The Howling

Distributed by
Pioneer LDCE

Cat.no: PLFEB 37211

Cert: 18

Running time: 87 minutes

Sides: 2 (CLV/CAV)

Year: 1981

Pressing: 1998

Chapters: 43 (30/13)

Sound: Mono

Widescreen: 1.66:1

Price: £19.99

Extras : None

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Director:

Joe Dante

Cast:

Patrick Macnee
Dee Wallace
Christopher Stone
Belinda Balaski
Dennis Dugan
John Carradine
Slim Pickens
Elizabeth Brooks
Kevin McCarthy
Ken Tobey
Dick Miller
Robert Picardo
John Sayles
Roger Corman

Seminal werewolf movie from early in the career of Joe Dante (Gremlins, Small Soldiers) boasts amazing cast from cult moviedom - including Macnee (The Avengers TV series), Pickens the gung-ho bomber captain from Dr.Strangelove, McCarthy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Tobey from The Thing From Another World (1951) regular Dante cast members Miller and Picardo - plus, uncredited, screenwriter Sayles (as a morgue attendant) and low budget exploitation legend Corman (as a man outside a phone booth).

It also features amazing early eighties state-of-the-art special effects from Rob Bottin, Rick Baker (Videodrome) and others. Sayles' script has TV anchorwoman reporter Dee Wallace agree to play bait for serial killer Picardo, resulting in his being shot in a porno store rendezvous. Wallace promptly becomes traumatised by porno images seen in the store and heads off with husband Stone to Macnee's isolated California community in the woods where (in a fairly obvious steal from Rosemary's Baby) all the members - whose numbers include the seductive Brooks as well as Pickens - are part of a hideous conspiracy.

I've never managed to see this movie in the cinema and I've never managed to sit down and watch this film right through on TV shot through with commercial breaks or on video with its reduced picture quality. Since the lighting tends to use sources masked with coloured gel so that different screen areas fill with red or yellow or blue in what is kindly termed 'Expressionism' but would no doubt have Fritz Lang or F.W.Murnau turning in their graves, I wouldn't describe the disc's picture quality as perfect since certain hues suffer, specifically blue night skies which occasionally fall prey to speckling and an overall murkiness that can be observed during the intense oranges during the werewolf attack closing side 1. But that didn't spoil my enjoyment of the film to more than the minutest degree and most of the time, the picture looks great.

The sidebreak falls at an obvious dramatic (and music track) pause, though personally I'd have gone for 60.03 not 63.25 to start side 2 with the phone call currently in the middle of Chapter 29 and get the aforementioned werewolf attack into CAV. That said, all the werewolf transformations come after this and all ARE in CAV, including a little snippet of three stop frame werewolves animated by David Allen (frames 26,142 - 26,200) which alas don't get their own chapter.

Before anyone claims I'm nitpicking here, there appears to be a redundant Chapter 42 (32,099 - 32,248) which allows the viewer to access a frying hamburger before the creeper credits appear as Chapter 43 - so a separate chapter for the three stop frame werewolves would have been well within the bounds of possibility.

Still, these criticisms are fine points and The Howling, in glorious mono (check out the chimes and accompanying howling wolves in Chapter 24's sex scene), is a serviceable little horror flick - and, consequently, an excellent little disc.

Film: 3/5
Picture: 4/5
Sound: 5/5

Review copyright © Jeremy Clarke, 1998.