Britain, Britain, Britain, it was about time I got around to reviewing another werewolf movie. I'm a fan of the genre, Howling being my favorite, although Silver Bullet had Busey in it as a "role model" so I guess that one wins some credit too. In 1981 "An American Werewolf in London" came out and it was directed by John Landis. The film was an easy to following horror film with some cool sequences of horror and violence.
The plot follows a couple of young men on a backpacking trip through Europe, although they don't make it past a small town, and one of them doesn't make it past London. The film immediately plunges the audience into peril with a werewolf attack, and then slowly builds to some awkward sexual scenes, and finally, the grandaddy of them all, a full transformation scene!
After we get the transformation sequence, our hero (named David) or rather anti-hero, goes into a self-realization that he's a werewolf and he'll be hungry and eating again, so he does what any self-respecting undead entity does, he goes to a porno theater! The film then starts to go into a "panic" mode as the werewolf takes center stage, and well, eats people. Eventually the cops get in the way and well, the rest is history.
The ending of the film is quite abrupt, and just kind of "closes" after a while. It's interesting to note that the film had a lot of inside jokes, lots of little references to other works, and a lot of random inserts that modern audiences will not understand, since most people don't carefully diagnose or write about film in general.
The dream sequences really made me love this film. Full blown fantasy land is really done nicely, with scary tones all over. David's friend walking around London as a zombie, telling him to end it all was cool. The whole wolf metaphor really gets played up here in the dream sequences and makes the film far better than I remembered it.
An American Werewolf in London isn't half bad. I liked Jenny Agutter's role as "Nurse Alex Price" and it didn't help my nurse fetish. Speaking of nurses, why are most of them in the United States fat? I mean, when I watch older film and read about history and what not, Nurses are HOT! In some of my fantasies...uh...never mind.
The acting is good overall, nothing too harsh on there, the film grain is quite good with a great overall transfer to dvd, and I found it better than I remembered. I loved the juxtaposing of the gore with real life cuts and edits, and I liked that there was a porno theater in the middle of London. It kind of made me want to go to London. Ok, no it didn't, but the nurse most certainly did, wow....what a hot lady.
I'll stop. I recommend checking out An American Werewolf in London, as it is a throwback to a classic time in horror, where werewolves were far better than Vampires, or at least better than shiny vampires and pasty white chicks. Till next time, watch out for the full Moon!!!
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I`ve always regarded "An American Werewolf In London" as one of the most ludicrously over-rated horror movies in the history of cinema (and not just because it was shot in England, although that doesn`t help things either obviously). "The Howling" (released around the same time) is 100 times better. Why couldn`t the werewolf have been in New York or Tokyo or Berlin or Los Angeles or..or..any-fucking-where except fucking London? then it would have been a much better movie.
ReplyDeleteSo that Potter garbage made $125 million dollars in its opening week-end, the American movie going public should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for encouraging this British made celluloid dog-shit (and for 10 years now as well), you`d have thought that they would have realised what a pile of shit Harry Potter was 20 minutes into the first movie but here they are 10 years later still buying into what is the most pathetic and laughable franchise of all time, its beyond my comprehension how such a vast number of people can allow themselves to be conned for so long by such unwatchable rubbish.
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