SECOND CHANCES

john cribbs

page 2

AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON

Despite their reputations, some films and filmmakers just don't do it for Funderburg and Cribbs. This series, Second Chances, follows their attempts to find greatness where they've previously failed to see it; to actively make an effort to appreciate esteemed artworks for which they currently have a distaste (or feel indifference). They'll give cult favorites like Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 another shot and dig deep in the filmographies of beloved auteurs whose appeal baffles them (like Luchino Visconti) - and with a little luck, maybe they'll even end up as newly-minted fans...

 

In one of my Video Oddity articles I rambled on pedantically about the use of comedy in horror movies. American Werewolf is usually described as a horror-comedy, and I just want to get this out of the way: when I hear the term "horror-comedy," I think of a movie that is a parody of horror films or has a larger "comedy" quotient to its "horror" supplements. I think of Young Frankenstein or Saturday the 14th or Transylvania 6-5000 (making me officially the only person who ever thinks about that movie, in my vain attempts to keep the career of Rudy De Luca alive in my head.) Because every good horror movie has a huge amount of humor in it, everything from Texas Chain Saw Massacre to the Hostel series. But nobody refers to those films as "comedies." There are some titles, mostly zombie movies like Return of the Living Dead, Night of the Creeps and Shaun of the Dead, that balance their horror and comedy in equal measure (ie, straight monsters and realistic violence despite goofy performances and obvious awareness of source material.) American Werewolf falls into this category*, which, at the end of the day, is "horror movie." In Werewolf, there are two types of comedy going down. The first is the self-aware "goofiness of the situation" comedy, such as the gallows humor delivered by David and Jack (mocking the cliche of the howl coming from the moor late at night or David's jokes about his transformation.) The second is Landis' attempts at gags outside the narrative. While the self-aware comedy is as imbued in the world of the film as that in Re-Animator, an "I can't believe this shit exists in my reality and it's actually happening to me" approach, Landis' gags exist outside the world and do nothing but undermine the story. They fall completely flat when they aren't outright embarrassing. Ooh, David's running around naked at the zoo, let's wring some laughs out of that! Frank Oz and Miss Piggy in the same movie! Get it? It's so madcap! And a bumbling police sergeant who walks into a closed door? Absolutely grating. The only attempt at comedy in a horror film I can think of that's worse is the idiot cops trying to hitch a ride in The Last House on the Left.

But it isn't enough to just say the comedy doesn't work - there's a fundamental problem in the storytelling. It reportedly took Landis 12 years to write the screenplay and it feels like it wasn't quite complete (even Roger Ebert's review opined that the film seemed "curiously unfinished.") Several scenes end abruptly, fruitless subplots appear to exist as padding between the main plot and the writer's bits of whimsy mark moments where Landis can't fully commit to a serious story. Placing the "naked American man stole my balloons" crack after the night of David's murderous rampage doesn't relieve the horror of his situation, it just takes away the emotion of its impact. In fact the movie's best joke doesn't appear until the ending credits in the form of the text: "Any resemblance to any persons living, dead or undead is coincidental." That's not even a great joke, but at least it doesn't get in the way of anything happening in the movie. Landis' career feels like one big identity crisis - he's directed car chase movies, espionage thrillers, gangster films and horror flicks, all of which either revert to awkward comedy or become so marginalized by the broad humor that only the stupid jokes are left. Part of this comes from Landis trying to understand youth culture, or urban culture, and more often than not result in flat stereotypes - fine for empty slapstick but completely unrefined. The ironic shot of a Mickey Mouse figure witnessing David's lycanthropy I wouldn't mind letting Landis get away with, if he didn't have such a reputation for aiming for the cheap seats. A lot gets made over the film's similarly ironic use of music, which are like the songs from The Graduate: some of it works, some of it feels forced. Obviously the two uses of "Blue Moon" - in the credits and during the transformation scene - are the ones that work, but the use of Creedence** and Van Morrison feel as cheesy and smart-assy as any employment of this cinematic tactic from Apocalypse Now to the work of Quentin Tarantino.

