THE HOWLING (Sci-Fi Channel- Sun Oct 19 12:30pm & 10:50pm/Mon Oct 20- 9pm) is a 1981 offering from director Joe Dante, who also gave us PIRANHA, INNERSPACE and both GREMLINS movies. Dee Wallace (CUJO, CRITTERS, THE FRIGHTENERS, Rob Zombie’s HALLOWEEN and Elliot’s mom in ET) top lines THE HOWLING as Karen White, an award-winning TV news anchorwoman. As the film opens, she is helping the police apprehend psychopathic killer named Eddie Quist, who admires Karen and brags of his crimes to her.

After confronting Eddie in a darkened porn theatre in which Eddie shows her… something… (No, not *that*, porno theatre venue notwithstanding) Eddie is shot down by police and Karen loses all memory of the incident. Her psychiatrist (a wonderful character part for THE AVENGER’S Patrick McNee) sends her to recuperate at to the seaside Californian resort community for troubled people known as ‘The Colony’, and before you can say ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’, Karen and her hunky hubbie Bill (played by Wallace’s real-life husband Daniel Stone, whom also starred with her in CUJO) are up to their armpits in cattle mutilations, nymphomaniac vegetarians, a seemingly resurrected Eddie Quist who still wants Karen to like him and more fur-covered, drooling monsters than in a Baldwin brothers film.

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The great thing about THE HOWLING is that, while it is terrifying in parts, director Dante infuses the proceedings with the same offbeat, loony, dark humour he used in PIRANHA and the GREMLINS movies. All the major characters are named after directors of previous werewolf movies. A tense moment involving Karen’s friend Terry being stalked by the werewolves in an empty doctor’s office is juxtaposed with her husband watching The Three Little Pigs on television. A character that Karen turns to for advice on werewolves is seen reading gay poet Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’. Famously penny-pinching B-movie director Roger Corman cameos as a man scrounging for coins in the return slot of a payphone…

The acting is also top notch. Dee Wallace is a cult horror actress and possibly one of the happiest and nicest stars ever to scream and run from a] a hulking maniac or b] a big-headed alien with a bad case of heartburn and an M & M’s fixation. Her real life husband Chris (who sadly died in 1995) is fine as the vegetarian Bill, who has a surprisingly revealing (for 1981 anyway) sex scene with the literally ravishing nymphomaniac Marsha (Elizabeth Brooks), who gets her claws into Bill in more ways than one (the sex scene starts with them as human and continues as they transform into werewolves- does this still count as ‘doggy style’?). Patrick McNee has a grand old scenery-chewing time as psychiatrist Dr. Waggoner, as does legendary actor John Carradine (in his final role) as an elderly werewolf who refuses to abide by Colony rules and raise cattle to kill instead of humans because (‘It ain’t natural- we were meant to eat folks!’). Special mention to Kevin McCarthy as a mean news network executive who doesn’t believe that being nearly murdered by a psychotic stalker means you need time off work, and Dante regular Dick Miller has a great cameo as the owner of an occult bookstore who knows all about California’s lycanthrope problem (‘Oh yeah, werewolves? Those things are all over the place, and damn hard to kill – worse than cock-a-roaches!’).

Try and spot how many corny werewolf gags and puns Dante works into the background. Just don’t make a drinking game of it, or you’ll be on all fours and howling long before the cast are!

Gavin Pitts