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Category:    Home > Reviews > Horror > Comedy > Werewolf > Counterculture > An American Werewolf In London (HD-DVD/DVD Combo Format)

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


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