Howling IV: The Original Nightmare

Imagine you have to make a fourth Howling movie. Imagine that werewolves, their sisters and marsupials are all off limits. What do you do? If your answer is to go back to the novels, and make the first movie again but much more authentically, then I would say this is some kind of shitty internet ready remake that would suck all the life out of the film. Instead it's that but without the internet component and icky fan service. What you get instead is an incredibly boring movie. It's so slow. Nothing happens. There's no budget, fine, but why also must there be no fun? Lackadaisical la-de-da storytelling. My lord. At least the last two went for it. It's not terrible, but man have some imagination here. It's The Howling 4 for crying out loud.

Writer Marie Adams (Romy Windsor) is having strange visions. Marie's husband Richard (Michael T. Weiss) takes her to a cottage in the small town of Drago to relax and rest. The visions continue, however, and Marie eventually finds that the town of Drago is full of werewolves. The plot to this film is a reworking of the original Howling. Actually, it's a more faithful adaptation of the original novel in many respects. It also sucks big time. It's all very drab and tedious. Obviously the movie has fans. My sister is one of them. Growing up she actually preferred this film to the original Howling! Windsor and Weiss are fine, I guess, but it's all so dull. See the original or even the hilarious part 2 instead.

The writing makes it painfully obvious what characters are good, evil, or just naive. You would have to be pretty thick to be surprised by any of the plot twists thrown your way. All the canned dialogue comes from the worst movies we've groaned at in the past. Special FX kick in towards the end, but end all too abruptly as does the film. If we've got to have a Howling movie so similar (plot-wise) to the first one, could we at least have it improve on the original in just one way? Apparently not.

Howling IV starts out decent enough, but by the end of the film it degrades to something less than average. The main problem with this movie is its very slow pace. Those looking for action-packed werewolf sequences will not find it here. In fact, you don't even see a werewolf until almost the end of the movie. This could have been excusable, if there was enough suspense to make the viewer want to keep watching until the end. Unfortunately, the audience's suspense is replaced with impatience. I kept looking at the clock, wondering when a werewolf would actually show up. When the werewolves finally do make their grand entrance, it is disappointing. They consist of: A) dogs with red eyes and B) actors in cheesy masks. And the transformation sequence of a human into a werewolf - something the original Howling was famous for - is bizarre and goofy in this movie. Recommendation: see it for free on TV if nothing else is on, but don't bother renting.

First and foremost: how can "part 4" of anything be an "original"? This is actually closer to the book that Gary Brandner wrote that was the basis for the first movie, but being close to the book doesn't make this movie any good. A real sleeping pill about a woman recovering from a trauma, sent to a wilderness retreat, finding that nearly everyone there is a werewolf. Nothing happens in this entire movie, just a lot of yawning from the audience. As with several other films in this series, good on-location photography (this time in South Africa) can't redeem an otherwise unwatchable flick. This looks like it could have been a TV movie. And a terrible one, at that. 1/2 a star out of ****

It is called the original nightmare because this is an update remake of the first Howling movie. In both movies, a husband and wife retreat to a small town that turns out to be full of werewolves. I like this update, this is definitely a breath of fresh air to the series. Special effects weren't terrible and I loved the the different ideas of how people change into a werewolf. One melts into a puddle of goo in a gruesome scene when he is walking in the woods and drops to the ground and begins to literally melt and then comes back together as a werewolf. Well done scene Tom Savini worthy. There is another man that rips the skin off of his jaw and it grows and he turns into a werewolf. Alot of memorable scenes in this movie makes this a standout movie in the werewolf horror genre and is definitely one of the best movies out of the series.

This film is terrible. I got more entertainment out of parts 2 and 3 - at least they were comical - this one is just flat out boring. I give them credit for trying to create a serious, non campy, werewolf flick but why so boring, so drab? I saw this one years ago and I couldn't recall anything about it, tried watching it again recently and now I know why the film didn't stand out in my mind - it's just bad. The lead male looks like David Copperfield's long lost illegitimate son. The lead female is rather bland - but then again so is the rest of the cast. I think I'll just leave this one in the past where it belongs. Not worth finishing the movie - leave it as a distant, fading memory. 2/10