Bad Meaning Good case study #3: 'Howling III: The Marsupials'

Wednesday, October 28 2009

In April of 2009, myself and DJ Intel launched the 'Bad Meaning Good' monthly movie event at The Burlington in Chicago. The idea behind the night is to screen cult classics, exploit movies, unintentional comedies and every other kind of film we collectively decide is so bad that it's actually good. In the ongoing search for the perfect 'Bad Meaning Good' film I've decided to take on a weekly (or AT LEAST once-per-week) blog entry in which I'll review, summarize and rate bad movies of every variety imaginable. The goal is to reach somewhere in the range of 75-100 posts within a year, at which point I'll look for a place to publish a first volume of 'Bad Meaning Good' reviews in book form. Stay tuned...

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'Bad Meaning Good' case study #3:
'Howling III: The Marsupials'

Summary:
How's this for a premise sent direct from the B-movie gods?... An American scientist/anthropology professor named Harry Beckmeyer comes into possession of a grainy home video on which Aborigines appear to have slain an actual werewolf. His growing obsession with tracking the elusive beast of lore leads him to Sydney, and later the Australian outback where an underground society of marsupial werewolves (yes, you did indeed read that correctly) derived supernaturally from the now extinct Tasmanian Tiger, have remained hidden from greater, civilized society for nearly a half-century.

One such marsupial werewolf, a smoking-hot young lass by the name of Jerboa, ventures away from both the confines of the werewolf society and the tyrannical rule of her stepfather Thylo, in search of a new life and the allure of the free world. She quickly learns that the level of difficulty involved in remaining an anonymous marsupial werewolf in plain site of the public is no small task. Before long, the clash between the werewolf underground and The Man is at full-throttle.

Having grown increasingly alienated by the government's refusal to let the werewolf population peacefully integrate into society, the humanitarian within Beckmeyer forces him to take up arms with the werewolf underground in a fight for the freedom of werewolves everywhere.

Along the way, there are two separate werewolf-human love stories, a brief glimpse into the world of low-budget filmmaking, an amusing mini-horror film spoof, a terribly inept military-on-werewolf strike gone wrong, an excruciatingly gross part-human/part-marsupial-werewolf birth and about ten additional films' worth of sideplots to spare. We meet werewolf nuns, a Russian werewolf ballerina, an undead werewolf skeleton obliterated by machine gun fire and a werewolf big enough that "if he put one tooth down in your mouth... It'd come out of yer asshole."

It also deserves to be noted that the movie has seemingly no direct connection to either Joe Dante's original 'Howling' film or that film's own loosely-related sequel, 'Howling II: Stirba - Werewolf Bitch' (a clear-cut finalist in any competition for the greatest title in film history). 'Howling III' is its own ridiculous, stand-alone feature that shares a title alone with the other films of the series and virtually nothing else.

How 'Bad Meaning Good' is it?:
If you've read this far you're probably asking yourself how this film could possibly fall anywhere short of some explosively hilarious, B-movie gold. Well, I'll tell you why it ultimately does...

The film is about 70% camp-comedy-horror fun and 30% compassionate, message-driven drama. A great deal of energy is spent trying to convince the viewer that, by God, werewolves are human (or at least part human) too! And it's really a shame because I can think of hundreds of better venues to discuss werewolf inequality than within the context of what could have otherwise been an awesomely-bad piece of 80's horror-schlock for the ages. I'm left with a small sense of bitter disappointment in the director and crew who couldn't find it within themselves to embrace the utter stupidity of it all and make the film's ridiculousness unrelenting from start to finish.

At the end of the day, I can deal with it though because while the total run-time of this film was probably about twenty minutes longer than necessary, there's enough idiotic fun to get you through the proceedings and some hearty laughs to be had to boot.

Let's start with the brilliantly hammy performance by celebrated bit-part actor Frank Thring as Jack Citron, a Warhol-ian, Rod Steiger look-a-like film-director... I mean, this was the dude that played Pontius Pilate in fucking 'Ben Hur'. Needless to say, the expression "slumming it" has now been properly defined.

And I mean, let's face it... We are talking about a movie about marsupial werewolves so the film's overall potential for absurdist humor begins at somewhere around 11. There are any number of moments in the film where said creatures are every bit as funny in execution as you've imagined them in your mind and any scene involving human-to-werewolf transformations (the "money shot" of any werewolf film worth a damn) achieves this very feat in spades. The acting is atrocious... The script is mostly utter horseshit with the exception of a handful of laugh-out-loud moments... The effects budget probably didn't top 10 or 20,000 dollars... But all things considered, even though it's never once even remotely scary, this somehow still manages to be a pretty amusing little werewolf crap-fest within its limitations and modest means.

'Bad Meaning Good'-O-Meter:
8.0/10

Tags: Bad Meaning Good, Bad Meaning Good Case Studies

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