Review

Two young Americans, David and Jack, are doing the foreign experience thing, and for no apparently reason have decided to trek around the remote areas of Northern England. They are headed for Proctor, a hamlet in the middle of desolate moor country, and hopefully some food and a warm drink at the Slaughtered Lamb, a Pub in the village. The locals don't give them much of a welcome, in fact it's positively hostile, and the lads are soon out on the moors under the full moon. We quickly learn a werewolf is stalking the dark, and David is the only survivor from the lupine shenanigans.

He wakes in a London hospital and soon forms a relationship with Nurse Alex Price. Things may be looking up for our mistreated tourist, except he's having torrid nightmares and his dead mate Jack keeps showing up in increasingly decayed condition to ramble on about David being a werewolf. When the full moon rises, the body count mounts, and David wakes the next day in the wolf enclosure at the London Zoo. Things are going to get a whole lot worse for David, and he hasn't even got inbred locals to prey upon. One of the great werewolf movies of the modern era ensues, let's get down to it and howl at the moon.

With the normal stampede of horror that passes my desk each week it's proving pretty tough to touch bases with some genre classics, something I'm hoping to remedy in 2013. Jet and The Outsider are doing a sort of ABC of horror currently; well okay we're publishing reviews from a defunct site, so at least some of the older catalogue are getting some TLC. I was happier than a Voorhees family member on a Camp Counsellor weekend on Thursday when I found time to sit down and groove to Am American Werewolf In London, the movie that single handily brought the lycanthrope sub genre spitting and snarling into the modern movie era. I can't get enough of this flick, Director/Writer John Landis, who never really contributed anything else to the genre, was bad arse with this flick, almost everything is perfect, a horror fan's wet dream. The special effects were something we had never seen before. The inherent humour had audiences smiling even as they were hiding the screaming. And the soundtrack simply nailed things down as one of the best early 1980s dark genre movies was unleashed upon an unsuspecting audience.

Back in 1981 horror wasn't dependant on half arsed CGI effects and went with prosthetics and camera dark magic, which works like a brought one for American Werewolf. Audiences had never seen these sorts of transformations before, previously it was all stop motion, and a new dimension was added to the horror movie, and dear I say it, a new level in the terror. At the time a lot of people couldn't handle the apparently realism on display, we had an early example of audience members fleeing the modern horror cinema in abject terror. Build a bridge over it people, what exactly are you expecting from a scary movie, Mary fracking Poppins! Interestingly, for me at least, a comparison between the lupine transformations in American Werewolf and 2011's The Wolfman, a movie that won an Oscar for make-up, shows just how far the dark genre has fallen in recently years from the heights of the past. When we finally get to our lycan antagonist in American Werewolf, it's something of a shaggy dog, The Howling, released also in 1981, would show what you can do with the big bad in the sub genre. But hey there's a hell of a lot more happening in American Werewolf than simply a dude turning into a shaggy dog and attacking innocent bystanders, hell there's the undead to contend with, an excellent addition for mine, and once again showing the benefits of excellent effects wizards working behind the scenes.

Back when horror movies went for the throat and weren't about Emo twats no gives a crap about

Surprisingly there's a whole bunch of humour going down in the movie as if John Landis wasn't prepared to say he was taking this dark genre stuff seriously. Throughout the movie the soundtrack was littered with songs that make reference to the moon, "Bad Moon Rising", "Moondance", "Blue Moon", etc, and in the full disclosure scene we have events going down in a seedy London cinema showing what looks to be a horrendously bad porno. It's pretty hard to take victim disclaimers seriously when you have a rooting movie playing in the background. Landis isn't after a serious horror flick; he's toying with the tropes and keeping the mood light, even though he throws the sort of standard horror scenes onto the screen that we have seen in 101 Werewolf flicks before. Besides the moors scenes, hello Hammer Studio, there's plenty of ominous shots of a full moon rising, the sort of seedy backwoods pub that populates cannibal flicks, and heck the Savant who is apparently going to find out what's going down. So yeah we're not talking a heavy brooding horror flick by any stretch of the imagination.

Landis is deceptively telling a very simple tale that people seem to have forgotten about when talking American Werewolf. There are no great moments in the script, it's a tale from the dark side nothing less nothing more. Dude gets bitten by werewolf, turns into a wolf, slaughters some folk, and then its beauty who killed the beast. Now come on that's one of the half dozen or so common horror stories that get recycled in a seemingly endless loop. What Landis does however is take the tale, rip it out of its isolated backwards setting, and drops it on a modern London. You haven't seen a Werewolf movie till you've seen a fully functional lycanthrope ramping through a crowded Piccadilly Circus causing absolute chaos, oh hell yeah! Landis begins his movie with all the traditional accompaniments and then sends it spiralling out of control into the modern world.

So yes there is a fair amount of gore going down, more in a Monty Python style however than blood splashing the screen. We get decapitations, decaying undead people, and all manner of wolf induced injuries. At no stage did I feel it went over the top or should be a factor in people not catching the movie, Landis once again doesn't take it all that seriously.

For those wondering about T&A we get, besides some flesh on the porno movie that David's victims seem to take an inordinate interest in, a pretty torrid sex scene between David Naughton (David) and Jenny Agutter's Nurse Alex. Though I have to admit that the sex scene wasn't actually needed, and pretty much is an Uwe Boll moment as Landis for mine completely miss times one of the themes of the movie. But hey blink and you'll miss some naughty bits, knock yourself out there folks.

The acting is working like a kebab after a long and hazy night at the Slaughtered Lamb. David Naughton and Griffin Dunne (Jack) have this naturally relationship going on that we would now call bromance, both Actors play off each other and it's a highlight when they get together. Jenny Agutter hasn't got much to do, once again there's a dropping of the ball by Landis with the whole love thing, but she's great to look at and comes out of the movie with her reputation intact. And John Woodvine (Dr Hirsch) hits one out of the ball park as the arrogant Doctor who looks like he might solve the mystery and do the typical Hammer Studio expert schlock.

An American Werewolf In London is one of those defining moments in horror, where the genre would never be the same again. While I definitely enjoy the movie for its blending of traditional horror tropes with modern horror conventions, all wrapped in more humour than the Little Britain crew can deliver in an episode, I can't help but think it's all slightly shallow end of day. There's not really that much of a story to be honest, and the whole "love" angle is so completely mishandled that you have to wonder if Landis was comatosed while writing it. Still full recommendation, the movie is a hoot and a holler, and definitely superior to the usual dark genre movie slung at the cinema screen in the 1980s.