  

I wouldn't be so harsh on Landis' comedy if the rest of the film didn't have scenes I felt deserved better. The bizarre, comedic feel of the movie itself works very well, and the horrible absurdity of the dream sequences in particular is pitch-perfect. Landis has admitted that the surreal nested dream-within-dream structure was inspired by The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but something else he may have borrowed from that movie is the decaying ghost of Jack, so similar to Discreet Charm's mutilated solider. The playful banter between David and a steadily putrefying Jack manage to relieve the sickness of the scene even as it's playing out without detracting from what's going on. Dunne brilliantly delivers what is both the funniest and most unsettling line of the film: "Have you ever talked to a corpse? It's BORING!" (the irony being, of course, that David IS talking to a corpse. What a great line!) It's in these moments that Landis the filmmaker really wins out over Landis the clown, and they are effortlessly funny. There's a twisted, bemused anarchy to the second nightmare: the wolf-SS officers mowing down mom in her kitchen and the two kids in the living room (same number of children killed in real life on the set of The Twilight Zone.) Landis' use of Nazis in general - Blues Brothers, Twilight Zone - is weirdly uncomfortable and unapologetically irreverent, but making them demonic-looking wolves who break into a scenic American home with machine guns yet use a knife (the instrument of the surrealists!) to slit David's throat is truly inspired. The sheer horrific chaos of the scene is comedic on its own without the use of pratfalls or one-liners and is just one standard wake-in-sweat conclusion removed from being truly Bunuelian. If only Landis could strike this kind of balance in the film's surrounding scenes, I'm convinced American Werewolf would be the masterpiece so many claim it is.

In the real world with no decaying friend or Nazi wolves, David is hopelessly boring. David is not a well-developed character; he's as thin structurally as David Noughton is physically. In the first three scenes we learn more about Jack - he's seen John Wayne's The Alamo, prefers Italy to Northern England, recognizes a pentangle when he sees one, and has been obsessed with Debbie Klein for a long time - than we learn about David throughout the entire film. Again this underdevelopment is even more disappointing in lieu of a later scene, where David calls his folks in Long Island to say goodbye. The phone booth sequence is really the only sense we get of David's life back home, that he's got a family (the same from the nightmare, one assumes) with two younger siblings. It's a genuinely sad scene, beautifully acted by Naughton as he speaks to his little sister across the pond, one that I wish the movie earned. I don't blame Naughton (whose followup to this was Hot Dog...The Movie) for failing to bring David to life: he's a little bland but gives a decent performance overall and is funny during the freak-out in front of police. It seems like Landis dropping the ball again, when he's set up David to be such an interesting character only to leave him as a kind of blank slate. He works more as a symbol, a young man filled with American brashness struggling with the pangs of responsibility and his own suicidal ideations. Because at its most poignant, this is a movie about survivor's guilt. David's remorse over running away as his friend was being torn apart is subsequently tearing HIM apart and manifests itself as a literal ghost of said friend, urging him to kill himself. The Nazi nightmare and David's background ("He's a Jew - I've had a look," a nurse confides to another) conjure Holocaust parallels and suggest tongue-in-cheek Jewish guilt over the crucifixion, hence David's almost propitiating blaspheme of "Jesus Christ!" when he begins the torturous transformation. But when the poor development of David as a character is considered, that feels like giving the movie a little too much credit.

If David makes for a weak lead, the rest of the characters are flat-out non-existent. The English policemen handling the case, the doctor who takes a ride in his MGB-GT to investigate the Slaughtered Lamb for no reason: until the last scene there's no need to pay attention to them at all. Then there's Jenny Agutter as nurse Alex, who begins a relationship with David that is neither convincing or realistic. No background is explored for either of them; they certainly don't seem interested in anything beyond their current relationship. It all comes back to David's companionship with Jack, which is so good it makes everything else seem phony. Jack obviously feels closer to his dead friend as evidenced when, writhing in agony, the last thing Naughton does before transforming fully is scream an apology to Jack for calling him a "walking meatloaf."

