Horror comedies have a bad reputation because of their inability to mix the two genres effectively. John Landis' contemporary classic "An American Werewolf in London" takes a stab at the genre and mostly succeeds, combining hair-raising thrills with gut-spilling (literally and figuratively) humor.
When "Werewolf" first ripped across silver screens in 1981, another slightly more serious werewolf film, "The Howling," also was released. Both films are historically significant for their revolutionary new approach to depicting creatures of the full moon.
Prior to 1981, werewolf transformations largely had been accomplished using opticals and other in-camera editing tricks. Shots would dissolve from a plain face to a face that got gradually hairier until eventually the actor looked like a werewolf.
This worked to varying degrees in Universal's "Wolfman" films from the 1940s, but no serious advances were made in onscreen transformations for the next few decades. Only within the last two decades have makeup effects made it feasible to actually show limbs transform and grow into beastial appendages. Working with a crackerjack team, Rick Baker engineered the effects for "American Werewolf" and ended up winning the film an Oscar for Best Makeup - a category inspired by his work in this movie.
The transformation sequence is indeed the movie's centerpiece, and it holds up. Its only weakness is that it doesn't look very frightening because it happens in such bright light. This diminishes any subtlety that the effect could have possessed.
But the most important thing about the transformation, as well as every other effect in the film, is that it was all done by hand and executed on set. If "Werewolf" were made today, all of these effects would be done with computers and would end up looking pixilated, pathetic and unconvincing. For proof, see the utterly awful computer-generated wolves in this film's 1997 sequel, "An American Werewolf in Paris."
Revolving around the effects is a traditional werewolf movie plot where a traveler, Jack (Griffin Dunne), is killed by a wolf and his friend David (David Naughton) survives a bite, only to become a werewolf himself.
The two lead actors' performances provide the glue that holds this somewhat uneven "splatstick" movie together. Dunne appears in progressively heavier makeup as a decomposing corpse who lost his life but didn't lose his sense of humor. Naughton is great as David, an everyman who doubts his sanity and fights a losing battle with his animal nature.
Although most of the comedic bits are genuinely funny, Landis peppers the film with supremely nasty violence that sometimes leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. The onslaught of absurdly over-the-top gun violence, knife mayhem and messy animal attacks make it hard to believe that a good deal of violence was actually cut from the film before it was released.
There are a number of intense sequences involving the wolf's hunt for blood but the stalking scenes never manage to achieve the genuine tension and terror of the first wolf attack that sets everything in motion. This suspenseful, dynamite opening gives the rest of "Werewolf" a lot to live up to, and it never fully reaches its potential.
Though Landis was previously best known for such comedies as "Kentucky Fried Movie" and "National Lampoon's Animal House," "Werewolf" also has a dark, surreal edge with help from the increasingly violent and nasty dreams David has while in the hospital. The demonic, deformed, machine-gun toting nazi wolf creatures shooting up a family den is truly a sight to behold and Landis provides several other unexpected surprises.
Although it has several weaknesses, "Werewolf" is an animal attraction well worth howling for. Its bark is just as intense as its bite.
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