An American Werewolf in London

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MONSTER MONDAY

My idea for Monster Mondays is to explore some of Hollywood's greatest (and perhaps not so greatest) creature features. After all, what's Halloween without a solid collection of monsters? We begin with a title which I quite honestly haven't even seen in its entirety until this viewing. Before going into this I knew three things about it. One, the transformation scene was famous for its use of practical effects from none other than Rick Baker. Two, it was written and directed by John Landis, who also did the music video for Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'. Three, the very bare basics of it being, evidently, a must-see werewolf movie.

I'm super thrilled to say that the last bit of info there is 100% true. One thing any film from this era will always score points for from yours truly is that it simply holds up. This is a fantastic example of how if one can become a master of practical effects, one can easily outshine all of the glimmer and glamour of CG effects. Interestingly enough, a lot of it does feel like the era it was released in, but the effects are something I'd probably argue were ahead of their time. This leads me to believe that if you were one of the lucky individuals who got to see this theatrically, you had an awesome time based on the genuine thriller this is. In fact, this film is what inspired Jackson to approach Landis to direct his now-famous music video which to this day stands as arguably THE quintessential song for Halloween, AND is my personal favourite music video of all time.

With that info, one can probably imagine that I was pretty ecstatic to see this with fresh eyes, forty-plus years after its initial release. What took me so long? Damn good question. But nevertheless, it really added to my Halloween spirit this year; a much-needed thing considering the past two years were all "Covidified". But man oh man, this could be a bit of a lengthy review this time around because I actually got so much out of this. I was actually surprised to pick up on quite a few moments I've seen referenced in other things as well - namely 'Tiny Toons: Night Ghoulery' with its "Devil Dog" segment. This was kind of like enjoying the "Shinning" segment of 'Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror', then watching 'The Shining' for the first time and getting more out of it because all of the references suddenly made more sense.

We open the film with two backpacking Americans, David Kessler (David Naughton) and Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne) who are trekking across the moors in Yorkshire. With the cold getting to them, they happen upon a pub called the Slaughtered Lamb and head in to warm up. There, they meet a handful of colourful harbinger characters who warn them that when they leave, they should stick to the road, steer clear of the moors, and above all else, beware of the full moon. Of course, we wouldn't have a movie if these two listened, so eventually, the pair gets attacked by an unseen creature who ultimately (early spoiler alert) kills Jack in a pretty terrifying mauling scene - again, some horror that holds up. If you wanna make your skin crawl just find this scene. Anyway, David is also attacked but does manage to survive thanks to some of the local townsfolk and their guns. Now, I should probably mention a Trigger Warning before I get into the next paragraph, as it involves some pretty heavy stuff.

Three weeks later, David wakes up in a London hospital and is told that he and Jack were attacked by an escaped lunatic. However, David insists that the culprit was far from human, and much more like a big rabid dog or wolf. While at the hospital, David meets and befriends a lovely nurse named Alex Price (Jenny Agutter), and the pair form a sort of romantic bond over time. But he is also haunted by his now undead friend Jack, who insists that David is now a werewolf and needs to kill himself, which will not only sever the bloodline and allow Jack (and others') freedom from their zombified state, but more importantly, no more harm can come to others. That's got to be a tough pill to swallow if you're told you should do such a horrific thing in order to save the lives of many others. But I digress. This brings me to another thing I give the film total credit for - David is a very rational-minded person.

Usually, you take any horror concept, and it's someone saying something along the lines of "You gotta believe me! I saw what I saw!". David doesn't even go there, he just straight up believes that he's losing his mind and wants someone to help him with it. It may not seem like a big deal, but for me, that breaks a lot of horror cliche that existed both before and after this film. I consider it a step forward that this film made in the fight against mental health problems when no one was even really thinking about that stuff as much as they do now. It's downright admirable to have the lead say "okay, I'm losing it, I need help" as opposed to just assuming you're right and everyone else is wrong. For this, I tip my hat to Landis.

And my God, how I could go on about how much I enjoyed this. But the scene everyone is probably curious about is the super-famous (at least among cult horror fans) transformation scene. I've seen a lot of werewolf transformations over the years, but this has to be among the best of them if NOT the best of them. The visual flow is a smooth transition, a slow and agonizing process, and may just make one feel sick to the stomach as you're seeing this guy sweating, writhing in pain, and putting on a very believable performance. I don't like torture porn stuff, but that's largely because it's someone doing stuff to someone else. To carry out such a believable performance such as this is admirable, and it's easy to see why this scene took off in werewolf fame over the years.

To close this review off though, I have a genuine complaint about the movie. After all that praise, what could it be? Amazingly, it's just the sheer unavailability of this movie! I could not believe it when I checked all of my streaming sources, even YouTube, and couldn't find this anywhere. Of course, this lead to pirating it, and that's becoming a real problem with fantastic movies like these. Somehow, these titles are actually dying off, and we need to pay closer attention to them, lest we lose them forever! I just saw this for the first time and I can't help but feel like I almost missed it altogether. To put it bluntly, streaming services need to do better with their selections if they're gonna be taking everything over!

5/5

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