Why Did The Howling Sequels Go SO Wrong?

[00:00:00]When An American Werewolf in London and The Howling battled for special effects supremacy and horror fans affection in 1981, sorry Wolfen, they took very different routes after. While London would have only one sequel that took 16 years to make, The Howling has seven sequels over the course of 20 years.

[00:00:19]What happened to these and when did they lose their way? What did the author think of the original film adaptation?

[00:00:25]Finally, what is the future of this franchise and how many attempts at a remake have been made? Let's jump into the messy productions and even messier returns of the Howling sequels.

[00:00:36]>> I have silver bullets in here.

[00:00:38]>> Silver bullets miners.

[00:00:41]>> Before we get into the madness that is the Howling sequels, let's take a look at where it all started. Gary Brandner wrote and published a book in 1977 called The Howling about a wife who is attacked and suffers a miscarriage so her and her husband go to a quiet California village called Drago. Well, quiet until werewolves. [music] It's always werewolves. The book did well and carried with it a quote from Stephen King [music] praising it. I don't know if you were aware of this, but Stephen King was kind of a big deal in the late '7s and 80s and 90s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s, pretty much all the time. A big fan of King was a theater chain owner named Steven Lane, who wanted to get into film production and chose horror.

[00:01:23]He saw the blurb on Brander's book and looked into it. The rights were owned by Warner Brothers, who sat on them before selling them to director Jack Conrad.

[00:01:31]The two men brought the project to Avco Embassy Pictures and it was on the way to production. During the time that the first book was found by Lane and made it into a movie, Brander released a second Howling novel in 1979. The filmmakers now had two books to take ideas from, so I'm sure it would have a faithful adaptation. Right. Right. Nope. And Brander would end up not liking it, though, ironically, he would change his tune, even if it was subconscious.

[00:01:58]Conrad would leave the film project over creative differences and the script would be a combination of Terrence Winklas and John Sales who was brought in by the replacement director Joe Dante who had impressed with his prior film Piranha. The book that the film takes its name from and its sequel are much more in the serious horror camp while the Howling film is in the well camp.

[00:02:19]Yeah, it has some horror elements by nature, but it's very much full of winks and nods both to horror history and the film fans watching. While both medias follow a character named Karen who is struggling with PTSD of sorts and goes on a retreat with her husband, they take drastically different turns. They have different surviving characters, plot devices, and very different endings.

[00:02:42]Anyway, I've covered this movie multiple times. From the differences between movie and novel to a battle between its popular comedy horror counterpart in American World in London. London received just one sequel that took well over a decade to make. And I think it's safe to say that that sequel did nothing to start a series and was a fairly sizable failure in Bomb.

[00:03:02]>> Oh, thank God.

[00:03:05]>> You cured my hiccups.

[00:03:09]While I remember renting the VHS and enjoying parts of it, there are just too many problems with An American World in Paris, not least of which the dicey 1997 CGI. Anyway, The Legacy of London certainly isn't tarnished by its unfortunate sequel, and that [music] was it. The Howling, though, strap in. The Howling was a moderate success, to say the least, for everyone involved. The movie did close to 20 million on a sub $2 million budget while wowing nearly everyone with special effects, and it gave Spielberg the confidence to allow director Joe Dante and producer Michael Fenel to tackle Gremlins. Yes, we have the first Howling to thank for Gremlins.

[00:03:46]Unlike its Academy Award-winning counterpart, The Howling wouldn't wait as long to get a sequel up and running, but honestly, even the four years they waited was probably a bit too long.

[00:03:54]While franchises like Friday the 13th or Hellraiser churned out immediate sequels to capitalize on the success and reviews of their first movie, Howling 2 was made almost out of spite and a last stitch effort to get something out of it and came out in 1985. In the case of producer Steven Lane, it was money as Avco Embassy really screwed him over with what they said was the movie not making enough and his contract language being suspect at best. for the second movie's director, French Australian Phipe Mora. It was also financially motivated as the producers of the Howling 2 Hemale film hadn't paid him yet for his previous movie he made for them a breed apart. Finally, author Gary Brandner sought redemption for his works, which he felt were misrepresented in the first movie. Well, none of that would happen, and this is where the sequels would begin to lose their way.

[00:04:44]>> [music] >> You know, with the very first sequel, [screaming] Hemale wasn't honest with their financial situation, which would move the production to multiple places during the shoot and force Brander to not only change the script, but stray further and further from his own story. This is oddly the only Howling sequel that not only follows the events of the original movie, albeit with changes that won't be the first time the author would make, but also the only movie that is a sequel to any previous film. That's right. The Howling series isn't a string of movies following a continuity, but rather an aimless set of remakes or movies just using a similar plot device and theme.

