I’ve been alive for nearly forty-three years and I suspect I’ve hated the dream fake-out for roughly forty of them. How do you keep an audience engaged? If you’re a hack screenwriter, simply throw a terrifying image at your starlet, have a hunky male shake some sense into her, and reveal that it was just a hallucination. Rinse and repeat until you’ve padded enough of your runtime.
Now contrast that method to a movie like Spontaneous Combustion, featured earlier this week, in which things don’t just happen for realsies, they actually have a lasting effect on the plot. When things happen in a movie, I want them to, you know, actually happen. If something exciting happens, why immediately reset the exciting development to zero? It’s like eating your cake and having it, too… meanwhile your starving audience has to watch you eat the fuckin’ thing right in front of ’em.
Marie Adams is a novelist. During a meeting with her agent, she has a hallucinogenic episode that’s so violent, she ends up in the hospital. (Her agent, by the way, has perhaps the deepest speaking voice I’ve ever heard in a movie… that is until her husband enters the picture with an inexplicably deeper voice. Perhaps the casting director had a voice kink? Beats me.) It’s obvious these visions are the result of some sort of supernatural phenomenon. Why are they happening to Marie specifically? What makes her so important? The only reason she’s the main character is because the filmmakers say so.
Marie and her husband decide to take an extended vacation at a cottage in the middle of the woods. While the husband makes up every excuse to go schmooze with an attractive shopkeeper, Marie is left alone with her endless hallucinations, haunted by the incessant howling that only she seems to hear. Eventually, one of Marie’s fans turns up on the doorstep of the cottage, looking for a missing nun. Okay, cool. So we have a mystery now. It’s still not an entertaining movie, though.
Once again it’s a sequel that has no overt connection to its predecessors. The required werewolf transformation doesn’t follow the rules we’ve seen before—this time it’s like something out of a melt movie. While I enjoyed the last three movies very much, I found too little to love about The Howling IV. Why make three far out movies just to reign in the wackiness for a bland outing? All the best stuff is crammed into a small sequence at the end. It’s not worth slogging through the first 80 minutes, mind you, but it’s got some pretty good visuals there.
My favorite part is when it’s revealed the werewolves can’t even claw through a convertible’s soft-top to kill the heroine. Now that’s incompetent.
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