I’ve seen horror franchises go off the rails before but never so quickly and so spectacularly as The Howling movies, the series began with Joe Dante’s original in 1981 where a news reporter found herself trapped in a colony of werewolves but as strange as that sounds the sequel, Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, was even weirder as it gave us Christopher Lee and an ancient Transylvanian werewolf sex cult – which is awesome in its own messed up way – but with Howling III: The Marsupials the weirdness was turned up to eleven.
As in the case with such franchises as The Amityville Horror, the installments that make up The Howling movie series have very little to do with each other – the first sequel was the only one with a direct connection to the original but even that film abandoned its tangential element rather quickly – and so with the next installment, the producers simply used The Howling name for brand recognition only. Howling III is once again directed by Philippe Mora, who gave us Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, and with this outing, the guide rails were completely off and it was on a fast track to looneyville where we find out that werewolves are roaming both Siberia and the Australian Outback.
This isn’t something you’re going to see on National Geographic.
Actors Reb Brown or Christopher Lee will not be making an appearance in Howling III: The Marsupials because, as mentioned, this film has nothing to do with the previous two installments as it completely makes up its own werewolf lore – we still have werewolves that can change at will but it no longer takes silver bullets to kill them – and this film follows the adventures of Jerboa (Imogen Annesley), a young Australian werewolf who are introduced to while she flees her sexually abusive stepfather, a Road Warrior wannabe named Thylo (Max Fairchild), and she hopes for a life outside of her tribe, which kind of looks like a cross between Branch Davidians and the cast of Survivors. While on a bus to a new life a priest asks her why she is running away and she responds "Because my stepfather tried to rape me, and he's a werewolf" which kind of sets the tone of the movie. Later, while sleeping on a park bench, Jerboa encounters budding filmmaker Donny Martin (Lee Biolos), who's working on a low-budget horror picture in town, and he offers her a part in a film called Shape Shifters.
“Have you seen the new girl? What a dog.”
What’s a shame here is that the film never goes anywhere with the novel idea of accidentally casting an actual lycanthrope in a movie about werewolves, talk about missed opportunities. This meeting does result in her getting pregnant by Donny – safe sex is something nobody thinks about in these kinds of movies – but before they can move forward with any type of relationship her lycanthropy is triggered by strobe lights and she soon finds herself in a hospital being studied by scientists, only to be “rescued” by a trio of werewolves from her tribe, who had been tracking her since she escaped, so that she could be brought back home. This lethal trio massacres at least a dozen people during this rescue but what is odd here is that this event is never really addressed by the film's supposed heroin, which is a prime example of elements being introduced and then forgotten.
No one expects the Werewolf Inquisition!
This brings us to the men chasing the werewolves. First, we have Professor Harry Beckmeyer (Barry Otto) whose discovery of old werewolf footage depicting the creatures roaming the Australian Outback spurs and reported attacks in Siberia he tries to warn the U.S. president (Michael Pate) about the widespread global threat of werewolves. Then we also have Beckmeyer’s colleague Professor Sharp (Ralph Cotterill) who helps him track down a Russian ballerina who has recently defected to Australia but why they think prima ballerina Olga Gorki (Dagmar Bláhová) could help them with the werewolf attacks in Siberia is never explained. And you have to wonder, “They do know Russia is rather big, right?” Lucky for them it turns out she’s actually a werewolf herself, and flashing lights during a rehearsal trigger her transformation.
Were they putting on a performance of Peter and the Wolf?
To say the lore in this movie makes little to no sense would be giving this film too much credit and never answers such questions as "How could an entire subspecies of humans exist in secrecy if all it took to expose them was a little flash photography?" We also get this bullshit history lesson about the “Tasmanian wolf” – or thylacines as they scientifically known as – which were carnivorous marsupials that had been hunted to extinction but just before being wiped out the “spirit” of the Tasmanian Wolf managed to transfer itself to a group of humans thus creating this new hybrid of marsupial humans. How this explains lycanthropes located around the world or why Olga Gorki was drawn to Australia so that she could mate with Thylo is something the film has neither the time nor inclination to explain. We do get evil government bureaucrats putting together a task force to wipe them out, something Queen Victoria and the Vatican had attempted to do a century ago, and so our scrappy band of misfits are soon on the run through the Australian Outback, but not before the obligatory scenes of scientists experimenting on the poor lycanthropes.
How else can we sympathize with rampaging monsters that eat humans?
Basically, Howling III: The Marsupials is a bloody mess, worse is the fact that it’s also not all that bloody which doesn't help sell your horror movie. I’m not sure if they were shooting for a PG rating because even though there is not a drop of blood shown during any of the werewolf attacks, which is as impressive as it is odd, but the film also has a fair bit of nudity so I’m not sure what kind of rating they were hoping to get. Another key problem is that the film doesn’t end so much as it just winds down to a slow stop with nothing much happening in the last twenty minutes, just a meandering series of boring events – Beckmeyer falls in love with Olga and has a little werewolf kid of their own and Donny and Jerboa move to California to start a new life under assumed names – and when the end credits roll, after Jerboa is exposed as a werewolf during an award show, we are left wondering “What was the fucking point of it all?”
Also, there is really very little werewolf action in this film, and what we do get is pretty lame.
I can appreciate writer/director Philippe Mora trying to do something new, and making a film about marsupial werewolves is about as new as one could get, but you also have to tell a cohesive story, one that follows a narrative to a satisfying conclusion – I’m all for stinger endings but this one was more “So what” rather than “What the fuck?” – and it wasn’t helped by most of the actors being really bad at their jobs and the transformation effects, which is easily one of the most important elements of a werewolf film, being equally as bad to the point of being both unconvincing and uninteresting. If Howling III: The Marsupials isn’t the worst werewolf film ever made it at least has to be in the top five.
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