30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 5: THE HOWLING: NEW MOON RISING (1995)

The seventh in a long, fairly stale series of werewolf films, The Howling: New Moon Rising is certainly the strangest of the bunch.  Maybe one of the strangest movies ever made.  I can't imagine how it was conceived, if it was conceived, if the end result in fact represents the director's intention.  I think it does.  It's mostly the work of one man: Clive Turner, an Aussie who wrote and produced entries 4 and 5 in the Howling series, and has produced a few other noteworthy films, like the dumb-but-fun The Lawnmower Man.

If you remember, Stephen King sued Turner and company to have his name taken off of that film, which bears no resemblance to his short story of the same name.  Similarly, a werewolf might want to sue Turner for this film, which features several peripheral references to werewolves but isn't really about them, nor is a werewolf ever visible on screen.

Turner writes, directs, produces, edits, and stars as Ted, a drifter whose motorcycle pulls into a small desert town in California.  He takes a job and befriends the townspeople, but he may have some secrets, possibly connected to a series of grisly murders that have been happening in the desert.

Earlier films in the series prided themselves on depicting bloody deaths and gory werewolf transformations in graphic, occasionally goofy detail.  This one, apparently made on the budget of an Applebee's dinner, can't afford to do so.  It instead gives us sloppy first-person attack scenes, seen through a red tint so we know it's a werewolf.  To give us an idea of what a werewolf looks like, the movie has to use archive footage from earlier films in the series.  The one time we get to see a werewolf for real, the effect is shoddy enough to make "Manos": The Hands of Fate look like Avatar.

But never mind that the film is awful.  This we know from the beginning.  Though Turner has failed at making a Howling movie, he's certainly made something.  I don't know what it is, but it's something.

In certain scenes it looks as if Turner is trying to make the Nashville of werewolf movies.  He devotes a heavy percentage of the running time to establishing the atmosphere of the setting.  We get to know the local characters, most of whom are played by actual local non-actors (it shows).  They drink, line-dance, crack silly dad-jokes, and sing country music.  A lot.

It's not long before we realize that this isn't a werewolf movie with musical interludes, but a musical with werewolf interludes.  Some of the music, dare I say, is pretty good, most of it written by the actors in the film.  There's even room for a campfire melody about the dangers of drug use (though it still extols the pleasures of beer-drinkin').  The acting is bad but the people in the film seem genuine, like ensemble players in a community production of Oklahoma!.  Werewolf or no werewolf, the town seems like a pleasant place to live.  Turner, brazenly casting himself as the movie's anchor, is no great actor himself, but he has a certain goofy charm.

The movie alternates between the drinkin' and dancin' of the town and a nearby police station, where a priest (John Huff) explains the plot of the film to a detective (John Ramsden) for what appears to be several days straight (the continuity of the film is not flawless).  It's here that Turner attempts valiantly to connect the plot of this film to that of Howlings 4 and 5: no small task, since the previous two films weren't made with any connection in mind.  The way in which he ties them together is positively labyrinthine, and it culminates in a last-minute connecting-the-dots scene that Keyser Soze would find too complex.

This movie is awful, yes.  But it is awful in a truly fascinating way.  Many directors make bad werewolf movies, but this one is a beauty.  It's as if Turner started to make a werewolf movie, hired some locals on the cheap to act in it, then was so charmed by them that he decided to make them the focus of the movie instead.  What a strange, unique occurrence The Howling: New Moon Rising is.  As bad as it is, I hadn't seen it before and I doubt I'll see anything like it again.