You could basically replace the werewolf in “The Rebirth” with anything you wanted, and nothing would change. Ghosts, demons, a slasher out for revenge. Like the former sequels, “The Rebirth” builds up this illusion that it’s a werewolf film and a further progression of “The Howling” storyline, when in reality it’s just another dull horror film. And one that avoids showing actual werewolves for a duration of the story. I use the term “story” very loosely.
Asking anyone to watch “The Howling: New Moon Rising” should be punishable by jail time and some kind of psychological examination. “New Moon Rising” is so bad it’s inhuman. It’s so bad it makes the former “The Howling” entries seem watchable in comparison. There is no reason why “New Moon Rising” should exist. Near as I can figure, someone took a tourist board video for a small Western town, injected imagery depicting a view through the eyes of a werewolf stalking animals, spliced in footage from the past “The Howling” movies and called it a day.
Director John Gulager is not above making entertaining horror films, as we saw with “Feast,” but his offering for the current zombie movie craze ends up being surprisingly conventional and dull. It doesn’t really offer anything new or unique in terms of the zombie movie realm, and to make things worse there are just too many sub-plots. We literally follow almost a dozen characters and their efforts to make it through the beginning of a zombie apocalypse, and beyond their efforts to stay alive, there’s not a lot to them or their personalities.
When Dracula tells you there’s trouble afoot, you should probably listen. “Howling 2” is a sequel to the Joe Dante film because, I guess it has something resembling werewolves in it somewhere. There’s Sybil Danning boiling the screen with her sexiness, and a legion of werewolves, there’s Sybil Danning completely re-defining the term skin tight, and the theme song. I have to say, as a kid who grew up with horror movies that mostly ranged from the eighties, the theme song by Stephen W. Parsons is haunting, and has been burned in to my brain since I was in the single digits age range.
It’s really tough to make sense of “The Marsupials,” but much like the second film, it has a good idea but a terrible execution. It wants to be a psychological thriller, a horror romance, a satire of horror movies, and a werewolf picture all in one and fails to deliver on these aspects two fold. “The Marsupials” garners too much of a narrative for one picture, and should have been spread out in to another film, altogether. One thing is for certain: The connection to the Joe Dante film stops at the fact that it has werewolves in it.
Anthologies have always been a favorite of mine. They’re usually a very entertaining source of storytelling that works more toward the horror genre, providing films like “Black Sabbath” and the series “The Twilight Zone.” Both genre fixtures changed my view of horror and storytelling altogether. After the eighties boom of anthology series and films, the anthology unfortunately peaked after “Tales from the Crypt” ended and suffered a sad death. The occasional gem like “Campfire Tales” popped up directly to video, while shows like “Night Visions” and “Ghost Stories” brought excellent horror entertainment only to be cancelled and tucked away in to obscurity.
For a film called “Axed,” I was expecting something really dark and gruesome, and yet in the end I didn’t realize how trying Ryan Lee Driscoll’s horror drama would be. It’s a practice in tedium and boredom, with a mean spirit that is often very forced. If that’s not enough the direction leaves much to be desired with a series of performances that are sub-par at best. It’s a despicable film about a despicable man, torturing despicable people for no real reason, when it all boils down to it.