As it happens, Best Buy had an online MGM DVD sale last week, and among the pickings were a whole shitload of Midnite Movie discs, and this. I didn’t even know it had been released on DVD until now. There’s probably a reason for that. There’s a good chance that reason is Christopher Lee threatening to shove everyone who works for MGM into a giant wicker man and burning them alive if they ever released this movie onto DVD. Now that Christopher Lee is old, and does not in fact have legions of orcs at his beck and call, I guess MGM finally decided they were safe enough and went ahead and put it out. And then no one bought it and they put it on sale at Best Buy for a pittance where stupid people like me will stumble across it half drunk and bored in the middle of the night and go, “Holy shit, I really need to own that!”

This movie is the idiot savant of werewolf movies. I mean, with what is possibly the stupidest title (which is repeated in excess of a thousand times by various characters throughout the movie, by the way) in movie history, what else would you expect? By idiot savant, I mean most of the time it’s a gibbering retard, but every once in a while it’ll do something that makes you stop and wonder, “Wait, what the hell was that? Did I just see part of a different, good movie for a second there?” We’ll get to that, if my head hasn’t exploded by the time I’m done trying to remember the plot. I don’t usually go into a real in-depth plot description and try to save my words for criticism, but it just won’t do to say, “Reb Brown and some chick that looks like Eric Stoltz go to Transylvania with Christopher Lee and kill werewolves.” There’s so much more.

We begin with Christopher Lee floating in outer space, reading out of some giant leather-bound tome. Between getting Lee right out of the gate, and the cool-sounding apocalyptical stuff he’s spouting from this book, it almost gives you the impression you’re going to watch a good movie. Alas, you’re still going to be watching Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf.

Ben White, brother of Karen from the first movie, has returned from his sheriffing job in Montana (where I’m sure he captured each of his collars by going BWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH! at them) for Karen’s funeral. Jennie Templeton, a friend and co-worker of Karen’s, meets him there, and they are both approached by Stefan Crosscoe (Christopher “This Movie Is My Own Personal Shame” Lee), who informs them that Karen is a werewolf and needs to be staked through the heart with a bolt of silver to keep her from getting up and killing again. He even tries to convince them by showing them a tape of Karen’s final broadcast (which alone should have most of the country believing in werewolves by this point because SHE DID IT ON FREAKIN’ TELEVISION but none of her family or friends at the funeral seem to have noticed, and even Jennie does kind of an, “Oh yeah, I forgot she turned into a monster and was blown to shit by trigger happy cameramen” when the tape comes out), except they apparently couldn’t manage to secure footage rights to the movie they were sequelling because instead of turning into a Yorkshire terrier (oh, just watch the original again, that is not a damn wolf), she turns into Cornelius from Planet of the Apes and gets pumped full of lead. Except it killed her, so it must be silver, so apparently every local news channel has their staff armed to the teeth and loaded with silver.

Ben’s first thought is to go to the graveyard that night and kill Stefan in the act of desecrating his sister’s body, but when they arrive, Karen springs back to life, turns into a wolf, and they are beset by several other werewolves outside. I use the term “werewolf” here in the loosest sense, as most of the costumes look not so much like the Bugs-Bunny-eared lycanthropes from the first movie as dollar-store monkey suits with sculpie fangs glued into their mouths.

Once the beasts have been dispatched or frightened away, Stefan informs Jennie and Ben that to end the curse forever they must travel to Transylvania and do battle with Stirba, Queen of the Werewolves, because in a few days it will be her ten-thousandth birthday and all humankind will devolve…into…um…wolves. Not apes. Not even capuchins. Man, when reduced to his primordial state, will become a wolf. I even buy the pile of goop that William Hurt turned into at the end of Altered States over that malarkey. The mind refuses to boggle.

So hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to Transylvania we go, followed by a wolf woman named Mariana (who is played by the chick that the Rolling Stones song “Brown Sugar” was written for), who is some kind of advanced werewolf mutant that can only be killed by titanium. Considering the process for forging titanium wasn’t discovered until the 1960’s, and up until only recently was so incredibly expensive that basically Tony Stark and NASA were the only people who could afford it, those Eastern European subsistence farmers were pretty well fucked when one of these things showed up. Thinking of which, it’s interesting that the silver immunity remained a recessive trait. With titanium in short supply to people who can barely afford a change of clothes and a goat let alone a multi-million dollar chemical forging process, they would be totally invincible. Shame on you, movie, for not considering the evolutionary implications of your stupid plot device. Or, perhaps, shame on me for giving this movie far more thought than it deserves.

Anyway, Stirba sucks the youth out of a local peasant girl and turns from a grizzly old hag into Sybil Danning, while Sefan, Ben, and Jennie make friends with some villagers whose families have been destroyed by werewolves. Jennie is captured, and the men plan to get her back and take down Stirba once and for all. Remember, if they don’t, mankind will devolve into wolves. I just had to point that out to you again to remind you how utterly stupid this is (and to make it worse, the movie was co-written by Gary Brandner, the guy who wrote the original novel the first movie was based on – clearly he doesn’t even care about his own creation at this point).

Ben and Vasile the midget go to scout out Stirba’s fortress, wearing earplugs made of sacred wax to protect themselves. From what, you ask? Well, they manage to interrupt some fun-fur werewolf sexy sexy between Stirba, Brown Sugar, and a dude who looks like he probably gets asked for Jimmy Smits’s autograph more frequently than his own (although he was in a PeeWee Herman movie, which is enough reason to not ask him for his own autograph), so Stirba, dressed like some kind of S&M Megazord, starts in with an incantation that forces transformation in all her werewolves. When poor Vasile’s earplugs fall out, his eyes explode in fountains of gore. His re-animated corpse is later used to attack Stefan and draw him out of the village for the final confrontation.