[00:05:22]It's even worse than Texas Chainsaw in that regard, and that's hard to do.

[00:05:25]Hell, the Trimmer series of films follows a stronger continuity than The Howling. Anyway, there are some pluses to the movie. It's got Christopher Lee chewing scenery and coming away with a couple of cool behind-the-scenes stories, including the shooting location, treating Lee like a hero from World War II. and him apologizing to Joe Dante for making the movie when they were on the set of Gremlins 2. The budget for the film is only two million and while it was popular overseas, it didn't do much at all domestically besides piss off Cybil Danning, who played the main villain, Sturba. Yeah, I know I screwed that name up in the last video because they used her one nude scene 17 times in the credits. I did a much more in-depth video on this movie last year, but it should be said it's unintentionally bad, which makes it really fun. and I proudly own the 4K.

[00:06:12]Elsewhere in 1985, we would also see the release of the final book in the Howling series from author Gary Brandner. As much as he talked crap on the first movie, he clearly had a change of opinion. After working on the second film, as he made several changes to the story of his third book, similar to the author of Who Framed Roger Rabbit did with his series after that movie came out. Brander changed the appearances of the creatures from actual wolves to the film's bipedal monsters and gave them the ability to transform at will instead of just during the traditional full moon cycle. He also completely changes the timeline and never once mentions the characters from the previous two books, even if some of the locations are the same. Well, the movies would follow suit as The Howling 3, which came out in 1987, regardless of the fact that it was directed by the same man who did part two and gets a screen credit for Bradner claiming it's based off his own third novel, has absolutely nothing to do with either the third book or the previous two movies. While I can't imagine defending this movie as a good Howling sequel or trying to say it did its best to write The Ship, I have a soft spot for this one. It's oddly PG-13, the only instance in the entire franchise, but it's so wild and out there that it works. It's osloitation, well, late Ozloitation at its finest. The effects are silly and effective in a feverdream sort of way, and it somehow makes the marsupial werewolf creatures sympathetic, something the franchise hadn't done before and wouldn't revisit after. The story follows an anthropologist in Australia who finds footage of a tribe sacrificing a wolf creature. We then follow a young werewolf who flees her father and ends up on an adventure that sees her becoming pregnant, getting a role in a horror movie titled Shape Shifters Part 8, a great nod to meta in storytelling, and eventually winning some sort of Academy Award under a new name. There's a werewolf town called Flo, which is brilliantly just wolf backwards, something that makes Troll 2's Nilbog seem somehow better, and the mass persecution of werewolves, only to end up with them having amnesty because of the crimes committed against them.

[00:08:15]There's also a ghost wolf, a reanimated skeleton, and a giant one that is blown up with a bazooka. If you haven't seen it, please seek it out. The budget here was again 1 to2 million, and it didn't seem to do overly well with fans or critics. It would be the final film in the franchise to end up with a boutique Blu-ray release as this one did on Shout Facto's label. And it's also the last one to be released theatrically. But as we've seen time and time again, decreased revenue and poor reception doesn't necessarily mean a series will stop. And that's certainly the case with The Howling. Steven Lane still had the rights after 1987 and probably was so bothered by how the first movie went down in terms of profit that he just kept going out of spite, which is not the best way to make a movie franchise.

[00:08:57]This is also where the movies really stop being overall worth a watch and become hard to find. Depart from their sporadic appearances on S tier horror streamer platform Tuby. There would be no more Blu-rays, at least in this country, and even the DVD releases are all out of print and carry with them nothing in terms of special features or even care of transfer quality. These movies could very well eventually be lost to time. This is also the part in the series where I hadn't seen them yet, at least until last October when, against my better judgment, I went on a serieswide binge. Here's what I found.

[00:09:30]The Howling 4 began in principle while the Howling 3 was still being completed.

[00:09:34]While the Marsupials would be released in theaters on November 13th, 1987, production on The Howling 4, the original Nightmare, would also begin in November of that same [music] year.

