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THE HOWLING II
aka
THE HOWLING II: STIRBA – WEREWOLF BITCH; THE HOWLING II: YOUR SISTER IS A WEREWOLF
Rating: 
USA. 1985.
Director – Philippe Mora, Screenplay – Gary Brandner & Robert Sarno, Based on the Novel The Howling II by Gary Brandner, Producer – Steven Lane, Photography – Geoffrey Stephenson, Music – Stephen Parsons, Makeup – Ellis Burman, Jack Bricker, Steve Johnson & Scott Wheeler, Production Design – Karel Vacek. Production Company – Granite Productions.
Cast:
Christopher Lee (Stefan Crosscoe), Sybil Danning (Stirba), Reb Brown (Ben White), Annie McEnroe (Jenny Templeton), Marsha Hunt (Marina), Judd Omen (Vlad)
Plot: At Karen White’s funeral, her brother Ben meets the mysterious Stefan. Stefan warns Ben and journalist Jenny Templeton that Karen is a werewolf and must be staked with titanium to stop her returning from the dead. Ben thinks Stefan is mad until Stefan makes him stay and watch Karen’s body come back to life before he stakes it. They head to Transylvania to stop a festival where werewolves from all over the world are converging under their centuries-old queen Stirba.
Joe Dante’s The Howling (1980) became a cult classic with its tongue-in-cheek werewolf movie in-jokes and genre quotes and most of all for the amazing central werewolf transformation effects set-piece. The Howling II was the first of a series of entirely terrible sequels (see below for the other titles). The sequel’s connection with the first film is tenuous – the Karen White that is seen here doesn’t even have the same hair colour as Dee Wallace did and the film certainly doesn’t come in the same lampooning, tongue-in-cheek style as the original. Although Gary Brandner, author of the original Howling novel (which was largely abandoned by the first film anyway), co-writes the screenplay.
When it came out, The Howling II developed somewhat of a Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) reputation. It is directed by Australian Philippe Mora whose work one has admired elsewhere – see The Beast Within (1982), the superhero spoof The Return of Captain Invincible (1983) and parts of the supposedly true alien abduction story Communion (1989). Certainly the tongue-in-cheek sense of humour that the first film had would have helped no end scenes such as the supposed werewolf menage a trois where the participants sprout hair and start barking!
Mora has an editing style that is a major irritation where he strobe flickers back and forward between images within a scene. This reaches a particularly sleazy height over the end credits where one scene of Sybil Danning ripping her top off from earlier in the film is repeated several dozen times. There is also the needless inclusion of a number of scenes with a band that are posing (badly) at being punks.
Part of the problem is the confused, meandering script. This at times owes more to vampirism than werewolf lore – the need to stake the werewolf to kill them, the sojourn to Transylvania. It’s a plot that really needed much tighter editing – the script throws in all manner of magic rituals and scenes around the village that have little incident to the main plot. And quite often the film seems to have included scenes for the sole reason of highlighting cheap makeup effects – the priest getting an Alien (1979)-like chestbuster forced down his mouth, the dwarf’s exploding eyeballs. Certainly, while the effects were the highlight and talking point of The Howling, here they are cheap and tatty and more than anything are kept to the shadows presumably so as not to emphasize their shortcomings.
The Howling II does star the perpetually awful Sybil Danning and her very large chest measurements, although she certainly cuts a striking figure in shades, V-neck leather catsuit and hip-length boots lined with strips of mirroring. But quite what Christopher Lee, who ended up swearing off doing horror movies any longer a decade earlier, is doing mixed up in this is a baffling question. Reb Brown is stolid, while Annie McEnroe proves wimpy.
The other Howling sequels are:– The Marsupials: The Howling III (1987), Howling IV: The Original Nightmare (1988), The Howling V: The Rebirth (1989), Howling VI: The Freaks (1991) and Howling: New Moon Rising (1995).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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