Deep breath, time for the big wrap-up. Our boys storm the castle in the middle of a big 80’s synth-pop werewolf orgy, which results in a great deal of the ol’ Reb Brown screaming-before-firing-a-shot shtick (every time I see him in a movie I grow more convinced that he actually thinks his screams make bullets go faster), the village pastor being killed by the mutant bat creature that lives on top of Stirba’s staff of power (!?), the revelation that Stefan is Stirba’s millennia-old brother, and finally, the big rotoscope laser beam showdown and the death of Stirba (which, for some reason, also kills Stefan).

Along with the bit where Karen wolfed (or Yorkied, I guess) out on TV but no one seems to remember it, the ending is the movie’s other biggest “I Don’t Give A Damn Anymore” moment. Ben and Jennie have returned home. They are joking about evil spirits, despite having nearly lost their lives to a ten-thousand-year-old werewolf sorceress and her pack. A kid comes to the door with a werewolf costume (which is identical to the Karen makeup from the newsreel), and they laugh nervously. The kid runs into the apartment next door, and when they go to greet their new neighbor, he claims to live alone and is VERY OBVIOUSLY ONE OF THE WOLVES FROM THE VILLAGE WHO TRIED TO KILL THEM BUT THEY JUST SHRUG AND GO BACK TO THEIR APARTMENT! AUUUGHHGHGHGHGHHGHHGHDKOFOIUHSOIUHILUHFYYUIOoomosmomofmomsasomsodimfoimsohpiohf…………medication…kicking in…aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh. Trust me, you will need to see a therapist after watching this movie. Just tell the doc you saw Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf. He’ll know what you mean, and have a very nice prescription all ready for you.

So you just watched a movie which has Reb “Big McLargehuge” Brown and Christopher “Lord Summerisle” Lee exchanging dialog. This is the best example I can think of to explain that comment up at the top of the review. Reb Brown has exactly two acting styles: “Where Am I?” and “BWWWWWAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGHHHHHH(gunshot)!” He is just about the worst actor who managed to be in some halfway real movies I can think of. I get the feeling from some of the scenes where he’s just goofing off with Jennie which seem pretty natural that he’s probably a pretty nice guy in real life, so I feel kinda bad making so much fun of him, but let’s face it, he’s awful. And then we have Christopher Lee, who has exactly one acting style: fucking awesome. Even given some of the most retarded dialog in cinema history, even though he knew how bad this movie was and was embarrassed to be in it, he plays the whole thing with 100% of the talent and gravitas he can bring to bear, which is one helluva lot, even when he’s wearing New Wave wraparound sunglasses or throwing a zombie midget out a window. The man pretty much single-handedly makes up for all the other shitty acting in the movie (on an interesting sidenote, most of the Czechoslovakian actors playing the villagers in this thing are pretty good and have about three times more acting credits than any of the crappy American ones).

The other standout examples I can think of are as follows. When Stefan explains the deaths of each of their Transylvanian sidekicks’ families, we are shown brief, three- or four-frame cuts of the killings which, while not spectacular, add a nice weight to the fact that these men lost loved ones to the pack and give it more of a punch than just being told about it.

During the final showdown, the Jimmy Smits werewolf starts freaking out and transforming while he and Mariana are hunting for Ben. She scolds him, telling him to control it, and drags him off down the hall while he’s writhing and whining, yellow eyes and fangs bulging, desperately trying to keep himself from wolfing out. It’s an interesting idea that the more experienced werewolves can transform at will, while the weaker ones are more subject to their animal nature. It’s not a new idea, but I like the way it’s treated here, even thought it was probably a throwaway scene to the writers and director. They weren’t even trying and they got something right.

Okay, two things right. Even though most of the werewolves look like monkeys with huge fangs, and the one puppet that really does look like a wolf is only shown in brief cuts, I also like the idea that each person responds to the condition differently, and so their transformed physical appearances differ from one another. Even if it was budgetary restrictions and lousy FX that made it happen, not having all the monsters look identical when transformed at least gives the viewer something to think about besides Reb Brown shouting and being confused.

And finally, Stirba’s pet bat monster. It looks vaguely organic throughout the movie, but it never moves, so you don’t think anything of it. Then, when the village priest is sneaking up behind Stirba, she chants some mumbo jumbo and the freakin’ thing launches itself at his face and tunnels into his mouth! It’s absolutely out of place in a werewolf movie. Combined with all the other mixed-bag of lore (stakes, garlic, holy water, etc.), it makes me wonder if this wasn’t originally a vampire movie that got turned into a Howling sequel because they needed a script quickly (hey, they did it with a fucking line dancing instructional video for part six, it’s not that much of a stretch). But as out of place as it is, it’s one of the coolest parts of the movie.

Roll end credits, in which you will hear that godawful synth-pop song for about the hundredth time (if you can only afford one song for your movie, be sure to pepper the movie with totally irrelevant scenes of the band playing it in a nightclub and play it on the soundtrack over and over and over to the point when your audience is seriously considering spending the time and money to track you down, come to your house, and torture you and your family to death), and see a montage of characters from the movie doing takes at the camera or smiling lasciviously to the same shot of Sybil Danning ripping her shirt off played in a loop twenty or so times.

So there you have it, an exercise in surrealist werewolf filmmaking. We laughed, we cried, we used the power of our screams to increase the speed of our bullets, and we watched Christopher Lee take on a role that would have reduced lesser men to pathetic wrecks, and make it a brilliant diamond in the rough (and it gets really fuckin’ rough here, folks). And you know what? It’s probably a good deal both worse and weirder than I managed to make it sound here. Was it worth the seven bucks I paid for it? Absofuckinglutely.