I feel like I watched this movie in the wrong venue and with the wrong frame of mind. This is not a movie to watch by yourself on Tubi for free with commercial breaks. This is a movie to watch on the big screen with a midnight crowd after a few drinks. Some movies require the audience to be quiet, An American Werewolf in London needs an engaged and possibly drunk crowd to laugh at the jokes, the absurdity of the situation, and the bloody kills. Hollywood has a few weekends to fill this year because productions are still reeling from the actors’ and writers’ strikes of 2023, so they are rereleasing some movies to draw audiences to theaters. This one seems tailor-made for late-night horror fans who like their violence on the big screen. Just putting it out there for any studio that wants to organize a horror night screening.
The movie’s beginning reminded me of a setup for a
possible Saturday Night Live sketch. David (David Naughton) and Jack
(Griffin Dunn) are two young American students backpacking in England. Their
budget is obviously low since instead of travelling by bus or train they
hitched a ride in the back of truck carrying sheep. The driver lets them off
near a small town where they stop at a pub called The Slaughtered Lamb (!).
When David and Jack ask why there is a pentagram drawn on the wall of the pub,
the locals give them a look as though they have just incurred Satan’s wrath.
What’s coming is obvious, but what makes this fun is that David and Jack are also aware of how something obviously bad is coming. Once they are outside the pub, walking alone in the moor, surrounded by fog, and hear a deathly howl under the full moon, they agree that is definitely not a coyote. They make a run for it, but wouldn’t you know it, some horrid creature catches up to them. David awakens in a London hospital sort of alive and well only to be told Jack was killed by a lunatic. This “lunatic” has left deep scratches on David’s body who now has disturbing dreams about running butt naked in the woods chasing animals.
Just in case David still doesn’t know what’s going on, the ghost of Jack shows up to spell it out for him. Jack’s ghost is the embodiment of the movie’s tone since he is possibly the gnarliest ghost ever put on screen while still retaining his sense of humour. His body still bears the nasty wounds of the attack, looking like someone took a lawnmower to his face. Yet, he is taking it in stride, chitchatting about the people who showed up at his funeral. Death seems at most like a minor annoyance to him: “Have you ever talked to a corpse? It’s boring!”
Like the ghost of Marley in A Christmas Caroll, Jack delivers a warning to David. He will turn into a werewolf during the next full moon which is a few days from now. The only way to break the curse, and give Jack eternal rest, is for David to die. Given everything that has been happening David is inclined to believe him but part of him of course would rather believe this is all in his head. On the night the full moon is rising David tries to act as though it is just another evening by relaxing in the apartment of his girlfriend Alex (Jenny Agutter). Alex is a nurse and therefore also leans towards a rational explanation for David’s hallucinations. However, the needle drop of CCR’s Bad Moon Rising, one of many inspired albeit obvious musical choices, tells us something very irrational is about to happen.
The movie’s highlight is the slow and seemingly very painful transformation into David’s werewolf form. Industry legend Rick Baker did one hell of a job to show the different stages of the transformation using practical effects. You see his hands seemingly stretch and grow claws, hair sprout all over his body, his legs grow bones where there shouldn’t be, and his face contort into a snout. Throughout you hear David scream in pain, until he howls a different, more animalistic scream. What follows is a series of bloody kills in the streets of London. Then we revert to comedy as David wakes up butt naked in a wolf cage of the London Zoo and in urgent need of clothes.
The constant shift between comedy and horror worked for me as I think these two genres blend very well. One thing did not work for me is the werewolf itself. When the creature is in the dark and chasing its prey the fear factor is there, but once revealed it’s sadly not as effective. It looks like a big furball wearing a wolf mask, not a snarling beast. It’s as though all the effort went into the werewolf transformation and then there was not a lot of budget left for the actual werewolf.
Then there is the ending. Given how self-aware this movie is and how David has seen werewolf movies you would think there would be a rug pull with how things end. Instead, events unfold as most werewolf movies do. Granted not all werewolf movies have a scene where the protagonist interacts with the ghosts of his victims while watching a pornographic movie at Piccadilly Circus, but after that the movie just ends. It doesn’t make it a complete miss, but I do wish the writers had been a bit more creative with the fate of this American werewolf.
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