An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981)

For some reason, werewolf movies leave me cold. I'm not 100% sure why this is, but I do have some theories. One of them is that, when you get right down to it, werewolves themselves just aren't very interesting. As opposed to vampires, werewolves aren't immortal, can't speak, aren't intelligent (aside from in the instinctual sense), and don't have much in the way of personalities. There's the blatant metaphor for the werewolf - the civilized man becoming a beast - but once you catch onto that metaphor, there's not much left to it.

Let's look at the recent spate of werewolf movies: only a handful of them are really any good at all. Although not a bad movie, Mike Nichols's Wolf leaves much to be desired (mainly, um, scares). Joe Dante's The Howling isn't bad, although the Howling franchise is laughable (especially the first sequel, Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf, one of the few movies Christopher Lee has made that he's actually apologized for).

I freely admit that I have neither seen Bad Moon or the recent Skinwalkers, but reviews have been far from kind (as of this writing, Skinwalkersw has a 16% "Fresh Rating" on RottenTomatoes.com and film critic James Berardinelli has put Bad Moon on his Bottom Ten list for being one of the worst films of the '90s).

However, there is one werewolf movie in recent years (recent meaning since the original 1941 film The Wolf Man starring Lon Cheney) that, although not bringing much new to the table in terms of story or werewolf mythology, serves as a superlative template to the modern werewolf film.

Although in many ways John Landis's 1981 film An American Werewolf in London is about as conventional a werewolf movie as you can get (a guy turns into werewolf, goes on killing spree, gets shot then turns back into a human), it's less a conventional werewolf movie and more a slapstick comedy run amok: a live-action "Itchy & Scratchy" cartoon (and about as funny and brutal as one, too).

Landis's film can either be viewed as a pitch-black mean-spirited comedy or a very, very funny horror film. That two versions of the song "Blue Moon" bookend the movie and that Miss Piggy and Kermit are credited as themselves in the closing credits (the main character has a dream in which his younger siblings are watching The Muppet Show) should give you a good idea of the film's mindset.

Which isn't to say that American Werewolf isn't scary. It is. You can never quite trust the filmmakers; you feel like they're ready to pull the rug out from under you at any moment. Consider the double-dream sequence where the character thinks he's woken from a nightmare, only to find himself in a new nightmare:

This is actually a good thing (it is, after all, a horror film we're talking about, so the goal is to not feel fully at ease).

Having Landis, who specialized primarily in comedies (Kentucky Fried Movie, National Lampoon's Animal House, Blues Brothers), its writer-director also makes American Werewolf work as both a horror film and a comedy. Landis understands the fine line and connection between comedy and horror and frequently blends both without veering too far off into either.

The movie opens with two American students, David (David Naughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne) backpacking through England and coming across a pub called the Slaughtered Lamb. At this pub, not only are its customers quiet and creepy, there's a pentagram on its wall that said customers don't want to explain. One guy warns the two students to beware of the full moon and stick to the road.

And do they indeed stick to the road? Of course not. Instead, they stray off the path, get lost in the woods and get attacked by werewolves. In the attack, Jack is killed. David is wounded.

A few days later, David finds himself recovering in a London hospital. There, the rotting corpse of his dead friend Jack visits him and warns him to kill himself before the next full moon. See, he's turned into a werewolf and will start an uncontrollable killing spree when the moon turns full.

David, of course, refuses to heed the warnings of his friend, falls in love with his nurse Alex Price (Jenny Agutter), and moves in with her.

Jack insists, however, regardless of how quickly he's decaying, that David kill himself. Rather than kill himself, David turns into a werewolf and goes on a killing spree through London.

I always get a kick out of Jack's impromptu visits with David, slowly decaying more with each subsequent visit, and even bringing along the (grumpy yet oddly cordial) ghosts of David's victims ("Can't say we're pleased to meet you.").

The comedy makes the horror that much more ghoulish and the horror in the film can't help but cause laughter (albeit shocked and appalled laughter). Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson are two of the few other directors I can think of that can offer this blend of copious bloodletting and huge laughs right.

Consider the climactic scene in which the werewolf's appearance in Piccadilly Circus sets off an utterly absurd chain reaction that leads to a seemingly endless and brutal multi-auto pileup accident, where countless drivers, passengers and pedestrians are decapitated, run over, cut in two and flattened. It's graphic and horrific, but at the same time, you can't help laugh (again, in that shocked and appalled way) at how utterly over-the-top it is, or be reminded of the epic car chase in Blues Brothers or the homecoming parade piling up in the alley in Animal House.

Landis tried in the '90s at a comedy-horror vampire film, Innocent Blood, which could charitably be described as unfortunate (although I did like Robert Loggia's corpse get up off the morgue table and run off, with one mortician going, "Stop him!" and the other, played by Frank Oz, going, "You stop him!").

Despite Landis's slightly lackluster resume in the '90s and modern day, he revitalized the idea of the werewolf movie, even though no one seems to have followed in his footsteps. True, the story is not the most original, but how can you not love a movie whose tagline promises: "From The Director Of Animal House...A Different Kind of Animal?"

Liking to bite things,

James "Furry Beast" Comtois