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.
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.
Apparently Jerry Dandridge from “Fright Night” had a sister. And she’s pissed that Charlie Brewster killed him. She plans to get revenge on him by tracking him down, taking residence in the same building he resides in, and staging one of the most convoluted revenge plans ever written. She wants to turn Charlie in to a vampire, but then she also wants him to believe that he’s going crazy. She shows him that she’s a vampire quite often, but also wants him to think that she’s merely just a stage performer and Charlie is going nuts because–well–going crazy makes the blood sweeter?
For the sequel to the creative but utterly underwhelming “Urban Legends,” director John Ottman and the writers basically ape “Scream” by taking the premise and much of the film’s general concept to the world of filmmaking. This time around “Final Cut” centralizes its story on a film school where a bunch of wannabe directors and actors are being knocked off by a serial killer with a fencing mask. Granted, I’m not a fan of the “Scream” films, but often times “Final Cut” feels like a poor man’s version of the Wes Craven series. A bunch of glamorous young folks in their thirties play aspiring Hollywood artists/college students, all of whom are being offed one by one by a masked killer in some of the most grotesque and anti-climactic ways possible.
My original thought was how the hell they’d explain Jason Voorhees fighting uber-Jason from Jason X. And the writers do a piss poor job of it. Maybe there are two realities in the future in where the space scavengers form a time rift? Who knows? What we learn is that Uber-Jason is not really Jason, but the head of Jason with a body compiled of nanobots, and robotic parts. He is kind of a pseudo-Jason, to be exact.
We learn in the two part mini-series that he’s convinced he’s Jason and is trying to re-claim the psyche of the original Jason to complete his memory and continue his mission to murder everyone and anyone who steps foot in Camp Crystal Lake. So Jason belonged to Earth Prime, which is now a wasteland, and the space crew from “Jason X” froze and destroyed Jason from Earth 2. That Jason was re-invented as a science fiction monster known as Uber-Jason. They then went to Earth Prime to capture Jason again, and learn from his regenerative tissues. That failed. Duh.
And now Jason is thawed and lurking on the abandoned ship. We now have two Jasons. So does that mean we have two Freddy Kruegers and two Pinheads and two Leprechauns? In either case, taking off from the “Jason X” special, the characters from Earth Prime that survive their confrontation with Jason end up on the party ship where Uber-Jason is, and as one female pilot attempts to flee, she ends up caught in between the battle of Jason and Uber-Jason for complete dominance.
As with the usual slasher fare, there are no characters we can root for, but this comic takes it to a whole other level. There are literally no interesting heroes or heroines here, and it’s mainly just pages of slaughtering hapless victims. The fight between uber-Jason and Jason also doesn’t warrant much sense, especially considering the Jason the writers chose to go with, in the end. Uber-Jason kills Jason, and puts his brain in to his own head to garner the crown of Jason Prime. So then what? Is Uber-Jason the primary design now? It’s all so unsatisfying, in the end.