Director: John Landis
Rating: 9 out of 10
Here's another fun picture. Officially dubbed a horror/comedy, it's actually equal parts both. I might even go out on a limb to say it's more comedy than horror, which I think makes the horrific elements so effective. It feels like it comes out of nowhere, although given the title you know damn well there's going to be an occassional werewolf attack in this thing. I have to say it's the two leads, David Naughton and Griffin Dunne, that make this engine run, along with a briskly paced script with some witty dialogue.
Let's face it, there really isn't much to the plot: two American tourists are attacked by a werewolf in the moors outside of London, killing one and leaving the other severely wounded. Then the rest of the time we wait for him to turn into a werewolf, since he was bitten by one, as the lore goes. But it's the little things that happen during the meat of the film that make it chug along without batting an eye. Aside from a romance with a pretty nurse, the best scenes are when David (Naughton) is visited by his undead friend, Jack (Dunne), as Jack appears in various states of decay throughout the film. Even knowing one of them is dead and clearly rotting, they still have some pretty casual and loose banter about the state of David's well-being and his impending transformation. I give all that credit to writer/director John Landis, who's screenplay never takes on the ominous and dread-soaked tone that most films would in trying to unease the audience. I think the looseness of the dialogue and character interaction makes the actual werewolf scenes more frightening because the audience is being kicked in the face and told to switch gears. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Of course, you can't talk about this film without mentioning Rick Baker and the make-up effects. The tranformation sequence is outstanding and totally insane, just so well done. I'll be buying a special edition of this disk very very soon just to see some making-of stuff about that scene. I mean, watching the scene and knowing what year this film was made, how did they manage to make his skin stretch, his bones change, appendages stretch and reshape and hair grow right in front of our eyes? It's insane. So insane, in fact, that the Academy Awards added the Best Make-Up award just for this film. I think they should just call it the Rick Baker award, but I'm sure some horror heads would prefer to see it called the Tom Savini Award or the Greg Nicotero Award. Despite all that, Baker is truly amazing. I especially enjoyed to gradual decay of Jack, and some other undead ghouls we meet a little later on. Great stuff.
Two more quick notes. The music is great, as there isn't really a musical score or theme music, more of a theme song. The classic tune, "Blue Moon", plays a minimum of 3 times during the film by different artists each time. I love the song, but I didn't know so many artists had covered it. I only knew The Marcels version, but I particularly enjoyed Sam Cooke's version, over the transformation sequence no less. But, the other point: David Naughton spends an inordinate amount of the film completely naked. I'm talking full-frontal, dick-dangling, bare-assed naked. It was a bit much for me. It's still a solid film, but you've been warned.
Next: Session 9
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