An American Werewolf In London (HD-DVD/DVD Combo Format)
Picture: B-/C+ Sound: C+ Extras: B- Film: B-
The rise
and fall of John Landis as a hot director is one of the most under-discussed
stories in early Hollywood revival filmmaking.
After helming the wild Kentucky
Fried Movie, he went on to direct three big, noteworthy hits people are
still talking about. First came National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978,
reviewed on HD-DVD elsewhere on this site) and then The Blues Brothers (1980) were two irrefutable and influential
hits. National Lampoon on a film has
become a lampoon of itself at this point, while The Blues Brothers was a forerunner of the soundtrack-driven
non-musical, a few years ahead of MTV and the “clip-vid” film and partly proved
Musicals could go on in new forms. The
next year, his An American Werewolf In
London was part of a cycle of “wolf” films that also included Wolfen and The Howling.
Now on
HD-DVD as a Combo Format disc with a standard DVD flipside, the film turns out
to be the best, boldest, most interesting and enduring of the three, with Wolfen only loosely a werewolf film and
Paul Schrader’s Cat People remake is
a loose cousin of the cycle. While The Howling (directed by also-Horror
film enthusiastic Joe Dante) was humorous and transformations had more to do
with violence and the usual predictable Horror happenings that has been done to
death too many times later and spawned the worst set of sequels in Horror
history, An American Werewolf In London
is even more off-beat, the most counter-culture oriented of them all and walks
a most interesting line between Horror and Comedy.
Two
friends (David Naughton and Griffin Dunne) are walking the Welsh moors when
they hear strange noises. After a visit
to a local pub where everyone acts suspicious, they venture out to find the
noise getting louder. A flash of events
happen that leaves one dead and what seemed like a monster to the survivor is
replaced by a nude dead man.
When
David Kessler (Naughton) turns out to be the only survivor, he starts to
question what happened. The good news is
he has a very nice, helpful and supportive nurse in Alex Price (Jenny Agutter),
but he starts to believe he is loosing his mind. What attacked him? Why is he having strange nightmares? Is his old friend Jack (Dunne) really dead or
coming back from the dead? More than
just playing with psychiatry and sanity as Dante’s Howling does, Landis and his screenplay do the same thing in layers
partly inspired by Dreyer and partly by the freedom of the counterculture that
informs his best early work. That pumps
up the horror, suspense and comedy, but as much as he intends it to be more
Horror than Comedy, his previous films were heavy on laughs so the line between
the two with his offbeat sensibilities skews that line in ways you hardly ever
see. Having Frank Oz in a cameo and
voice in a clip from The Muppet Show
furthers the question of what exactly Landis is trying to do here.
This
includes the subject of childhood and at what roles do sanity, fantasy and
reality play in development before and during puberty. This also includes and leads to human sexuality. Influenced by Stanley Kubrick (though The
Shining was made only the year before this film and Landis wrote this script in
the late 1960s), the film and its director have a sense of sexual freedom going
on in “art house” cinema beginning in the 1960s in what was unprecedented male
nudity (by Naughton and two actors playing XXX sex film stars) in a mainstream
commercial film (especially of and for this genre) that is intended to increase
some anxiety and deal with human sexual suppression, while Kessler’s
relationship with Price becomes loving and sexual in nature. To his credit, it is never explicit, cheap or
degrading, while the same acts in Cat
People and The Howling are much
closer to sex and death in a way that is much more clichéd in current films
Horror and otherwise.
Just
before the 1980s became the 1980s, many fine films with this kind of approach
were being made such as the films in this cycle. Also at this time, many of the big movements
connected to the counterculture were peaking in a way beyond anyone’s
control. Disco and open homosexuality
peaked with Can’t Stop The Music,
the step after Blaxploitation to larger “legitimate” film productions fell with
The Wiz and the XXX film business
about to be annihilated by the home video industry peaked with the wreck that
was the Penthouse Magazine film production Caligula. In the case of this film, the 1950s began a
friendly cycle of spoofing old monsters, which increased and further celebrated
them in the 1960s and reached a new phase with the cult classic TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker (with its
hip takes on classic monsters, including a werewolf) as new types of dark big
budget hits (Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen) and low budget Horror films (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the Romero Zombie films) broke new
ground becoming classics.
