Film review: The Howling (1981)

I honestly think that An American Werewolf in London is a masterpiece.  It manages the almost impossible feat of being genuinely funny, legitimately scary and honestly romantic all in one package. It has very good acting (including by British stalwarts John Woodvine and Brian Glover), still unrivaled special effects and... Jenny Agutter in her prime.  Why do I mention this?  Because when people are talking about "great werewolf movies" The Howling very often gets listed alongside AWiL as a comparably great one that came out around the same time (and also has a great British character actor in it in the person of Patrick "Steed" Macnee (and such luminaries as Slim Pickens and John Carradine in minor roles)).  I am here to tell you that the comparison is tantamount to blasphemy.  Because The Howling is embarrassingly crappy.  I mean embarrassingly so.  We watched it hoping to match the success of Body Snatchers (to add to the parallels this film also has Kevin McCarthy in it) and it just made me realize how history can see a chasm between two films that at the time might have been judged equivalent.  The Howling also has special effects that at the time were highly praised.  They are laughably bad.  It had a plot that was seen as "ironic" and "satirical" and (like Body Snatchers) had snide things to say about psychiatry.  But it's just cheesy.  So I won't waste too much time on this one.  Our protagonist (played by the mother from ET) is an anchorwoman/reporter on a local LA news channel who begins the movie on assignment out meeting a suspected serial-killer who has struck up a correspondence with her.  This part isn't too bad.  It ends with her saved by the police (in a sex shop - because The Howling is also tawdry in a rather creepy way) as they "kill" the killer who is about to assault her.  After a series of flashback nightmares that make her unable to do her job, she goes to see pop-psychiatrist Patrick Macnee who recommends she go up and stay at "The Colony" - a place he runs "up North" (looks like near Mendocino, or possibly the Oregon coast) to recuperate.  Long story short, this place turns out to be full of werewolves, a female one of which seduces our protagonist's husband into incredibly gagworthy werewolf sex.  Differences between this and AWiL (other than quality): the werewolves in this one are bipedal, although it looks difficult as their legs are dog legs (unlike the human legs in the far-superior Dog Soldiers); they can change any time they want (they're not controlled by the full moon, as in AWiL) and they need silver bullets (or, conveniently, fire) to kill them.  But it doesn't matter, because there really is no good reason to watch this.  I am frankly astonished at the number of positive reviews of it that bounce around the internet (at least The Howling III: The Marsupials gets panned).  I can only assume that whomever wrote them is misled by the fact that it was written by John Sayles and directed by Joe Dante.  Or more likely, they're going by memories they had of watching it at the time as tweens, when its heady mixture of nudity and gore would have been awe-inspiring.  Watch AWiL again instead.