[00:09:44]Producer Henry Allen Towers, maybe best known to at least this audience for producing the Christopher Lee Fu Manchu movies of the 60s and 70s, approached now familiar howling rights holder Steven Lane. He wanted to make another movie, this time in Africa due to the tax shelter benefits, which was a popular practice at the time. I know many of us know about the Canadian tax shelter movies of the 80s, but this was a whole different breed of film and style. The script would be written by Clive Turner, a name we will see a lot coming up, and directed, well, mostly by John Hoe. Ho wasn't new to directing with TV episodes of The Avengers and Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense, as well as movies like Twins of Evil, The Legend of Hellhouse, and even Disney Dark Age films like The Witch Mountain duology and Watcher in the Woods. The cast would be filled out with, well, not much actually. Michael T. Weiss would go on to 88 episodes of the show Pretender, while Anthony Hamilton would go on to 35 episodes of Mission Impossible. and the main star Romy Walt would have a consistent TV career up into the early 2010s. Strangely, the movie would also be credited to Brander again with it allegedly based on all three of his Howling books. The movie shot from November 87 to January of 88 and released straight to video in July of that year. By this point, Bradner was still writing, but hadn't made any more howling books, and that was easily his most popular work and the one that gave him the most on-screen attention. He was probably hoping it would drive more sales or attention to other works. In another twist of fate, this low-budget and honestly forgettable flick is more book accurate than anything we'd seen before. And honestly, it's a miracle that it got made in the first place. You see, when the cast and crew arrived at the agreed upon location, Towers was nowhere to be found, and the things he claimed were prepped for the shoot were simply not there. They had to move the shoot to South Africa where apar tide was nearing its end but in a near revolutionary status and on top of this the director ho seemingly lost his way mirroring the series. Writer Clive Turner would end up directing many of the scenes but go uncredited and somehow the movie was successful enough on home video markets to warrant more entries.

[00:11:54]The movie does technically follow a shocking amount of the first book.

[00:11:58]hilarious that it also adapted from the other two which have nothing to do with the movie but falls very flat and feels cheap. It follows Marie who suffers a mental breakdown and leaves for the town of Drago with her husband. Drago happens to be full of werewolves and Marie's husband ends up sleeping with the town shop owner who is also a werewolf. Marie ends up luring the creatures to the church where she traps and burns them all after starting a fire. Yes, it's more accurate to the source material, but no, it's not good. While ironically being a better Howling adaptation than The Howling, it loses what made that movie so special and shouldn't be considered a remake, it also loses everything that makes the first one special. Its charm and fun acting are replaced by well, not charm and what we see on screen. And the budget was so low that it was filmed with no sound and redubbed later, making it very difficult to get through and feels more like a shot on video film than a directtovideo film. I'm also curious as to what the original movie would have been as what director Hoe turned in was not at all what we got. The entire movie was seemingly reshot and redone to original director Clive Turner's whims. We lost out on better effects shots and even more blood based on the VHS stills that don't even appear in the movie. Effects artist Steve Johnson wanted a melting effect where the human would go liquid and then burst into a werewolf, but it simply doesn't come across like that on film. As much as part two gets crapped for the costumes being old Planet of the Apes gear, here the production just used actual dogs in some scenes, the only time in the series that happened. Again, the series would chug along, but nothing here feels like the howling. Enter part five called Rebirth. This is once again executive produced by, amongst others, Steven Lane, and again written by Clive Turner and Freddy Row. At this point, it must be said that it's entirely possible that Clive Turner is Freddy Row. During the filming of the fourth movie and with its apparent sabotage and re-shooting from Turner, there was no script to start with. When it was written by Row and there were changes needed, the crew were told that there was no way to get a hold of him by phone or otherwise. So, it was up to Turner to tweak it. Add that to the involvement of Turner in the subsequent films, and it kind of adds up. Unless I get comments or an email from Mr. Row, something that has happened from time to time in my six years here, I'm calling it. Anyway, part five would be directed by Neil Sunstrom, who had co-directed the mystery science theater space mutiny starring Rev Brown, who full circle moment was the star of The Howling 2. To the surprise of no one, Sunstrom would later say that he buted heads with Turner constantly. What we ended up with was something of a fan favorite amongst the Howling sequels, though it has nothing to do with its immediate predecessor, nor anything else in the series. It's a weird Hungarian who done it involving werewolves. This was done far better in my opinion than the underseen amicus production, The Beast Must Die, starring Peter Cushing and Michael Gambon that had a damn werewolf break near the end of the movie. But as unrelated howling sequels go, this one's pretty fun. It has far better effects than the previous entry and includes the gore and sleas that we had come to expect from fun horror movies. It is still miraculously credited to the original author's novels, even if it is as far away from those books as humanly possible. It was filmed in Budapest where the movie takes place with much of the crew being native to that country. So much so that the original cinematographer had to be let go because he spoke no English. The replacement was at least good at faking as he also spoke almost no English but made it through production. The movie stars again almost no recognizable talent at least compared to the first couple movies. Mary Staven was in multiple Bond movies Octopusy and A View to a Kill as well as horror favorite house. Phil Davis was Kevin from Alien 3 and Victoria Caitlyn was Bruce Campbell's wife in Maniac Cop. Maybe most importantly, William Shockley is, I think, the criminal who Robocop shoots in the dick. Again, there's no resemblance to the previous movies and characters, tone, or even theme. Just werewolves. The movie must have done well enough to keep the series going, at least in the mind of Lane, who at this point was in it for the love of the game. Howling 5 would release on February 22nd, 1990, direct to video, while Hauling 6, the Freaks, would start production shortly after. Do you want to guess if A, this had anything to do with the previous sequels, or B had anything to do with the source material? Well, the answer to the first question is no, of course not. The answer to the second question is a surprising yes, as this movie has to do with the freak show at a circus featuring a werewolf, and that's straight out of the third book story.

