Revenge of the Revenant Review 9: The one that's a werewolf movie

 

Title: An American Werewolf In London

What Year?: 1981

Classification: Mashup/ Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: That’s Good! (4/4)

 

In the last few reviews, I’ve mentioned having to make some hard choices for this feature. For this one, I ended up in an even bigger conundrum. I had already deferred reviewing one egregious movie, in large part because I haven’t felt in the right frame of mind to watch it. Then I put another movie I had slotted well in advance, only to decide it simply wasn’t weird enough to fit with this feature, at least for the moment. At that point, I was really in a bind, because there weren’t any others in the remaining line-up (the part I had settled from the beginning) that I could really handle on short notice. Then I thought of one that had already crossed my mind very early on, and it all came together. What could be more unusual for a zombie movie review feature than one that’s never been considered a zombie movie? But, as we shall see, it’s not all as it seems. With that, I introduce An American Werewolf In London, and quite possibly the most unusual and unclassifiable undead in movie history.

Our story begins with two Americans, David and Jack, hitchhiking in northern England. After being turned out by the strange and unfriendly patrons of a village tavern, they wander onto a moor where they are ambushed by a mysterious attacker. The encounter leaves Jack dead, and David scarred and mauled. Our surviving hero goes through recovery with the help of his very attractive nurse Alex, with romance on the horizon. But things take a turn for the worse when Jack appears in his room, still mangled and increasingly moldering. He warns David that they were attacked by a werewolf, leaving them both under an ancient curse. Where Jack must wander the earth as an unquiet spirit, David’s fate is to become a werewolf at the next full moon.

An American Werewolf In London was the creation of director John Landis, best known before and since for comedy. The cast was led by David Naughton and Jenny Agutter as the nurse, with Griffin Dunne as Jack. The score was provided by Elmer Bernstein, and featured in a further tie-in album from the group Meco. Despite the high-profile talent, the total budget was under $6 million. Along with The Howling released the same year, the movie portrayed werewolves with modern practical effects, in this case provided by Rick Baker. The simultaneous releases marked the start of a minor wave of werewolf movies, including several sequels for The Howling. However, American Werewolf did not receive a sequel until the release of An American Werewolf In Paris in 1997.

I first saw American Werewolf on TV in college, back to back with the (alleged) sequel. It immediately stood out in comparison with the second movie or any other that came to mind. It combined horror, comedy and romance, without in any way taking itself less than seriously. It was the kind of thing that could only have been done in the 1980s, as proven well enough by the sequel, and the enduring question is whether this is a good or bad thing. Ever since, I have been back and forth on just how I feel about it. At one point, I bought it on either tape or DVD but traded it back, in part because I was simply unsatisfied with the image quality. More recently, I sprang for Blu Ray, which is definitely much kinder to it. I gave it a viewing a few weeks prior to this review, just to kick off my usual Halloween monster-movie binge, so I came in with it fresh in mind without having to watch the whole thing again.

On further consideration, most of the movie’s problems simply come from its time. The effects were mixed even then; the one transformation sequence is amazing, but the final product looks like a marsupial Muppet (albeit just a little like Archididelphis invicta!). The twists on the werewolf lore are effective, particularly undead Jack’s casual dismissal “Be serious!” when silver bullets are mentioned. However, with this movie literally as old as the Universal monster movies were then (horrifying in itself for people like me born when it came out), the references are doubly self-dating. What really deserved to be dissected to death is the casual acceptance of the patient/ caregiver relationship, which should set off alarm bells for anyone who’s been through the mental health “system” from either side. Here, at least, the movie does show some sensitivity, as Alex in particular can be seen evaluating both her feelings and David’s mental state, which from an ‘80s movie is practically a public service announcement.

What keeps the movie watchable, funny and often unsettling is Jack; this, needless to say, is what gets the movie a place here. (The Nazi werewolves/ mutants/ zombies in one of the nightmare sequences get honorable mention.) At face value, he is no more or less than a ghost who looks more or less like a zombie, particularly after he has been out for a while. (The decay actually happens much faster than on a real corpse, if properly embalmed, and you do not want to know the things I had to do to know that.) In that respect, he can be compared to the uncertainly classified entities of Carnival of Souls. What stands out is that he never seems that unhappy with being (un?)dead, notwithstanding his protests to David. He remains a wisecracker to the very end, with nearly deadpan comments like, “Have you ever talked to a corpse? It’s boring!”

What begins to be apparent, especially on repeat viewing, is that he is never quite bound to the same “rules” as a purely immaterial being. Once he appears, he does not dematerialize, pass through solid objects and so forth (which would of course have cost more money to film). By extension, he only goes into another room through doors that are open, and if he sits down, he does so on furniture and other surfaces that would support the weight of an actual human. Most strangely, there are moments when he actively and deliberately interacts with objects around him. If one really pays attention, it feels as if the actor (who may well have ad libed much of this) and the script are actively mocking the idea of a ghost.

This brings us to the “one scene”, the tour de force of Dunne’s performance. During his first night with Alex, David rises to go to the bathroom, which the camera gives a good look at. As he closes a half-open medicine cabinet, the mirror reveals Jack, now visibly discolored, in a spot the camera might have missed. When David denies he is real, he merely remarks, “Don’t be a putz.” As they continue to talk and argue, they both was to another room, with Jack pausing to sniff a flower. Then they both sit down, and in the single most surreal moment of the film, Jack picks up a Mickey Mouse doll and plays with it, saying in a perfectly good imitation, “Hi, David!” After a few minutes of fateful dialogue, Alex comes in… and sits down on the exact same chair Jack was just in. In trying to explain himself, David neglects to mention if he noticed what exactly happened to him.

In the final analysis, even I can’t bring myself to argue that this one is a zombie movie. What I will argue is that it is very much in the same cloth as the “classic” films of the genre. Above all, it demonstrates the extent to which the creativity of 1970s-80s horror was born of necessity. In the age of CGI, they would have thought nothing of showing Jack walk through the bathroom wall. If it had been a higher budget, they might still have done that, and perhaps made him an animatronic puppet or a stop-motion skeleton in the process. But what they had was two guys in a room, and they found a way to make that unforgettable long after any number of high-tech monsters had dropped from memory. That is what movie magic is all about.

Image credit Discogs. They have everything.