The Howling: New Moon Rising
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All of this just works. ― Todd Howard |
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The Howling: New Moon Rising (also known as Howling VII: Mystery Woman) is a 1995 direct-to-video horror film. It was the seventh film in the Howling film series, and the last in the original continuity (the next, The Howling Reborn, was a continuity reboot).
Plot
An Australian man named Ted arrives in the desert town of Pioneertown, supposedly looking for work, but actually in search of a werewolf he previously encountered. Meanwhile, a local detective investigates a skeleton recently found in the desert, and is told by a local priest about a series of werewolf attacks.
Why It Can't Rise
- Barely anything resembling a plot. Most of the film is taken up with Ted just hanging around Pioneertown, with occasional cuts to him investigating the werewolf, and the priest talking with the detective.
- The film recycles huge amounts of footage from the fourth and fifth films in the series.
- They bring back the lead actress from the fourth film, only to kill her character off almost immediately, making her return pointless.
- Retcons to previous films in the series, most noticeably with a pair of characters played by Clive Turner in cameos during the fourth and fifth films being revealed to actually be Ted, even though Turner played a werewolf in the former film and had his character killed in the latter. The fourth film's heroine, Marie also takes credit for stopping the werewolves in that film, even though her friend actually sacrificed her life to do so (presumably this change was made so that they could edit her out of the footage and avoid paying her actress).
- Incredibly low production values. They even shot this one on video instead of film, making it look completely different (and much worse) compared to all the previous entries in the series.
- Awful lighting, which makes it impossible to see what's going on in certain sections.
- Long stretches of the film are taken up showing people line-dancing in a local saloon.
- Poor attempts at humor, including a lot of fart jokes.
- The central mystery is abruptly wrapped up when one of the women who works at the saloon turns out to be the werewolf, with absolutely no foreshadowing. What's more, they reveal that she's actually the same woman who turned out to be the werewolf in the fifth film, even though they look absolutely nothing alike (in fairness, Ted admits that she looks different, but they don't explain how she changed her appearance).
- Not counting the footage recycled from the fourth and fifth films, the werewolf appears on-screen for only thirty seconds at the climax, is created with a cheap plastic mask and some badly-done computer morphing, and is killed off-screen.
- The film establishes early on that the only reason they have any chance of stopping the werewolf is because it's still immature, and that if they don't stop it before the next full moon, it'll become invincible. Firstly, this contradicts the fifth film, where it was indicated that the werewolf (which is the same one as in this film) was centuries old. Secondly, the main hero isn't able to prevent the werewolf from transforming, but it turns out that the "invincible" werewolf can still be killed by a bunch of hicks with guns.
External links
The Howling: New Moon Rising at the Internet Movie Database
The Howling: New Moon Rising on Rotten Tomatoes
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