AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON review: a naked American man stole my balloons

AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON review: a naked American man stole my balloons

Dec 08

There’s something magically timeless about John Landis’ werewolf comedy / horror, something as familiar yet unpredictable as the moon itself. It takes a few common tropes–the fish-out-of-water tourist movie, the oh-god-I’m-a-monster movie, the oh-god-my-face movie–and twists them together in a way that’s new and interesting still to this day. The movie was never flawless, and a few of its flaws stand taller than they used to, but it’s still a classic of the genre.

Early on we are plunged headfirst into the kind of funny-scary moments that typify the film: creepy but talkative local Northern Brits, brash American dialogue set against muggy, claustrophobic English countryside, and a remarkably effective first-werewolf-encounter scene that hits every dichotomous laugh-and-scream with perfect timing.

This relationship between comedy and horror, prevalent throughout the film, is a strange one. Two seemingly mutually-exclusive genres, they sometimes work extremely well together–a lot of horror flicks use humour to break up the tension, relax the audience before the next really big scare, but that genre-borrowing is rarely reciprocated in comedy films. So it’s still strange, even post-Scream, to see a movie that is both amusing and chilling, and the fact that Landis manages to pack laughs alongside screams within a single scene is a tribute to his skills both as a writer and director.

But switching continuously between the two doesn’t always work to his advantage. Any laugh you get is going to be nervous, in anticipation of the next horrific mauling we’ll be subjected to; and any scream you get is going to be lessened by the audience’s awareness of the comedic safety-net lurking a few lines before or after the violence. So you end up with a compromised offering of each, contrasted directly against each other. This is fresh and interesting, but you get the feeling it would be even more effective if the director had picked just one and favoured it over the other.

Another thing that doesn’t work too well is the relationship between protag David Kessler and pretty nurse Alex Price. He’s taken with her at first sight, and the crazy werewolf hormones raging through his body only enhance his enthusiastic advances and Alex, for her part, is captivated by how “sad” and yet “attractive” David is. This almost automatic male worship makes a lot more sense in the context of werewolf lore (werewolves are supposedly unresistably attractive when in human form–no idea what sad, lonely person invented that rule), but this logic-gap is never addressed, and so when Alex claims to love David after knowing him for, like, a week, eyebrows may be raised and disbelief may become un-suspended.

The structure of the film is also dated. David’s character doesn’t really progress or evolve over the course of the film; it’s almost like he’s just reacting to what happens to him, rather than taking matters into his own hands. Sure, he’s confused about the whole situation, and considers suicide in order to offload the guilt he feels for killing half a dozen innocent Londoners, but he never really commits to anything in the film–not Alex, not his lycanthropic condition, and sadly not to helping those he’s harmed.

It’s not really fair to ping the movie for the zeitgeist’s shifting appreciation of cinema, but I’m assuming you’re alive today even if you weren’t thirty years ago when Werewolf was released, so I’m giving you advice from that perspective. Besides, the film is partially informed by the strucutre of classical Greek tragedies, but there’s never a true ‘terrible realisation’ scene where the character realises he’s made a complete shitstorm out of his life and sets out to kill himself–the third act lacks the clarity and conviction it needs to be forceful, memorable or cathartic like the Greek plays of yore.

Judging by the number of negative points I’ve brought up, you’d be excused for thinking I didn’t like the movie, but that’s not entirely true. The first time I watched it, a couple of years ago, it was effectively funny and scary, and I didn’t mind that the plot lost momentum about halfway through, because it was all such a new and exiting experience to my mind. These newer thoughts were spawned during a second viewing of the film, with better knowledge of what to expect and how to appreciate it.

Before the fanboys rip my throat out, the dream sequences are still deliciously surreal, the dialogue and general writing are top-shelf, the performances are moody, charismatic and amusing, and the make-up special effects are astonishing in their detail and realisation: everything everyone claims to love about the film is still great, and age has detracted nothing from the experience.

For a movie to be truly considered a classic, it has to reverberate through multiple generations of audiences, and in that sense, Werewolf succeeds admirably: the humour and spirit of the film transcend the shoddy production values and dated scare-tactics it employs. The jokes are still funny today, and the aforementioned first-werewolf-attack scene is scarier than anything I’ve seen in cinemas all year (yet to see Paranormal Activity–we’ll see if the record still stands after viewing that), and it’s nice to see someone actually scratch the surface of, rearrange and personalise the werewolf tradition without totally bastardising and de-fanging it–I’m looking at you, New Moon.

81/100