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Film: The Howling: New Moon Rising
Year: 1995
Director: Clive Turner
Writer: Clive Turner
Starring: John Ramsden, Ernest Kester and Clive Turner
Review:
This film begins with a couple of men looking down at a corpse. There is no skin or meat on it anymore, but just a skeleton wearing clothes. We can clearly see that this is happening out west. A detective joins them, played by John Ramsden. He then leaves and goes to meet with a catholic priest, played by John Huff, who starts to tell him about the history of werewolves. He tells of events from previous films, which includes the carnival from The Freaks as well as the castle from The Rebrith. Ramsden doesn’t believe it, but listens to him.
We then meet a biker as he rides into the small town. He is played by Clive Turner. He goes into a bar, looking for work. There we meet Ernest Kester as well as the owners of the bar, Claude ‘Pappy’ Allen and Sally Harkham. Turner makes eyes at a woman, who is played by Jaqueline Armitage.
Turner fits right in, getting along with all of the regulars except for some younger guys. He and Armitage also hit it off and start to dance together.
Soon after Turner arrives, a man turns up missing and Harkham’s deer are bothered by an animal. A man gets into with Turner and then he is found dead. Turner is the prime suspect, but there are animal paw prints around the attack. It is then thought to be a mountain lion.
It does turn out that both survivors from the castle in Hungary are in this town, one of them being Romy Windsor and the other is Turner. This animal that is attacking is actually a werewolf, but who is it? Is it Turner? Or is it one of the townspeople? Could it be Windsor who has also encountered one?
The best part of this film for me was that it actually ties the continuity of past films together. The second was a direct sequel to the first and the third loosely is, but this film actually ties the first back to it. That I really liked, because I have issues with series of films that just add films to it without it making sense. Other than that, I thought the werewolf doesn’t look back for the one minute of air time it gets. It does look fake, but it could have been worst.
I don’t know where to start with what is bad with this film. The first being that the acting is done by a bunch of locals who are not actors and it is very easy to tell. The acting is bad, the lines are delivered robotic. There is a lot of singing of country music that was confusing to me. The story is barely there outside of retelling old stories and connecting them back together. I’m not a big fan that they reshot many of the scenes from the original Howling film by adding in Windsor and taking out Dee Wallace, who was the original main character. There are really no death scenes and it all happens off camera. The film doesn’t really build into anything coherent.
With that said, I would avoid this film. The acting isn’t good and performed by amateurs. The story is not there outside of tying in the past films to actually show how the series is connected. The werewolf doesn’t look horrible, but we don’t get much of it. There are a few attacks by the animal, but it happens off camera and there isn’t a lot that either. I would only recommend this film if you are out to see all the films in the series. If not, then I would avoid this, there are much better werewolf films out there.
My Rating: 2 out of 10