, which is a bit nice. It's the beginning of every bar on the song by Babel. Of course you hear Babel once again since the world begins.
But it does drive home that Howling two was a party, that was the prime that was the prime reasoning here. They don't leave it on. They don't even really want to land on that humorous node or that ominous note. They just want to remind you, hey, you just had a good time, right, it was fun. Right, you do this again?
Right? Once we get to the ending of the movie, do we know anything more about what would have happened if Steerbaugh was not staked? Was the process of evolution going to be reversed worldwide?
I think everyone would have been turned into horny wolf people. Yes, I think that's what would have happened.
But eventually, bacteria, I guess.
Yeah, does it stop? Because if you know, yeah, maybe the world's a better place either way. I don't know. Maybe that's what we needed a species, But they prevented it, and hopefully they had our best interest at heart.
Hats off to Sybil Danning.
She rules this movie absolutely. I mean I thinking again that, like, you have such an amazing trio of actors here, Christopher Lee, Reb Brown and Sibil Danning, all three of them outrageous and amazing in their own way, and all three kind of like carrying their own weight. Like you could leave this thinking of it as a Red Brown picture. You could leave it thinking of it as a Christopher Leef picture. But I have to agree with you. I think this is Sybil's picture.
I think most people are gonna leave it, thinking of it as a sibil danding picture. She is. Yeah, once she first appears, you can almost feel it in the editing that there is a constant anxiety, like a pressure, driving us to cut back to Steerba as frequently as possible. It's like, you know, characters should be standing around asking what's Pooci doing? Why isn't Pouocy on screen right now? It's like that with Stierba.
Yeah, what is Steerba doing? What is Steerba wearing? We've got to know she's doing some sort of weird arcane ritual or lounging on a throne somewhere, and we want all the details.
Folks, If you're watching on VID and you just saw Rob's feed go dark, we've just had a technical difficulty and lost his camera.
You might be wondering, did I start changing into a werewolf and did JJ have to shoot me? No, that is not true, just something went weird with the camera. We'll work on that for the next episode.
Unless we detect the process of evolution that's being reversed, in which case all bets are off.
All right, Well, keep the camera on Joe here, Joe, I'm just going to say real quick as I always do. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes and two seas and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns, So just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema. Follow us on Letterbox we were Weird House. There nice list of all the movies we've ever covered, and sometimes a peek ahead at what comes next.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to blow your Mind dot com.
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