All that aside, the question is how Landis' film holds up as a good old fashioned monster movie. Again this is an area where the movie falls short next to The Howling. Dante's film, from a script by John Sayles which makes for a more original werewolf concept that doesn't update elements from the classic 1941 template (as well as the lesser known Werewolf of London from 1935), treats its fanged subjects as threatening invaders from the outside. Whereas David's terror comes from within, in The Howling there's a werewolf conspiracy and everyone is against an already traumatized Dee Wallace. The transformation in AWIL is sexier and more visually arresting, but it's also an interior thing - you can appreciate the horrible, painful changes this poor guy is going through, but since the danger is not in the tradition of the classic "confrontation" with the monster, the danger is never really palpable. This might have something to do with Landis' decision, possibly inspired by his friend Steven Spielberg's Jaws, to show the wolf itself as little as possible outside the transformation scene. Which just isn't as effective as seeing them in full under Rob Bottin's supervision. The one decent suspense piece in American Werewolf, where an anonymous victim is chased through the tunnels of the tube culminating in that great shot from the top of the escalator where the wolf just barely comes into frame, is cheapened by the other more mediocre moments of werewolf mania and the sloppy final scene - the finale at Piccadilly Circle that might as well be one of the big car pileups from The Blues Brothers it's so slippery and chaotic. Landis seems to pull away from the thrills either out of a fear at his inability to direct these kind of scenes or an unwillingness to let the movie "revel in its trashiness," as Pauline Kael stated in her review of The Howling. If David were a better character the internal struggle would be more compelling; as it is there is no satisfying exterior conflict that The Howling delivers so easily. This actually makes the movies so different that I now realize comparing them is inherently stupid...like comparing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.

That said, I will point out the only scene that comes close to the creepiness of the porn shop opening of The Howling - the penultimate episode in an adult movie theater. It's another encounter with Jack, as well as the other (in some cases, literally) faceless victims of David's nocturnal activities. It's our last moment with the two men, and it's a nice gesture when Naughton says, "I'm glad to see you, Jack," even though his friend has now rotted beyond recognition (Dunne still does a great job, even through the proxy of a puppet standing in for him.) The victims - some bitter, some polite - suggest ways David can kill himself and thus end the cycle. In the movie's defense, it doesn't end with either obvious option of having the David-wolf regain enough of his true self long enough to hurl himself off a rooftop or a dumb twist revealing that Alex has been scratched and contaminated by him after he's dead. But...it just ends. Like many a scene before it, the interesting and intimate conversation in the theater randomly halts with the victims still arguing as David changes and runs amok only to be shot dead by a cop outside the building. So what has everything been building to? Maybe Landis should have considered one of the obvious ideas for an ending in favor of the one that reminds me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It's abrupt and arbitrary, undercutting everything that came before it in the five minutes it burns up until the film cuts to black.

I'm not sure what the hell happened here. In some ways I've completely come around on the film; on the other hand I feel more frustrated with it than ever. I guess the easiest way to break it down is to say there are things that work (Dunne's character and performance, the make-up effects, the dream sequences) and things that don't (the story, the comedy, all the other characters.) Which is exactly what I said at the start of this thing! But that's really what it comes down to: I love the good stuff and hate hate hate the bad. But seeing it again, I now understand that the good stuff really is super - enough so that I ended up picking up the cheap Blu-Ray disc as my annual October horror movie purchase. And what the hell is this movie's relationship to Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London" anyway? Not a single piña colada is consumed over the course of the entire film.

Thanks everybody, have a safe and fun Halloween. See you next Wednesday!

* I truly hate labeling films by genre, but in this case I feel it's important.

** Interestingly, I thought "Bad Moon Rising" was much more prominent in the movie than it was. I guess I just associate Landis with CCR because of the bookends he directed for the Twilight Zone movie (the ones where all the actors survived the production.)

<<Previous Page    1    2    Next Page>>

home    about   contact us    featured writings    years in review    film productions

All rights reserved The Pink Smoke  © 2010