THE HOWLING: NEW MOON RISING (1995)

 

(a.k.a. HOWLING VII: MYSTERY WOMAN. Director: Clive Turner and an uncredited Roger Nall. Screenplay by Clive Turner, billed as “based on” Gary Brandner’s The Howling trilogy, but it’s not.)

Storyline

After a friendly stranger arrives in a small town, a series of savage, animalistic murders occur.

 

Review

A mysterious biker, Ted (Clive Turner), arrives in a sparsely populated cowboy town (Pioneertown) and gets a job at the community hub country bar (Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace) and makes friends with the locals. What they don’t know is that he has an agenda, making notes about his social interactions on a tape recorder in his motel room.

Meanwhile, a “Detective” (John Ramsden) talks to Father John, a local priest, about a series of out-of-town murders the Detective is investigating. The priest tells him that the killer he’s hunting has roots going back to the 1500s in Hungary and is a spawn of Satan─a werewolf! The cop is unconvinced but listens to Father John anyway. The priest’s voiceover, spread throughout the film, narrates extensive footage from HOWLING IV: THE ORIGINAL NIGHTMARE, HOWLING V: THE REBIRTH, and HOWLING VI: THE FREAKS.

Within days of Ted’s arrival, two bar patrons are torn apart. Eventually, the “Detective” meets Ted, everything comes to anticlimactic finish, and MOON finally ends.

MOON, the seventh HOWLING flick, is not a good film. Shot in Yucca Valley, California, its microbudget is painfully obvious. Most of its players, wooden in their roles, are non-actors, all of whom use their real first names and whose humor runs from a recurring George Jones joke to a scene with loud, squirting fart sounds. Its FX/transformation scenes are cheap, even for MOON’s infinitesimal financing, and there is no suspense in this amiable but boring-for-any-genre work.

MOON has some good things about it too. It’s the first film in the series since HOWLING II that strives for series continuity─in this case, it tries to bring together elements from the three previous movies (e.g., Romy Windsor reprises her role of Marie Adams, the famous writer, from HOWLING IV). While it doesn’t entirely succeed, it’s an admirable attempt on Turner’s part.

Another thing I liked about MOON was its set-up (why Ted comes to Pioneertown, and who hired him to go there) as well as its clever end-twist. Now, if everything else about it had been better, it might’ve made MOON worthwhile. It’s not the worst film I’ve seen, but I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone.