Eighteen years ago, Will Kidman (Landon Liboiron) was literally torn from his mother’s womb after she was mauled to death by a mysterious monster. Now Will is a high school senior with a hopeless crush on sultry bad girl Eliana Wynter (Lindsey Shaw), who has a psychotic boyfriend in Roland (Niels Schneider) and runs with a pack of punk poseurs. After being roughed up, Will finds a friend in Kay (Ivana Milicevic), a kindly woman with a son at the same school, who assures him his life will get better. Shortly thereafter, Eliana lures Will to an underground rave where, high on ecstasy, he thinks he hallucinates werewolves attacking the other club kids. He narrowly escapes being mauled by a ravenous beast. Come the morning, strange changes in Will’s body have him convinced he is becoming a werewolf.
Well, what do you know? After three decades and seven fair-to-godawful sequels, the Howling franchise at last yields a movie worthy of the original werewolf classic. Unfortunately the low gore content coupled with a newfound emphasis on romance led the hardcore horror contingent to undervalue The Howling Reborn, but speaking as someone who sat through all those largely slapdash sequels, the atypical presence of strong characters, snappy dialogue, genuine emotions and directorial competence goes a very, very long way. In some ways typical of the recent trend for rebooting established franchises with hip young things, the film spoofs its own blatent pursuit of the youth audience when Will’s monster movie fan best friend (Jesse Rath) remarks kids don’t watch films with actors that resemble their parents.
Besides merging the overriding themes behind the two most popular high school fantasies in recent times: destiny (Harry Potter) and desire (Twilight), the film also replays motifs from the first Howling in fresh and ingenious ways: the subjective camera stalker, the S&M sex scene, the climactic transformation broadcast on the evening news, and the story continuing over the end credits with apocalyptic implications. First time writer-director Joe Nimziki cleverly parallels teenage tensions (obligations to parents, peer pressure, an uncertain future) with the lycanthropic dilemma, whether to repress his inner beast or indulge his innermost desires. On the one hand the film argues the need for young people to take charge of their lives and not follow the herd, but acknowledges following their impulses can have consequences for those they love. Turning his back on decades of slasher film clichés, Nimziki stages an intriguing sex scene wherein one character offers herself to Will in a bid to liberate his tortured soul. Instead of equating sex with death, the film evokes the early Romantic concept of sex being the most meaningful connection one can forge with another person, something not to be treated frivolously, which obviously echoes Stephanie Meyer’s work.
There are some lapses into the unintentionally comic (lisping Frenchman Roland ranks among the screen’s silliest school bullies, while the wolf pack are rather fey boy band rejects) and in its bid for a sequel the film leaves some loose ends. The low budget confines the werewolves on-screen appearance to the third act (via impressive costumes instead of sloppy CGI), but few need complain since Nimziki’s assured directon yields solid, scary set-pieces without sacrificing the nuances of a smart script that asks compelling questions. While leading man Landon Liboiron is solid without bringing as much gusto to the material as he could have, Casino Royale actress Ivana Milicevic and an impressive Lindsey Shaw offer magnetic interpretations of atypical, nicely faceted roles. Nimziki plays a compelling game, drawing us down one particular plot direction before turning everything we think we know completely on its head. Thereafter the suspense ratchets up a notch with the heroes trapped on school grounds with the werewolves, the discovery of a cave storing future victims (a blatant steal from Aliens (1986)) and a clever climax that cross-cuts the Freudian werewolf on werewolf battle with a graduation speech delivered by the class valedictorian. Given the series last bowed out with the risible Howling: New Moon Rising (1995), The Howling Reborn marks a quantum leap in the right direction.
Gurg. I really thought this movie wasn't as great as it could of been because it fits in too much with our current, sucky movies, thus making it just another forgettable title in the many movies that are emerging. Although i thought it was nice they used costumes similar to those in the howling, they looked bad in comparison to other costumes (like Elanore from origional nightmare) from the series. When the first movie came out it was a step in the right direction, a change in the flow of werewolf movies that forever changed how we saw our lycanthrope friends. We said goodbye to wolf men and fade out transforamtions and hello to amazing real time effects, a twisted story and a step in the right direction for werewolf movies in a whole. The sequels all need good remakes to fix them, but this...was like the rest. It offers nothing really new or interesting to my plate and falls in a lower place in my list of movies i would watch over again. It never even got a theatrical release in Canada because we've realized that no mater how much mney or efforts is put into these sequels THEY WILL NEVER BE WORTH WATCHING! The poster rips-off the first movie even! Gah! Can they never make a good howling sequel?!