[00:16:38]1991's Howling Six Freaks actually gives credence to the adaptation credit that Brander received yet again. In the Laws of Diminishing Returns, this movie is fine, but nothing special. It follows a drifter named Ian who ends up at a circus led by the charismatic leader Harker, who of course ends up not being who he thinks he is. This one has higher production values than the last couple, including hiring actors that are actually pretty recognizable with Tim Burton collaborator Deep Roy and perennial bad guy Bruce Payne. It's a fun excursion into straight to video '90s madness, but again has really nothing to do with the series at large.

[00:17:14]It is notable that this is the first howling sequel in a long time that has absolutely nothing to do with Clive Turner. And I think maybe we needed a break, especially with what happens next. Freaks would be written by Kevin Rock, who would go on to write the first sequel to Warlock, and the wonderfully terrible Fantastic 4 movie from Roger Corman. The director chosen for part six would be Hope Pello of Charles Band's pet shop fame. This one actually has the charm that a lot of early9s straight to video movies have, especially from Charlie Band. Howling 6 is fun, and I wouldn't mind at all if somebody like Sever, or Vinegar Syndrome included four, five, and six in some sort of mega box set. you know, clean it up with some special features to go over the making of with the principal partners. Part seven should have been the end of the franchise. Part seven shouldn't have ever come to reality, honestly. The howling New Moon Rising. Finally, Steven Lane would be released from his post as executive producer, as he would not be credited on this movie. Unfortunately, Gary Bradner would still be cursed to have to carry this burden on his back, as this one is the worst movie in the franchise and one of the worst movies ever made. Clive Turner would finally get his way as he would write, direct, produce, and edit this disaster piece for Allied Entertainment, and it would be unleashed onto the world by New Line Home Video of All Things. Turner would have finally complete creative control, an attempt to link this movie to the other films in the franchise as, god help us, an actual sequel in the truest sense of the word. Romy Walthal would reprise her role from the fourth movie.

[00:18:45]It would follow a detective that would find clues that stitch together the movies from the franchise. Not a single other person on IMDb has a picture on their profile either out of shame or the fact that they didn't make anything else. And even Turner jumped in front of the screen this time. It's essentially a clip show stitched together with way too much line dancing in a town that was used as a place for westerns decades prior. It gained notoriety from Joe Bob Briggs, who would eventually visit the town after receiving letters from residents after showing it on the TNT broadcast Monster Vision in the '90s. It is without a doubt the worst movie in the franchise and maybe the worst movie I've ever seen. Clive Turner would do nothing after this apart from an acting appearance in the 2000 movie The Apostate. And the series should have died here in 1995 with this abomination.

[00:19:34]Of course, you can't keep a good IP down and we would get The Howling Reborn from Anchor Bay in 2011. It started in 2009 as a soft reboot of the series. Steven Lane was back in the executive producers chair and the film was written by James Robert Johnston and Joe Nimziki with it being also directed by Nimziki. Johnston had written the directtovideo sequel for Joyide and Nimziki had only been a script doctor and directed one episode of the '90s iteration of The Outer Limits. It was originally written as a teen slasher, but when the Twilight series hit and hit hard, it was changed to mimic that. We got Howling Twilight Edition to end [music] the run. It stars Lindsy Shaw of Pretty Little Liars fame and Landon Laborian of Hemlock Grove and Degrassi. It looks, feels, sounds, and is shot like Twilight, but all werewolves and goes out with a whimper instead of a growl. There was talk of a remake as early as 2015 that floated to Andy Machete in 2020 and was again announced in 2026, but I won't hold my breath. This series isn't a series at all. The creators could have continued the story at any time, but chose to just make single entry after single entry.

[00:20:43]And I guess that's okay. It's a very big what if, though. Could it have been a Halloween or a Friday the 13th instead of a Children of the Corn? Well, I mean really it probably would have been a hellraiser at best, but even that would have been better than what we got. I think the only reason the sequels don't tarnish the original is because of how far away they are. They lost that special formula immediately after the first movie because they lost people like Joe Dante and his acting troop as well as writer John Sales and FX from Rob Boutine. There was no Wes Craraven or Robert England or Doug Bradley to carry the series and so it became the most forgotten horror franchise we have.

[00:21:20]Hopefully, this announced remake creates a whole new generation of fans and erases 45 years of failure.

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