My wife and I are working through a long list of werewolf movies to watch for this blog and it’s Halloween season, so we’re also being prompted by Prime, Netflix and other streaming services to watch monster movies.
Basically: I’m wracking up a lot of drafts of werewolf movie “reviews” this October month. So far, they’re all pretty good.
The only werewolf movie we’ve watched so far that we have no interest in watching again is this British film called “HOWL” (not to be confused with anything by or about poet Allen Ginsburg … unless*).
I might have been overly excited by the tagline (“Last train. Full moon. All change.” – sounds good!) and setting: ON A TRAIN, at night.
The aesthetic, transformations, gore and action were all pretty slick, brutal, and well-done. Unfortunately, the pace, characters and execution of critical plot points were a scatty, irritating mess.
I’m not going to go into tons of detail about all of it (if you’re interested enough to read this post you’re probably interested enough that watching the movie yourself would not be the worst way to spend an hour and a half), but most of the characters are repellent and annoying. Most of this is probably intentional; the movie description is
“When passengers on a train are attacked by a creature, they must band together in order to survive until morning.”
So … I get it … they want us to feel like the threat outside is so great we will overlook the minor character defects of our fellow passengers and team up together, and/or experience added tension because OMG look who we have to depend on to get through this!
Our main character is a harried, undervalued public transportation employee forced at the last minute to work this doomed extra shift, so we’re supposed to identify with him and his absolutely intolerable CONSTANT resting-bitch-face as he’s abused by a handful of positively SHITTY passengers sparring with him for no good reason. WE DON’T LIKE ANY OF THEM. THEY’RE TERRIBLE. AND OUR PROTAGONIST IS PRETTY UNLIKEABLE TOO.
They really took the unlikeable characterizations way too fucking far. WAY too far, and for far too long. While that did lead to some pretty satisfying kills later and a few moments of redemptive acting, they just weren’t enough of a payoff.
I was also confused by a couple pairs of actors/characters having such similar features and presentations that I began expecting some kind of a paranormal ghosts-of-Christmas-past-or-future-better twin/mirror/parallel-universe-ish kind of reason for it. But nothing like that was revealed, so it was just confusing that four whole characters had doppelgangers.
On top of all of that, the people who ultimately survived or were saved versus the people who perished by the end were not at all the right choices to make for a satisfying ending. Yeah, I know, at least one favorite heroic character has to meet a sad demise in a horror movie. The problem is that there was only one and four half characters we were truly rooting for, and whoever made this movie picked the absolute wrong fucking ones out of this ensemble to shit on versus save.
It is too bad that the loathsome nature of most of the characters and the ways that they behaved (and the lengths of time spent on them behaving repellently) overpowered what could have been a really entertaining and visually-excellent scary movie.
I think this movie is still worth watching if you’re really into monster movies and transformations, and/or you want to cross off every single werewolf and/or train movie as SEEN, or if you’re really bored or just in the mood to watch something but don’t have the energy or attention span for a truly great movie. But don’t expect something awesome from HOWL like the epic zombie movie TRAIN TO BUSAN (one of the best movies in the whole wide world, IMO, so you know my problem with HOWL was not just that I can’t tolerate a few unlikeable characters).
Howl comes across as the product of someone who wanted to tell the story of an underestimated public transportation employee / young man and all of the ways he is shit on, but is so much more capable and heroic and worthy of the (super-annoying) hot girl than he’s given credit for. So they did that instead of making a good movie, and it kind of sucked ass. It’s too bad, because they weren’t really that far off the mark that somebody with good sense couldn’t have gotten this back on the rails and kept it there and made everybody’s investment in this flick really pay off. It’s the kind of project I personally would not have been embarrassed or ashamed to be a part of, and would be proud of in a lot of ways, but just really depressed at what could have been and the aggravating mediocrity that resulted.
*maybe this movie (and it’s horrible characters) IS inspired by the Allen Ginsberg poem? Do I need to read and research further to understand and appreciate werewolf movies? I almost want to open up comments on this post to see if somebody can school me …