Though
Landis said he was trying to do an old-fashioned Horror film in an updated way,
but with B-movie roots and similar energy, the greatest thing about this film
is that it is the unacknowledged peak of that love of traditional monster
movies from the 1930s into the 1950s. It
has the energy, wit, possibilities, innovations and does interesting things
with the conventions. However, it also
puts it in a real world of ordinary people with basic needs and the subtle ways
it also does this further jumps-up the ability of the audience to suspend
disbelief.
A logic
step in Horror/Comedy trajectory after Kolchak:
The Night Stalker, it is too bad he did not get a crack at reviving the
character while McGavin, Simon Oakland and company were still around since a
Kolchak with this kind of R-rated big screen freedom could have worked. Of course, there would later be a very
dreadful, belated and remarkably unnecessary in-name-only-sequel calling itself
An American Werewolf In Paris in
1997 (?!?) that Landis had nothing to do with and is an all-time turkey.
Sadly
following this success, Landis had to deal with the awful Twilight Zone: The Movie debacle (no matter who or what was
responsible, which is already the subject of a few books and too off topic to
go into here), never to return to form despite continuing to work. Unfortunately, work with Eddie Murphy and
Michael Jackson, no matter how commercially successful, ended his amazing
run. Many critics have tried to write
him off as a hack, but it is time for some revisionism about what he did
accomplish at the time and what it says about how great the time was he was on
top. Unfortunately, this film peaking so
high took him down with it and that is horrible indeed.
The 1080p
1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image was shot by Robert Paynter, who
established himself with films like Michael Winner’s The Mechanic, the 1978 remake of The Big Sleep and Superman
II. It looks good but aged and
limited in detail and depth a bit from the print used here, though some of the
intent might have been to create atmosphere.
The regular DVD’s anamorphically enhanced image is even flatter, a bit
more color challenged and has a bit less depth.
Otherwise, playback is not bad despite these limits because the form,
style and camera shots can be involving.
Rick Baker’s groundbreaking make-up and make-up effects hold up very well
and are better than ever in their digital-effect-free glory, remaining most
impressive.
The Dolby
Digital Plus 5.1 mix on the HD-DVD side and DTS 5.1 & standard Dolby
Digital 5.1 on the standard DVD side are very front heavy, which makes since as
this was originally a monophonic theatrical release. The upgrades have their limits, but sound
good and the film is known for its use of songs including the word “moon” in
their title. All sound like they come
from vinyl records off of a very high fidelity stereo turntable, but that works
for the film’s Rock N Roll approach in ways so many later imitators since (and
that is many) using music to cover up bad writing and no talent when they have
had the money. Note that he never goes
for obvious Rock songs a real hack director would, especially today, like Monster Mash and Haunted House. Cheers too to
the great Elmer Bernstein turning in one of his most interesting, underrated
scores.
Extras
include a feature length audio commentary by Naughton and Dunne that is very
entertaining, featurette with Baker being interviewed, original making of
featurette, storyboard/film comparison, stills, outtake, Landis interview and
how Naughton’s hand was cast to be reproduced for the groundbreaking and
Academy Award-winning make-up effects.
By the
way, Naughton and Dunne talk about the title of the XXX sex film playing in the
film entitled “See You Next Wednesday”
about an orgy. They noticed that Landis
uses this in all his films, but not the origin of the phrase. Well, it’s a line from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) when the
father signs off to his daughter on the Bell Picturephone. Landis even has some Kubrickian shots in the
film, but without the pretension of the majority of the film and videomakers
imitating him since.
- Nicholas Sheffo
