Rent Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985)

The Dog It Was That Died - Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf review by Count Otto Black

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! Given the late second flowering of his career and his appearance in two of the biggest movie franchises ever, it's hard to believe there was a time when Christopher Lee seemed to be a hopelessly typecast out-of-date horror star who, just like Bela Lugosi, was all washed up and had to take whatever work he could get. This isn't quite his equivalent of "Plan 9 From Outer Space" (that would be the Dracula film he made for Jésus Franco without knowing it would include lots of pornographic scenes from which his character was conveniently absent), but it's definitely on a par with "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein". And although he does his best to be professional, it's pretty obvious from the look on his face in every single scene that he wants nothing more than to go home, have a very long shower, and try to forget he was ever involved in this irredeemable dreck.

Despite being the only one of far too many sequels to "The Howling" to directly link with the events in the first film, it only does so in the most minimal way, and then ditches everything established in part one. Werewolves, it seems, are not people with some weird disease they struggle to control, but satanic monsters with magical powers led by a 10,000-year-old crone who regenerates into Sybil Danning in a ridiculous Barbarella oufit. Therefore established werewolf lore suddenly goes out of the window; silver bullets don't necessarily kill a werewolf for good, or even at all, because there are super-werewolves who are only affected by titanium weapons! I have no idea why this is so important that everyone keeps going on about it, since at no point does anyone who needs a titanium weapon to kill a super-werewolf not already have one. And why titanium? It's not plutonium or kryptonite; you can buy the stuff as easily as silver if you know you're going to need it!

This sums up the incoherent plotting of the whole film, which would be hilarious if it didn't spend so much time showing us poorly-faked semi-nude werewolf orgies and clips of a live performance of the title song by a post-punk band called Babel who are so terrible that even Wikipedia has never heard of them. The werewolf makeup is vastly inferior to that in the first film, and at no point does anyone fully transform - we see many close-ups of a human face extending into a muzzle (or rather, the same close-up many times), but they don't seem to have anything to do with the gorilla-suit werewolves we actually see in the long-shots. The obligatory heroic young man and his girlfriend are annoying, dim-witted, and can't act, and apart from Christopher Lee, who looks slightly nauseous, everybody overacts like mad, especially those unfortunates required to constantly behave like werewolves despite seldom being given any monster makeup at all because it costs money.

Utterly worthless, unless you have a thing about seeing Sybil Danning ripping her top off over and over and over again. Watch out for Jimmy Nail in a small part, proving that when he really makes his mind up, he can be in a movie worse than "Morons From Outer Space".

Breast Is Best - Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf review by Spoons

Don't let the KNOCKERS put you off this film. Yes it is awful but in a way in which you just can't help liking it and it has the best end credits ever commited to celluloid.